Policy Research Media Morhamburn

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

It’s been a weekend of big talks for me, as I opted out of what little mischief you can get up to in Cambridge of a Saturday night. The most notable was at Trinity College, recently parodied in a new ITV series I have sadly yet to see. Apparently it’s a cross between Harry Potter and Footballer’s Wives, so I will have to catch up on that for personal reference. The talk was billed as an inter-disciplinary discussion on the role of History in Law, and vice versa. All in all, it was a bit depressing. The opening speaker, a lawyer rhapsodising about the glorifies of proving people wrong through pettiness and nit-picking , managed to lull me into a stupor so that the rest passed me by in a daze.

Suffice to say, I perked up a bit for Professor Richard Evans’ contribution. He is the History Faculty’s Regius Professor, one of the UK’s most famous historians, and gloriously full of himself, and so is always a good value speaker.  He regaled us of all the times he had advised on history-based legal cases, taking particular delight in the memory of seeing the accused ‘backed into a corner,’ helplessly squirming when faced by Evans’ supreme intellect. In an attempt to liven things up, I foolishly decided to ask the professor a question, which just so happened to be the topic of the essay I am currently writing. Sadly, I got the name of a historian wrong, and so was irritably corrected by the Professor, who then gave me a haughty 10 second answer, before angrily staring me down. I found it quite funny, but the whole evening had been somewhat down-heartening.

The moral I had been sold was that life is all about correcting your rivals, exposing their weaknesses, talking people and actions down. It seems to the dominant theme in politics as well. It’s so adversarial at times, with the focus being on humiliating the opposition, that the good things that get done are almost inevitably overlooked. No wonder we have ever downward spiralling voter-turnouts. Why can’t we be a little more positive sometimes?

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