Nick Clegg agrees with Cardinal de Retz: ‘Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif’ — there is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.
Nick Clegg agrees with Cardinal de Retz: ‘Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif’ — there is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment. Last year, Mr Clegg published a pamphlet called ‘The Liberal Moment’, which he said had come. Last week he made a speech in which he said the Liberal moment had arrived on 7 May. ‘Our challenge now is to seize this moment,’ he said.
I’m not quite sure how long a moment hangs around waiting to be seized — surely not as along as a year. According to John Trevisa, the knowledgeable Vicar of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, there are 40 moments in an hour and 12 ounces in a moment and 47 atoms in an ounce. That was in 1399, when they were better at mental arithmetic. They derived satisfaction from knowing that 47 was the sum of three prime numbers: 19, 17 and 11. It is possible that we have already missed quite a few Liberal atoms, since an atom is only 15/94ths of a second.
Perhaps the Liberal Moment is a moment of truth. I was surprised to discover how recent this phrase is. It wouldn’t be amiss in Shakespeare, but its earliest appearance in English seems to be in 1932. ‘The whole end of the bullfight was the final sword thrust,’ wrote Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon, ‘what the Spanish call the moment of truth.’ The Spaniards themselves hardly seem to have been using la hora de la verdad for much longer.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in