Alas, the British Still Aren’t French

Whenever private indiscretions send a seismic shudder through the political landscape, the complexity of our response is a sharp reminder that, as Oscar Wilde observed: “One should never make one’s debut in a scandal. One should reserve that to give interest to one’s old age.”

In the last few days, British Home Secretary David Blunkett, at 57 one of the most senior members of the government after Prime Minister Tony Blair, has found himself engulfed in a scandal that is dominating the headlines, threatening his career and even jeopardizing the Labor Party’s reelection strategy. The scandal, like all such brouhahas, exhibits complex political and constitutional ramifications. In essence, however, it comes down to sex.

Blunkett’s offense? It’s almost Lilliputian. A single man since his 1990 divorce, Blunkett had an affair with a younger, married American named Kimberly Quinn and claims to have fathered at least one and possibly both of her children.

This much was known in August, and although it was embarrassing, it did not appear to be job-threatening. But now, as their relationship soured under the pressure, details of his conduct at the interface of his private and public lives have emerged that seem deeply discreditable to Blunkett. Some are beginning to say that his resignation is the only course open to him. All this despite the support of the prime minister, who last week declared that his home secretary had done nothing wrong. “Politicians are entitled to their private lives,” Blair said.

Although the newspapers have been all over the story, the British public apparently remains indifferent to this domestic scandal, which says a great deal about a changing society. In its day, the atomic fusion of sex-and-politics broke regimes and wrecked lives.

Nearly 70 years ago, in 1936, then-King Edward VIII was forced to abdicate to “marry the woman I love,” an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson.

Within a generation of that high drama, the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan was similarly shaken in 1963 by what became known as the Profumo Affair. Here, Secretary of State for War John Profumo admitted having a sexual relationship with a call girl. He was forced to resign in disgrace when it emerged that the woman, Christine Keeler, was also sleeping with a Soviet military attache.

It was not the sex that did for him, but the politics: Profumo lied to the House of Commons, a mortal sin. Like Blair, Macmillan did strenuous damage limitation. “No British government should be brought down by the action of two tarts,” he said loftily, referring to Keeler and her fellow call girl, Mandy Rice-Davies. In the end, it wasn’t, but Profumo and Macmillan are now associated in the public mind like ham and eggs.

Meanwhile, in the subsequent 40 years, British governments of all stripes have periodically been rocked by sex scandals that have inspired thousands of column inches, the title of a hit play -- “No Sex Please, We’re British” -- and the reflection, in progressive circles, that this could never happen in France.

The idea that Britons are uptight, repressed and incapable of reconciling sex and politics in a grown-up way was expressed in the observation that “Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot water bottles.”

In France, we note with envious approval, the late President Francois Mitterrand not only fathered a bastard child without repercussions, he was also buried, with full state ceremony, at a public funeral attended by his wife and their sons, his mistress and their illegitimate daughter.

How we sometimes long to be French! And how we cannot shake off our puritan and our Protestant inheritance! It is this inheritance that links us to the United States, of course. It’s this flinty puritan tradition that inspired, for instance, the outcry in the U.S. over Bill Clinton’s “inappropriate relations” with Monica Lewinsky.

In Britain, the Clinton impeachment proceedings were watched with puzzled and sometimes incredulous fascination. Could so little bring down so much, we wondered? We joked; we sniggered; but we did not avert our gaze.

Now the joke’s on us. Will the laughter turn sour or merry? Which way the public mood will turn is anyone’s guess. But one thing is certain. It will continue to revolve around Blunkett’s obsession with his former lover, her 2-year-old son and his not-yet-born sibling. Just as it eventually focused on Lewinsky’s dry cleaning.

In the public life of both Britain and the U.S. there have always been just two, contradictory, default positions. The puritanical tradition that abhors any sexual misconduct by the officers of state. And, at the same time, inherited from what we might call the Virginia side of the American psyche, there is the freebooting, libertarian tradition that goes back to Walter Raleigh. This allows that men and women should be free to do as they please so long as it does not infringe other citizens’ rights -- or frighten the horses.

Read today’s tabloid account of Blunkett, or yesterday’s of Clinton, and you’ll find both these traditions braided together in a rude and vigorous dialogue. We long to be European about it, and shrug it off with an insouciant Gallic shrug of “c’est normale.”

But sex and politics are the oil and vinegar in the salad of everyday life. They go together, and they make everything taste just that little bit better.