Isabel Hardman of this parish explained after last week’s government defeat that a deluded theory among the party leadership had held that Tory backbenchers were now self-whipping. When she aired this opinion on Radio 4, Michael White of the Guardian did a Frankie Howerd-style, ‘Ooh, Missus!’ routine.
Surprisingly, self-whipping is no neologism. The satirical Nonconformist clergyman Robert Wild, in a poem on Charles II’s declaration of indulgence in 1672, refers to the ‘self-whippings, of the Popish Priests’. He meant the use of the discipline for ascetic motives. This was equally frowned upon by the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The calm, familiar hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ was extracted by others from his much longer poem ‘The Brewing of Soma’, in which he condemns ‘The scourger’s keen delight of pain, / The Dervish dance, the Orphic strain … / The naked Santon, hashish-drunk, / The cloister madness of the monk.’
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