After the massacre in Dunblane, Conservative and Labour leaders were both exercised about appropriate visiting arrangements. The prime minister, John Major, told Tony Blair (according to Alastair Campbell) that Margaret Thatcher “had always wanted to do these tragedy visits but he hated it and he felt it would be wrong if there was a big circus there”.
But Blair wanted to be in Dunblane too. Only Cherie Blair could be left out, an omission later reported to have rankled. Not that Campbell got much out of his own central casting: nobody important paid him any attention. “Major and Norma were chilly with TB, and as for me, I might as well not have existed.” He studied the visit on television to see “who had come across better, TB or Major. It was TB.”
Long before the Chilcot era, Blair’s post-tragedy reflexes were widely considered to be as impressive as, now, are Jeremy Corbyn’s hugely popular demonstrations of the human touch. If the leaders’ staff are still, like Campbell, ranking leaders for who “comes across better” in a tragedy, Corbyn’s expressions of concern for the sick baby Charlie Gard, like his recent hugging of Grenfell survivors, must put him well ahead of the awkward – when visible – Theresa May and, inasmuch as it counts as any sort of victory, Boris Johnson. On Gard, following Vatican urgings for a transfer to an Italian hospital, Johnson, plausible for possibly the first time in his life, could only offer support for the Great Ormond Street Hospital doctors whose priority is, as much the pope’s and fellow Gard activist Donald Trump’s, the infant’s best interests.
But Corbyn was more warmly reported, even in the MSM (welcome aboard Mr Corbyn!), for his show of sympathy for the parents who want the child moved for experimental treatment. “If it was my child that was going through a terrible, terrible trauma like this, a life-threatening trauma, you’d move might and main to get them the best treatment they can. I fully understand that.” Though he volunteered that he had no reason to question the baby’s treatment – “I’m not medically qualified” – the emotional power of his “I fully understand” (he does?) is surely instructive for other public figures, technocrats or suspected replicants who may not have been promoted for prowess in displaying empathy and, possibly, in more adversarial professions, to the contrary.
Maybe all Sir Martin Moore-Bick needed to say, at last week’s Grenfell meeting, in response to objections about his alleged lack of empathy and common/human touch, was not: “I give you my word that I will look into this matter to the very best of my ability”, but Corbyn’s “I fully understand”. In the continued absence of a reliable empathy detector, along the lines of the Voight-Kampff machine in Blade Runner, Moore-Bick didn’t even have to mean it.
To reassure the regrettably unendearing, if much qualified, Moore-Bick: there is no call, or not immediately, for literal embraces. Hugging was not, though it had lately been pioneered by Princess Diana, part of Blair’s compassion repertoire; rather, he excelled at the pained delivery, the agonised pause to gather and, above all, at the rhetoric of feeling, as Blair’s words, whether the nation liked it or not, channelled its emotion. At the same time, the words were working overtime on Blair’s behalf. The morning after Diana’s death Blair knew, he says, “they would be a major part of how people thought of me”. They’re definitely better remembered than another line in his memoir, in relation to the Iraq invasion: “I am now beyond the mere expression of compassion.”
Anyway, his People’s Princess speech, as Blair records, went swimmingly: “I had come through with general approbation. A poll showed the absurd rating of 93% approval.”
Top of the to-do list for Robbie Gibb, the latest BBC apostate (as he must be, given the latest Tory complaints about the corporation’s endemic anti-Brexit bias) to become a Downing Street director of communications, is surely a crash course for May in similarly crowd-pleasing empathy. Guided by an actor, or an anthropologist, she might master those words and gestures that are conventionally, unlike running away or hiding, or like George Bush, pulling a sad face in a helicopter, taken to disprove charges of heartlessness. “Once that impression was formed,” Bush writes, “I couldn’t change it.”
By way of encouragement, May’s predecessor, with even less claim to the common touch, demonstrated, simply by hiding his interest in £25,000 shepherds’ huts and feigning one in football, how little it takes to be acclaimed in the Conservative party for emotional literacy.
Admittedly, David Cameron’s attempt to, as David Lammy would put it, walk with flood victims on their journey was overshadowed by the pristine state of his footwear; some cheap wellingtons having been bought specifically to prevent mockery of his Hunters. Thatcher, for her part, visited so many hospitalised victims that Private Eye offered a form of assistance that may, if Andrea Leadsom gets her way, soon need to be revived. “In the event of an accident, the holder of this card wishes it to be known that he/she does not wish to be visited by Thatcher in any circumstances whatsoever.”
But as the Queen and various princes have repeatedly confirmed, since they learned at the feet of Blair, the occasional empathy setback is always better than the charge, levelled at May and now Moore-Bick, of not caring.
While opinions vary on the relative contributions of hubris, lack of principle and a piss-poor manifesto to wrecking May’s political career, her fatal mistake, as with Bush’s aerial disaster tour, is widely judged to be want of empathy in the face of tragedy or at least of the ability to perform it. For scale: she has been shamed by local fertility goddess Leadsom; offered humanising counsel by the former “bastard” turned train spotter Michael Portillo.
That the finest compassionate noises are not invariably, as earlier confirmed by Trump, Blair, Thatcher, matched by any concerted plan to improve people’s lives has done little, May has discovered since her hugging fail, to awaken much public suspicion about the value of these interventions.
Trump breaks off from smashing up Medicaid to offer medical assistance to one child already being cared for by the NHS in one of the best hospitals in the world. He is then praised for the surge of compassion thus created, by an equally moved Katie Hopkins, last heard calling drowned migrant babies and their parents “cockroaches”.
If the unruly emotions now focused on this one child’s suffering tend to support Paul Bloom’s argument, in Against Empathy, for mistrusting this guide to decision-making, their awakening has certainly advanced the Trump and Hopkins claims to non-replicant status. They can’t compete, who could, with leading empathiser Corbyn, but with all three, and the pope, too, in such obvious distress, the staff of Great Ormond Street Hospital plainly need to take a good look at themselves.
