You know things are definitely becoming awry when British pols start having more liaisons dangereuses than their French counterparts;‘twas a time when no French politician worth his foie gras did not have a maitresse attitrée if possible funded by l‘état (the état ever aware of the foibles of the human heart gives every high fonctionnaire an envelope with cash to be used at his or her discretion and not to be accounted for).
This in turn gave people a chance to gossip and a distraction from the everyday drudgery of the affairs of state. A source of endless speculation was the speedy manner in which former President Chirac dispatched his amorous business, this leading to cement the urban legend of “five minutes, including shower”. Replacing boring political affairs with affaires of the heart even at a cost to the taxpayer was a welcome respite.
No more.
Post-lockdown the Brits are running amok like rutting stag and cornering the market on public officials in high places getting caught on camera with their hands in the cookie jar -or in the case of the appropriately named Matt Hancock former Minister of Health- in the honey pot.
The last time we saw a French politician misbehaving was when former President Hollande was caught on camera riding a scooter behind his bodyguard, wearing a helmet that looked suspiciously like a chamber pot and carrying a paper bag with croissants en route to his early morning romp with his maitresse; hardly the peak of eroticism -kinda sweet, actually.
That pinnacle in the UK was achieved last week by the fiery groping and snogging displayed by Hancock and his paramour behind the closed door of his office, but below the CCTV camera that filmed everything. Hancock and the lady are both married, to other people as we were rapidly informed, and have a symmetrical family of 3 children each.
Friends of the rompers insist that this is true love all the while explaining that this true love started in May.
If it is a month old how can they tell between love and lust?
The lady, one of Hancock’s trusted consigliore and an old chum from Oxford, is married to a 55 -year old very good-looking millionaire, way better looking than Hancock.
The day after the scandal broke in the news -all the while BoJo* insisting he would not fire the fiery Romeo- the lady left the family home. The husband helped her get her things in the car: good looking and class. I don’t know about you, patient reader but I would stick with the sexy, gallant guy.
To my untrained eye Hancock looks like vanilla yougurt and were it not for the lofty position he held until a few days ago, like someone who works in a packing chain at Amazon.
Here’s where French and British and specially Americans part ways.
The French are really only concerned with what lies in the heart of men. Would Hollande marry his illicit paramour seeing that he is not very much a man of the marrying kind? He had five children with his longtime live-in mistress –an excess of kids, if you ask me, when you are not planning on marrying the mother what point are you trying to make? When he became President of France he installed the next maitresse in the Elysee Palce only to ditch her when a younger thing appeared in his radar. The French never passed judgment about the ethics of all this and they just gave it a Gallic shrug.
In America they’ll pillory you for much less. Two things are unforgivable: tax evasion and sins of the flesh, especially in the context of adultery. Clinton and Lewinsky come to mind. He was almost impeached and she wasn’t even married.
The UK does things in a different way. Here people are very shocked not at the affair which is understood belongs to the realm of ‘private life' in a very civilized -Noel-Coward-way, but of Hancock not respecting the social distancing rule. Yep. He cheated. Broke the rules “jumped the queue” and that, not the implicit debauchery, is the truly unforgivable, un-British thing to do. That Hancock created the said rule only adds insult to injury. So off with his head!
And a good thing too.
*Boris Johnson, a naughty boy himself, has a soft spot for misbehaving colleagues and likes to have things his flamboyant way. Of lately he may be misreading the public and overplaying his hand.
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