Confessing Evangelical

"It's tragedy, tragedy,
when you lose control
and you got no soul,
it's tragedy." Discuss.

- Cambridge University English examination question, 2001.

Say what you like about British national decline over the past century, but we still know how to give our political scandals that Shakespearean élan.

A man blind from birth, overcoming the further barriers of poverty and the death of his father in a ghastly industrial accident, battling his way first to regional power and then to one of the highest offices in the land, brought down by his love of another man's wife, a love that curdled into an obsessive desire to prove himself the father of her children; then, after a brief time in the wilderness, restored to power, only to be brought down again, finally, by his arrogance and desire for riches - with, in a further irony, his final fall having come about through his involvement in a company that carries out... DNA paternity testing. And the whole affair only serving to highlight the fading power of an aging king from whom power is inexorably draining away.

And you Americans have, what? A guy called "Scooter" who says too much to a journalist?

Anyway, as for David Blunkett, tragedy really is the word. I can still remember the summary given in our GCSE English Literature classes of what constitutes "tragedy": a tragic hero, with a tragic flaw, who makes a tragic error, leading to a tragic realisation (Blunkett yesterday: "When you have been in politics as long as I have, you can smell and feel when it is time to step away...") that comes too late to prevent a tragic end. Well, there you go.