You could hear the Cumbrian Tourist Board clanking into gear as Bill Clinton delivered his characteristically folksy encomium to his wife at this week’s Democratic convention. “I first proposed to her on a trip to Great Britain, the first time she had been overseas,” he told the adoring party faithful, who (like his wife) seemed to have forgiven him for past misdemeanours. “And we were on the shoreline of this wonderful little lake, Lake Ennerdale. I asked her to marry me.”
Lake Ennerdale is more usually known as Ennerdale Water, and is the most westerly lake in the Lake District, something of a poor relation to Windermere, Buttermere and Coniston Water. Here, surely, is an opportunity to put it on the map with a Bill & Hill proposal bench or Clinton wedding chapel, complete with tasteful gift shop. On that occasion, Hillary said no – it took Bill a couple more attempts to win the argument – but nonetheless this was history in the making and has to be worth some sort of memorial. It would certainly be preferable to the nuclear waste facility that has in the past been proposed for the remote valley of Ennerdale.
And there is a precedent, indeed a presidential precedent. The location where Barack Obama first kissed Michelle LaVaughn Robinson – the place in Chicago that he kissed her, not the part of her body on which he planted the kiss – is now marked by a large slab of granite, called the Obama Kissing Rock, inscribed with the president’s poetic description of that initial unforgettable osculation: “On our first date, I treated her to the finest ice-cream Baskin-Robbins had to offer, our dinner table doubling as the kerb. I kissed her and said it tasted like chocolate.”
Andrew Marvell would have been proud of that simile, and the poetry is only slightly undermined by the fact that the ice-cream parlour is now a branch of Subway. The rock has become a place of pilgrimage on Valentine’s Day, with the added advantage that hungry couples can pick up a chicken and bacon ranch melt at the same time.
Political love could be the next big tourist thing, and the UK needs to exploit the potential. The intense relationship enjoyed by Tony and Cherie Blair offers multiple opportunities, especially their journey home on the No 74 bus after a dinner hosted by the head of their legal chambers, Derry Irvine, in 1975. “Tony and I took the bus,” Cherie recalled in her 2008 memoir Speaking for Myself. “It was a double-decker and we went upstairs. It was completely empty and by the time we got off we knew each other better than when we’d got on. And even better the next morning.” Yes, thank you.
Scouts are even now trying to discover the precise location of the Conservative association event in Oxford in 1976 at which Benazir Bhutto, the future prime minister of Pakistan, introduced the then Theresa Brasier to fellow student Philip May. We also need to know exactly what this event – variously described as a ball, a dance and a disco – was, though there is no suggestion that (cf the liberal Blairs) they spent the night together. If we do locate the spot, we will erect Britain’s very own kissing rock, or perhaps a shaking-hands-slightly-sweatily rock.
