I’ve always felt that Polonius in Hamlet has had a bad press. He is usually dismissed as a boringly preachy busybody who voices trite truisms and is eventually killed behind the arras, and who cares?
In my production of Hamlet, Polonius would be a master of state craft and a more intelligently Machiavellian protagonist than the fussy old father that he usually is. I think that a lot of the advice that he gives is good and has become unattributed aphorism. It is particularly pleasing to see that our departing Prime Minister has taken one of his homilies to his tiny little heart.
In what is probably Polonius’s most famous utterance he says, and he prefaces it with a ranking of its importance (“This above all”) “. . . to thine own self be true” – and with his last speech Johnson has personified that dictum, by using his last public performative vomit of words as Prime Minister to lie, lie and lie again!
His achievement of the first stage of becoming World King (i.e., Prime Minister of Great Britain and The United Kingdom) was through the lies that seeded the victory in the corrupt Brexit campaign. Throughout his inglorious stewardship of the Government, he has lied to The Queen, Parliament (repeatedly) and The British Public – as well, of course as various lovers, friends, officials, foreigners, wives, colleagues, bosses. Everyone, in short, with whom he has ever been in contact.
Everything in his Last Speech was either an out and out lie, a wilful misinterpretation of accepted reality, or a shading of the truth with intent to mislead. From his false assurance that he would retire to his plough, knowing as he did that his chosen Classical reference was to a man who was called from rusticity to public life again, to his fulsome assurance of his backing of Truss (an assertion of loyalty from a man who made an entire career out of disloyalty) his statements were, one after the other, disingenuous.
It is remarkable that being Prime Minister during one of the most turbulent post war times has left his character untainted by any scintilla of self-knowledge. He started the job on a lie, he has lied through his time in office, and his valedictory speech was also a pack of lies.
His baseness is so profound that nothing, not a near death experience; unnecessary Covid deaths; divorce; marriage; birth of a child; criminality; public disgust; rejection by colleagues; degradation of Britain’s position in the world; breaking draconian rules and being found out; presiding over a cost of living crisis; threatening the destruction of The Union; breaking the law – and so on, NOTHING has been able to dent, nay, scratch his galactic self-esteem.
His leaving speech reeked of faux humility – lauding his imaginary achievements and parading his equally imaginary victimhood; praising a woman he hopes will fail, so that he can be seen as a Bonnie Prince Charlie character, the king over the water, waiting for the call to take what is rightfully his.
Johnson should remember that The Young Pretender’s life ended in bitterness, loneliness, drunkenness, and failure and, something that Johnson can all too easily relate to, dependent on the charity of others for his lifestyle!
I am building up my strength to respond to his replacement’s speech in little over an hour or so. Toni has suggested a coffee in town and perhaps a sugar free ice cream in our favourite gelateria. Sounds like a good way to separate myself from the political anger that is all too evident in my world view nowadays.
Oh, and by the way, the “to thine own self be true” continues:
“And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man”
And to be fair to Johnson, he has been glaringly true to his debased self from day 1, in his twisted world of alternative facts, the only way in which he could have been false to himself, was to have told the truth occasionally, but he had the strength of character to resist such weakness!
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