The story of Huw Edwards presents challenges to anyone who wonders how to respond appropriately. He’s back in the news that he used to present this week, resigning from the BBC on “medical advice”. In news terms, it seems a long time ago – nearly a year – when stories emerged that he had paid a teenager for what are blushingly called “explicit images”.
His departure, rather belatedly said to have been inevitable, follows disclosures that he has continued to draw a very handsome BBC salary during his suspension from duty – and one that the corporation would rather not still be paying when it publishes its annual review of figures shortly.
The difficulties come when, putting aside prurience and distaste, one scrutinises why exactly the life and career of Edwards have been ruined. The police wasted little time last year in concluding that there was no evidence that a criminal offence had been committed. All that is left is a salacious whiff and the knowledge that Edwards has suffered a depressive breakdown of some sort.
Called to higher standards
So how to respond to that? The question supposes that we must indeed respond and that might contain the principal point. A senior news anchor with the BBC is a public figure. As such, he (or she) needs to be trusted by the public. Consequently, Edwards is called to a higher standard of behaviour than that of his invisible viewers.
This is why the positions of senior people become untenable, when they do something wrong, or something just plain silly. Those on whose trust they depend can’t see past the event that has disappointed them. Serious people in serious jobs need to be taken seriously. And anyone caught with their pants down, literally or figuratively, cannot look serious.
Made to look frivolous
This is what politicians really mean when they resign because they have become a “distraction”. It’s not really that they’ve watched tractor porn or said to have worn Chelsea football kit in flagrante delicto. It’s just that they’ve been made to look frivolous.
Yet that still doesn’t supply us with a response (beyond “don’t be an idiot”). Actually, it rather complicates matters. It’s easier if a crime has been committed, because we can take refuge in justice, reparation for the victim and punishment for the perpetrator. None of this seems to be available in Edwards’ case.
Some will reach for forgiveness under these circumstances. But that’s meaningless, since for most of us Edwards has done nothing more than read the news off an autocue and speak for the nation during royal events.
Forgiveness as get-out-of-jail-free card
We risk disempowering a real victim if we forgive on their behalf, so it’s inadequate to talk only of forgiveness in this circumstance. While forgiveness liberates the forgiver (rather than necessarily the one being forgiven), Christians should be wary of using forgiveness as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
In any event, forgiveness is a quality of compassion, the latter being the virtue to which we might most usefully aspire in response to the circumstances in which Edwards suffers. The root meaning of compassion is “to suffer with”, as in to share and, in doing so, profoundly to understand the suffering of another. In popular parlance, it might be to walk a mile in their boots.
“There but for the grace of God go I”, a phrase coined by an 16th-century clergyman as he watched a condemned man climb the scaffold, is an iteration of the same sentiment. To view the media execution of Edwards with compassion is to walk a mile in his boots and to accept, with humility, that we can be as fallible as him.
Cardinal virtues
The four Cardinal Virtues, marshalled by the Christian patriarch St Augustine of Hippo from the great Greek philosophers, were prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. In modern application, these might translate as wisdom, fairness, courage and self-control. They were codified for the Catholic church in the middle ages by St Anselm and appended for Christian witness with faith, hope and charity (scripturally channelling St Paul).
It’s from these latter, theological virtues that forgiveness flows. But they are born of compassion, which has its Christological source in the suffering (or Passion) of Christ, in which the human condition – sin, frailty, pain, death – is shared by the divine.
Wholly loving gaze
That’s a world-view that holds Huw Edwards in its gaze. It’s a wholly loving gaze that seeks to share his despair and failure, which is the ultimate act of compassion. Edith Cavell, the nurse who was shot as a spy in Flanders in the First Word War, came very close to it when she said before her execution: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”
Edwards doesn’t (literally) face a firing squad, so direct comparison is invidious. But our response might still be a compassionate one. We may not be able to walk a mile in his boots. But we can try.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest