Buried, not praised ... Sir Menzies Campbell. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA
The defenestration of Sir Menzies Campbell for looking older than he is reminds us that, for all their bombast and defiance, the mighty can always be brought low. While the official narrative was of a leader falling on his sword in the privacy of his tent, the consensus of political comment insists that it was more a question of his having been shown the door of the small room containing the bottle of brandy and the pistol.
As tragic finales go, the destruction of the leader of a third party is inevitably less House of Atreus than Wizard of Oz. Pay no attention to that elderly gentleman in sock suspenders behind the curtain. Nonetheless, the delicious shudder the news produces is evocative of the ambivalence we often feel at the downfall of great ones.
The literary analogy for which the sketch writers reached was, naturally, Shakespeare's Caesar, tottering like a lanced bull before the Capitol as his dying gaze meets the faces of ostensibly loyal lieutenants. Where recently was ironbound deference, all is now reeking blades. "Et tu, Vince?" Simon Hoggart had it in Tuesday's Guardian.
Imagining Ming bestriding the narrow world like a colossus takes some doing, but the analogy holds firm in unexpected ways. The notion that, as for Brutus, there ought to be a proper reluctance on humanist grounds to spill blood is overshadowed by weightier calculations of the greater good. This man's continuance in office is sickening the health of the Republic, or bringing us low in the opinion polls at least, and our actions are guided by the demands of history, the "tide in the affairs of men" of which we have become the mere instruments.
The tragedy is all the more complex because the man who must be destroyed has first been set in place by his subsequent assassins. One minute he is thrice rejecting the proffered crown, the next he has become the public sacrifice. This sense of expiation in the bloodletting reflects the evident fact that his vainglorious ascent to prominence is largely our own fault. And it is our heavy task to bring him down.
The assassin knows the bloody duty cannot be shirked, and the victim knows what's coming. In Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Kurtz, having seen enough, awaits the faint rustle of leaves that will betray the arrival of his executioner. Ming too must have peered into the same abyss in his office on Monday afternoon. "The horror! The horror!" And indeed, 11% in the polls is pretty horrible.
