In scene 9 of William Congreve’s The Way of the World, amid a fiendish tangle of desire, deception and general waywardness (Sir Wilfull Witwoud: ‘Ahey! Wenches? Where are the wenches?’), Lady Wishfort speaks for many of us as she cuts the discussion short. ‘This will never do!’ she declares.
This will never do. To my dismay this week, as the nation’s kitchen tables buzz with instant opinion concerning a particular politician’s private life, Filipina nannies, rail warrants, visa applications, DNA tests, security warnings, government cars, and the bearing (or otherwise) of any or all of these on a person’s fitness for public office, I find myself bereft of any reasoned opinion at all, beyond a matronly urge to sweep all arguments aside, and join Lady Wishfort in her conclusion. It won’t do.
It just won’t do. I can’t put my finger on why, but it won’t. I wonder whether there is more to be said.
The problem for a columnist and freelance broadcast commentator, however, is this: there’s a limit to the number of broadcast minutes or printed words to which one can spin out the Wishfort doctrine. ‘That may be your view,’ one’s interviewer is likely to reply, ‘and so far as you’re concerned it may indeed not do, but what in particular won’t do? And why?’
And at once one is in difficulty. Because there really isn’t anything in particular which so won’t do that the whole thing won’t do. It’s the whole lot together which won’t do; it’s the one-damn-thing-after-another that won’t do; it’s the ‘oh for Pete’s sake, not another unpleasant newspaper article about something else he/she is alleged to have done’ that won’t do. It’s the ‘that’s enough about Cecil P/David M/Tim Y/Edwina C/Peter M/David B, or Kitty O’Shea — Ed.’
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