Mother Theresa

Tory activists last week were heard to refer to Mrs May as ‘Mummy’. No Corbynista calls their hero ‘Dad’. The human race is guided by myth as much as by logic, and mythology explains people to themselves more vividly than economics. The agony expressed in the liberal intelligent press is understandable. The sensible people who all voted Remain direct much of their fury against the Corbynistas who have taken over the Labour party. Fair enough. Interestingly, however, they attend so closely to what Tony Benn liked to call ‘the ish-oos’ that they ignore the bigger mythological picture.

Last summer the country voted — very unwisely according to the sensible 48 per cent — in favour of Brexit. Times of great collective crisis summon up the blood, create responses which are not entirely rational. While the sensible people wonder how many decades of negotiation will be necessary before we can agree on the necessary tariff for a new Mercedes-Benz or a slab of Camembert, their fellow Britons are in a ‘different galaxy’, perhaps the same meteorite on which sat the Victorian painter Dyce when he depicted Neptune surrendering his sceptre to Britannia — a picture which Prince Albert commissioned for that mythological imperial mother, Queen Victoria.