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Weirdly, Boris Johnson twice alluded to A Tale of Two Cities during PMQs this week. Both fairly obscure references, neither of which made much sense if you know the novel, but neither of which you would have spotted either, unless you had a pretty good knowledge of Dickens.
So is it a good thing that the PM assumes Dickens is so well known that he can casually & unobtrusively, reference him? Or is Johnson such an arse that he feels able to make inept allusions that don't really make sense on their own terms? To be more accurate, he made the same...
allusion twice: repeating what seemed to be a pre-prepared line comparing Keir Starmer to Sydney Carton. In response to a question on Brexit, Johnson advised Starmer to 'wrap a towel round his head and decide what he actually thinks'; later, he suggested that Starmer...
'puts a cold towel round his head...and tries to work out what his position is'. Both jibes refer to scenes in A Tale in which Carton works up his legal papers by wrapping wet towels round his head' in a manner hideous to behold' - a process that helps him prepare for court.
It's easy to guess at Johnson's logic: Carton's a lawyer, Starmer's a lawyer, therefore the comparison works. Quod erat demonstrandum, as someone with a tedious habit of lapsing into Latin might say. It's part of Johnson's attempt to paint his opponent as a vacillating lawyer:...
(see also his recent depiction of him as ‘General Indecision’ and, before that, ‘Captain Hindsight’: itself, perhaps, an unlikely allusion to an episode of South Park). But Johnson misunderstands, or misremembers, Dickens's text.
Carton's towels aren't there to help him make up his mind in the way Johnson thinks; they help him sift & weigh evidence, untangle the details of 'knotty' cases, conduct research, master his brief: traits for which Johnson is hardly famous. It's no surprise he reads them as flaws
In fact, Carton's work isn't even done for himself, but for his old friend Stryver, who in many ways resembles the PM. A heavy-set, florid-faced, public-school bully too lazy and entitled to study these difficult texts himself, but keen to ascend to a position of power.
A man who tells lies so often that he comes to believe them himself; who fancies himself as a ladies man; and whose reactionary snobbishness ultimately triggers the events that lead to Carton's redemption in the novel's final pages. Starmer might well resemble a Dickens...
character, but surely not Carton - much too dissolute and doomed. Johnson, on the other hand, is Stryver to a tee. ‘Always driving and riving and shouldering and pressing’ his way to the top; who thinks ‘it is a pleasant thing for a man to have a home when he feels inclined..
...to go to it (when doesn’t, he can stay away)’. So while I'm all in favour of politicians citing Dickens, they need to handle him with care. He's much too good at skewering the pompous and vain to be treated in such a half-arsed, uninformed way. QED.
