A letter from the novelist, critic and journalist Philip Hensher in the
London Review of Books, Vol 42, Number 4 quotes a couple of lines from Tramp The Dirt Down:
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Labour’s Defeat
In the course of his excellent piece about the December election (LRB, 6 February), James Butler says that Jeremy Corbyn possessed the quality of resilience: ‘He withstood a level of opprobrium almost unprecedented in public life.’ One wonders whether ‘resilience’ is quite the word, when complaints about the supposedly unprecedented opprobrium have been noisy and outraged. Butler echoes the claim in the Labour Party’s post-election report that ‘there is also little doubt that four years of unrelenting attacks on the character of the party leader, an assault without precedent in modern politics, had a degree of negative impact.’
Perhaps they ought to read Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher. He records some of the statements by public figures, in public or in writing, about her character, appearance and personal attributes. Dennis Potter called her ‘repellent’. David Hare said that her influence would disappear after she went, ‘leaving nothing but the memory of a funny accent’. Alan Bennett said that she was ‘a kind of maiden aunt who knows all about marriage’. Mary Warnock said that a film of her in Marks and Spencer had ‘something really quite obscene about it’. Jonathan Miller called her ‘loathsome, repulsive in almost every way’. Songs were released by pop bands with lines like ‘I want to change into a dog so that I can use Madame Thatcher daily as a lamp-post,’ or ‘
When they finally put you in the ground/They’ll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down,’ or, concisely, ‘Maggie, Maggie, you cunt/Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, you fucking cunt’. Alice Thomas Ellis called her ‘a mean little mouse bred on cheese rind and broken biscuit and the nutritionless, platitudinous parings of a grocer’s mind’. Much later, admired novelists would write stories fantasising about her violent murder set around the time of her attempted assassination in Brighton, a time when (as everyone concedes) she behaved with notable bravery.
This is not to complain about this sorry and often childish catalogue of insults, which some readers will think richly deserved, while others will hold that opprobrium is only to be expected by a politician proposing radical change, whether Thatcher or Corbyn. But it isn’t correct to suggest that the opprobrium Corbyn undoubtedly experienced and clearly thought unjust was unprecedented. If there was a popular West End musical with a song looking forward to celebrating Corbyn’s death, as Billy Elliot gleefully anticipated and, in the event, celebrated Thatcher’s, I missed it.
Philip Hensher
London SW8"
As Elvis has pointed out, whoever nominated him for an OBE may have overlooked this song, just as they overlooked Billy Elliot the Musical when nominating Sir Elton John to become a Companion of Honour in the 2020 New Year's Honours.
MOOT