Isabel Oakeshott lacks loyalty but not fidelity
As we approach Judas's role in the Passion, George Pitcher wonders about the motives of betrayal
The more we hear of Matt Hancock, the more he becomes an irony-free zone. When journalist Isabel Oakeshott broke her Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) to leak Hancock’s WhatsApp messages as health secretary during the Covid lockdowns, he described her action as “a massive betrayal”.
For me, it was a correspondent to the letters page of The Times who nailed it, writing that Mrs Hancock might be able to tell her errant husband a thing or two about betrayal. But perhaps irony doesn’t cut it – it’s perhaps the total loss of self-awareness when you sacrifice the service ministry of a political career on an idolatrous altar of celebrity.
Nature of betrayal
But I want to contend that this isn’t really about Hancock, who simply looks sillier by the week. More intriguingly, it is about the nature of betrayal. As the Church remembers Judas Iscariot’s betrayal – perhaps the greatest example of all time - in exactly four weeks, it is worth examination. I’ll come back to Judas in a moment.
Christians in Media’s Steve Cox, meanwhile, has written excellently about the primacy of journalistic ethics and how they dovetail with Christian conscience. And I don’t want to go there either. Rather, I want to consider if we really know what betrayal is.
Loyalty overrated
We may tend to confuse fidelity, which I offer as the opposite of betrayal, with loyalty. In my view, loyalty is a massively overrated virtue. In fact, it’s not a virtue at all, more of a mortal quality. Soldiers were loyal to Ratko Mladic as he ordered massacres of Croats in Bosnia in the Nineties. Dogs are loyal to such monsters. Loyalty, of itself, is not a good thing.
Just as the Jesuit might say that the opposite of faith isn’t doubt, it’s certainty, so we might say that the opposite of betrayal isn’t loyalty, it’s fidelity. And fidelity, with faithfulness at its core, owes its allegiance to the truth and arguably, in theological terms, to nothing else.
Moral Maze
But this issue gets well bogged down when loyalty hangs in the air. And it was the pungent miasma of loyalty that permeated the studio in which this week’s episode of the BBC’s Moral Maze was broadcast. The panel and its erudite witnesses considered whether Oakeshott had sinned with her leak to The Daily Telegraph – whether, if you like, she had broken the seal of the confessional by failing to honour her NDA.
Most of the debate centred on whom Oakeshott owed her loyalty to as a journalist: To the public interest or to her confidential source? But the point evaporates when you replace loyalty with fidelity. One simply cannot betray if one acts with fidelity.
Which brings me to the Great Betrayer, Judas. Now, there’s an important disclaimer to be made before I take my argument here. To paraphrase Python Terry Jones in The Life of Brian, Hancock is not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy. So I don’t wish to make a direct comparison, blasphemous or otherwise.
Righteousness of pursuit
I just want to say that the strongest phrase for me that emerged from the Moral Maze was that “motive determines the righteousness of the pursuit”. We can have no idea where that gets us with Oakeshott’s WhatsApp leaks. Maybe she was offered 30 pieces of silver or more by the Telegraph; maybe she believes that a public that suffered so dreadfully during Covid deserves to know what Government was or wasn’t doing about it. We simply can’t know.
We can know where it gets us with Judas Iscariot. It’s inconceivable that he was motivated by the blood money he was offered by the Temple authorities for the Nazarene’s scalp, which he anyway throws back at them.
Final culmination
Far more likely is that he thinks he is precipitating the final culmination of the Christ’s mission. He’s right, of course, but not in the way he imagines. It all goes horribly wrong and he hangs himself. This version of events is supported by the apparently apostolic mission that Jesus gives him at the Last Supper, to do what he must do.
So his motivation may determine Judas’s righteousness. He has still, however, done a very wicked thing, in order to serve God’s purpose. It has nothing to do with despoiling the sanctity of the confessional and actually very little to do with betrayal. It has an awful lot more to do with the opposite of betrayal, which is fidelity, not loyalty.
As I say, there are dangers in eliding the Passion of the Christ with the passions of Hancock. And Oakeshott is no Judas, either in history or metaphor. It’s just worth noting in passing that the transformational nature of God, turning darkness into eternal light, uses human weaknesses and frailties to do its work.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest