The revenge of Cummings may be rough justice
In scripture, justice is human and God does revenge, writes George Pitcher. But redemption can come from both
Just as any innovative fashion trend has to be the “new black”, anything do do with autumn has to channel Keats’s “mists and mellow fruitfulness” and any monarchical merry-making has to be prefaced with “Right Royal”, so in Newspaper Land there is the established ritual that any revenge has to be “a dish best served cold”.
We’ve heard plenty of this revenge trope since Dominic Cummings appeared before a parliamentary select committee to – ahem – appraise the Government’s performance in tackling the covid crisis.
But rather than reaching for the comforting assurance that revenge shares the qualities of a Vichyssoise soup, there is a more appropriate saying to attach to Cummings’s cameo: That, if you want revenge, then you’d better dig two graves.
Cummings’s nuclear strike against his former patron, Boris Johnson, does have much of the Cold War’s mutually-assured destruction strategy about it. And not just because the policy in those days was known by the acronym MAD. As political commentator Ian Dunt had it:
Four straight hours of testimony from a self-interested narcissist who has weaponised falsehood challenging the record of a self-interested narcissist who has weaponised falsehood... The real poetry will come when the self-interested narcissist who weaponised falsehood realises he cannot inflict damage on the other self-interested narcissist who weaponised falsehood, because he undermined truth-telling as a functional quality in political discourse.
That assumes that both Cummings and Johnson are embodiments of the tautology “self-interested narcissist”. For many of us, this is axiomatic, but nevertheless there is a grammatical conjugation to be observed: I seek justice – he wants revenge. The first is a noble pursuit; the second a human weakness, even a sin.
We speak of Hamlet being motivated by revenge. By contrast, the families of the Hillsborough stadium disaster seek justice in their court action against the police. Revenge is fuelled by hatred. Justice is a Platonic ideal; one of the classical moral virtues, a veritable disposition of the soul, to which we have a constant will to render to everyone their due.
Odd, then, that in the Hebrew Bible it’s very often the human realm that dispenses justice with equanimity, while God visits his revenge on the tribes of Israel for their waywardness. Jacob swindles his brother Esau out of his birthright, but a couple of decades later Esau deals graciously with his conscience-stricken twin. Joseph, who has risen to be the Egyptian Pharaoh’s right-hand man (one might even say top aide), doesn’t take revenge on the brothers who threw him down the well, but deals justly and compassionately with them.
Meanwhile, God is forever getting his own back on his chosen people for the folly of their ways. Diseases and death when they worship other gods. Famines when they get too greedy. Even in the Christian Bible, Paul writes to the members of the nascent Church in Rome that they are not to take revenge, not because that is a bad thing to do, but because “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, I will repay.” To judge is human, to avenge divine.
So how to categorise the behaviour of Cummings? Arguably, if he is after revenge on Johnson’s Number 10 for his peremptory dismissal he is only behaving as the demi-god that stalked that particular universe. Were he to keep his own counsel, draw a line under that time and move on, then he would be but another flawed human.
We might reasonably assume which of those options would be his choice, given that the humility by-pass he underwent some years ago seems to have been a complete success.
Unfinished business
But there is another way of looking at it. And it’s to do with unfinished business. Justice is to do with establishing a satisfactory conclusion in which an equanimity is restored for those who have been wronged.
In this view, victims of a pandemic that was casually, indolently or negligently addressed by our political leaders are denied redress unless and until those leaders are brought to justice. If just a fraction of the charges that Cummings brings against health secretary Matt Hancock are vindicated, then Hancock’s position is untenable and some form of justice will have been done.
That may be an overly kind interpretation of Cummings’s motivation, but it does contain a truth. Justice is about resolution. In some life circumstances, we are encouraged to draw that line and “move on”. These are circumstances in which no one has been at fault and so there is nothing to be resolved – the collapse of a romance or an accident that is no one’s fault (an act of God, as it happens).
But victims of great injustices aren’t told to move on, precisely because their grievance is unresolved. Witness those Hillsborough families.
It’s highly unlikely that Cummings is going to be redeemed in the public eye any time soon, because of character failings of his own that put the British public at risk and the office of the Prime Minister in deserved derision.
But justice is ultimately about redemption and if his desire for revenge delivers a saving truth about the mess of this chaotic administration, then the ends will have justified his means.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest