THERE is a (vanishingly small) part of me that feels sorry for Dan Hodges and other members of the political-media class who look at a human tragedy and then assess it using, exclusively, the categories and idiom of quotidian, transactional politics.
Mail on Sunday commentator Hodges accused Reform UK of using Ann Widdecombe’s death to distract from the financial affairs of Nigel Farage.
Hodges is unique in his oddness, and his regular oscillation between astute commentator and total mentalist is one of the more amusing perma-features of contemporary political neo-journalism. In a way he’s beyond help and therefore insensitive to reproach. The normal mechanisms of moral correction don’t work on the very insane. Perhaps we should just pray for him?
Others should know better. Politicians are people, people have friends, friends will mourn when one of them is killed in her own home. It seems strange to me that people can look at these quite natural human responses and interpret them according to the hermeneutics of political advantage or disadvantage.
Sometimes laying a wreath is just what it seems to be – an inadequate expression of a broken heart. The outward sign of an inner grief, a sacramental gesture whose authenticity asks to be taken at face value. You have to be very sure of yourself before you take the complicated psychology of personal loss and shove it into the box marked ‘utilitarian politics’.
And if there are television cameras present, the most anyone is entitled to conclude, surely, is that this is the public form of a private sorrow. To infer and then assert that this is fake is surely to move into the realm of speculation.
But speculation about the circumstances of Miss Widdecombe’s death, and the motive and identity of her killer, is exactly what these same people would very much rather the rest of us not be permitted to do. Which is one very good reason for doing it.
We are entitled to speculate about what happened to Miss Widdecombe if only because nobody is entitled to insist that we mustn’t. Speculation happens when we look at the evidence that is presented and think about possibilities that while not logicallyimplied by that evidence are nevertheless consistent with it.
There is nothing wrong with that. Evidence is always of something which goes beyond the evidence – that is what makes it evidence. Provided it is relevant, of course. I doubt anyone is theorising on the motives of this killer on the basis of the position of the stars, or the closing FTSE numbers. And if they are, this is unlikely to be fatally compromising to the ongoing investigation.
There are good and bad ways of thinking, to be sure, but this is a normativity which arises from within thought itself and is not to be decided and then handed down by journalists, politicians or even senior police officers.
To speculate is to think with imagination. There’s a reason we find it difficult not to do that: it’s threaded into our essences as created persons. We are built to ask questions, and to ask us to stop is to ask us to go against our own nature.
Our souls are restless, St Augustine tells us, and likely not satisfied by the meretricious and expedient instructions of people who seem to forget that they work for us.
What they really mean when they tell you not to speculate is ‘Don’t go on X and post in ways which stress test the story we’re telling you.’ There is a class of people who are allowed to speculate. This caste includes regime journalists who apparently have an infallible insight into the collective Reform soul, and you’re not in it.
The Higher Ups who manage the System that entraps the rest of us – Lucy Powell, Lisa Nandy, the Northern Archetype about to become PM – are happy for you to participate in social media discussion if this discussion is within the parameters of government-licensed propositions and if the debate is conducted according to forms of reasoning that aren’t dangerously creative, original or subversive.
Nobody wants to hinder a police investigation. But if the ambient ideological atmosphere has incubated violent sleeper cells of mentally ill people, that is owing in large part to state-imposed constrictions on freedom of speech and thought and the consequent asphyxiation of eccentric and counter-orthodox ways of seeing the world.
And we are more than entitled to entertain the possibility that this is exactly the situation decades of expert class orthodoxy has put us in.
In other words, we are where we are because we don’t speculate enough.
We have duties of thought and imagination. There are natural limits on what we believe and say. If somebody believes that p and it can be demonstrated (and they understand) that p implies q then we can accuse them of a moral as well as a logical error if they decline to believe therefore q.
And if somebody else shouts loudly that Nicole Simpson committed suicide in order to frame O J Simpson, we can and should forcibly expel them from the community of reasonable people.
But within the limits of reasonableness, we should speculate away, as outrageously as possible.
The truth is usually hidden, and that’s the best way to find it.
Miss Widdecombe loved God, and therefore truth, above all things and all politics. The same cannot be said about the Labour politburo. Already the ghoulish Lucy Powell has chosen to ‘not play politics’ with this political assassination by using it to call for yet more social media restrictions.
Which is a problem for Christians such as myself who despise Ms Powell whilst trying to see her as a child of God. We should have a voice too.
