Corona Diaries: Boris’s darkest hour

The BBC is very cruel. On Saturday, the night before Boris Johnson’s address to the nation, it chose to screen The Darkest Hour. I happened upon the last thirty minutes of the movie, in which Gary Oldman’s Winston Churchill struggles to hold himself and the country together during the fall of France.

Mussolini has offered to mediate a peace deal with Hitler. Leading members of the War Cabinet persuade him to accept Il Duce’s offer. Winston, barely coherent, agrees that they should draft a response.

There follows a dark night of depression, in which Clemmie, his wife, tries to boost his spirits and the King, who arrives unexpectedly, succeeds. The next morning, on his way to Parliament, he escapes from his car, hops on to the Tube and asks his fellow passengers if they think he should give in to Hitler. Never, comes the resounding response.

Duly strengthened by the will of the people (at least those in one carriage of the Metropolitan Line), he marches into the House of Commons with the speed of an Olympic walker. He addresses a group of MPs with a blood-curdling speech in which he vows to die choking on his own blood fighting the Nazi invaders. He walks into the War Cabinet meeting, tears up the letter to Mussolini and stalks off to address the House, his opponents trailing in his wake and muttering about a vote of no confidence.

He then delivers his “We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches” speech to a rapturous reception. As the armada of little boats makes its way towards Dunkirk, the film ends.

For me the most telling line in the movie comes at the end. With order papers cascading to the floor of the House, Halifax, Winston’s main rival and proponent of the peace talks, is asked “what just happened?”. He replies “he just mobilised the English language – and sent it into battle.”

It’s stirring stuff, even if Winston never actually came anywhere near a tube train at the time.

And now, alas poor Boris, struggling in the footsteps of a giant he adores. No Empire to come to his aid. No visible enemy at the gates. No fleet to protect our shores. A worthy successor to Mussolini in the White House. No packed House of Commons to rally and rouse. Just baby steps and new slogans that appear to have been written by committee.

Alas also for the English language. The soaring rhetoric of Churchill replaced by a recitation of rules that might have excited a convention of council librarians, but is unlikely to have inspired a nation whose resolve is crumbling amidst mixed messages and unchallenged outbreaks of civil disobedience.

Unfair of course. They don’t make ‘em like Winston any more. Nowadays, anyone attempting to sway an audience with Churchillian rhetoric is likely to be laughed off as a pompous buffoon.

The most effective political language today is delivered in simple staccato bursts. It’s fashioned for short attention spans. When the politician delivering it goes off script, often enough they collapse into incoherence. The ability to think on one’s feet seems to have atrophied as steadily as education standards have risen beyond the preserve of the elite.

So instead of blood sweat and tears, we’re faced with R-numbers, conditional measures, stay alert and control the virus. Even a former journalist like Boris, who delights in florid phrases, looks like Gulliver pinned to the ground by an army of bureaucrats and advisers who argue about every phrase, every nuance.

Margaret Thatcher’s best efforts at Churchillian style fell flat when, after one of her election wins, she intoned “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony; where there is error, may we bring truth; where there is doubt, may we bring faith, and where there is despair, may we bring hope.” Unfortunately she spoke in the monotone of a schoolgirl who had stayed up all night to learn her lines in a poetry competition.

In 2020, she might have said “Where there’s a virus, may we bring vaccines; where there’s a lockdown, may we bring cybersex; where there’s testing, may we bring targets, and where there is Italy, may we bring South Korea.” On second thoughts, that wouldn’t work either, not even from the mouth of Winston.

So now we have a choice. Across the Atlantic we can listen to Donald Trump whining away about American Carnage and Make America Great Again. Over here we have Take Back Control, Get Brexit Done and Save the NHS, and Boris Johnson addressing the nation with all the authority of a puppy that has just pissed on the floor.

On the other hand, we can still rejoice in novels, films, poetry and plays that remind us what the English language is really about.

Alongside writers such as Hilary Mantel, Lee Child, Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Franzen, Susan Sontag, Armando Iannuci, Tom Holland and Jez Butterworth, poor Boris, desperate Donald and their armies of semi-coherent acolytes don’t stand a chance.

Advance Britannia, God Bless America and all the other English-speaking nations! There’s still hope for our beloved mother tongue.