The Prince, Privilege and Public Life

I wasn't going to watch the Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. Not out of a sense of propriety: there was more entertainment to be had on other channels that night.

But then I read some social media posts. And commentary in next morning's papers. I realised that bigger matters were at stake than mere royal titillation. So I sat down, logged on to the BBC iPlayer and started paying attention.

I don't want to speculate. I don't know whether the Prince was telling the truth or not (or at any rate the whole truth). I don't know what to make of his having "no recollection" of meeting Virginia Giuffre or having sex with her. I can't make any more sense of the notorious photograph of them together than he apparently can. I don't pretend to understand his memory of a precisely datable evening in the Pizza Express in Woking, or the clinical pathology that inhibits perspiration. I don't know how to evaluate his demeanour and body-language during the interview.

And I'm not clear whether the Prince's readiness to submit to this intense interrogation was courageous or foolhardy though the consensus is the latter. Others are experts: they must judge. All I'm competent to say anything about are the words he spoke, on the record, taken at their face value. And what these words mean when someone in public life speaks them, someone who is at the very pinnacle of the establishment by virtue of his being a senior member of the Royal Family.

In a modest way, as a clergyman, I've been in public life for most of my adulthood. I've learned a little about how exposed you are in a leadership role, how your words and actions are placed under an unforgiving spotlight you are never quite prepared for until you find yourself there. I've discovered, sometimes the hard way, how your behaviour is calibrated against the values of the organisation you serve (in my case the Church of England) and against your own professional and personal values, whether they are stated or implicit. ("Would Jesus have said or done this?") In a sense, you have no private life. You are not your own any more.

So watching the interview was a profoundly uncomfortable experience. I could all too easily imagine myself sitting across the table opposite Emily Maitlis for what I would probably remember as the most uncomfortable hour of my life. I could imagine myself perspiring (unlike the Prince) under her scrupulously courteous yet relentlessly forensic examination. I might persuade myself that I could bluff my way through it by turning on the charm, or rely on clever formulae rehearsed in coaching sessions. But I know I would not be capable of maintaining any pretence for more than a few minutes. An hour is a long time in the dock. The truth would out in the end. If it were me.

I don't know about Prince Andrew. Only he knows the full story. But let's make the presumption that his truth was told too, all of it, or at least all that was relevant to the scope of the interview. What did I make of that as I imagined myself in his shoes?

My answer is that if it were me, I would reckon that I'd already rendered myself unfit for public office. Both on the basis of what I hadn't said as well as what I had.

It's what the Prince didn't say that was most culpable. Jeffrey Epstein's record is not a matter of conjecture. He was a convicted sex offender. He procured ("trafficked") women and underage girls for sex with himself and others. The Prince's close association with him and the inevitable collusion with his lifestyle and behaviour would already have posed grave reputational risks. But for him not even to hint in the interview that he understood how Epstein's abuse of women and girls would have created victims who would be damaged for life is beyond culpable. Not to express the slightest care for or sympathy towards them, not to deplore Epstein’s behaviour would be incredible if we had not heard for ourselves this sound of a gaping royal silence.

As for what he did say, his only acknowledgment of any misjudgment, the only hint of having made a big mistake was in respect of visiting Epstein after his release from prison in order, he said, to terminate his relationship with him. That gives the game away: in that admission, the Prince was acknowledging that his relationship with Epstein was altogether toxic, hence the need to end it. There was a mysterious reference to "honour" in doing this face to face rather than through a phone call. Let us suppose so. But there's something oddly self-regarding about invoking your own sense of honour when the entire conversation has been about what most people would regard as at least flirting with serial dishonour. The register of self-justification hardly matched the narrative. It felt dislocated, out of context.

You'd have thought that the Prince would have been advised by his coaches to adopt a seriously contrite approach to this interview. Maybe to have said something like this. Yes, I've messed up badly. My behaviour has been at best self-indulgent, not to say unforgivable. And worst of all is the plight of the women and girls who were victims of my friend's predatory abuse with which, by my silence in not condemning it, I've colluded. How can I ever put right that terrible wrong done to them? How can I show them that the damage they have suffered will go on weighing on my conscience for the rest of my life just as it will forever haunt theirs? As it was, he came across as entitled people often do - not guided by the same moral compass most of us invoke when placed in ambiguous or compromising situations.

I'm trying not to speculate about things the Prince either denied or was silent about. I'm going only on what he said in front of us all. He must make up his own mind about what he does next. But if it were me, what would I do?

I was asking myself that question all through the interview. But it's really not that hard for me to answer. I'd have had to admit to a sense of shame that events had brought me to this point. I honestly do not think I could continue in public life in the light of it. Not with honour. I'd be too compromised by my past, and I'd risk in turn compromising the institutions in which I held a public role. If I said I'd be too ashamed to continue in office as a public leader, I'm not overstating it, I think. I recognise that it may feel different for a member of the Royal Family. But I'm also questioning whether it should be different. Honour and trust come into everything we do and are in our public roles. Leadership that is worth anything collapses if they are forfeited. So I would have to say that if it were me, I'd now have reached that point, and it was time for me to retreat back into private life with as much dignity as I could muster. Not because my reputation had been damaged beyond repair. Not even because of the harm I had done to my family, my associates and my institution. But because (I hope) I’d want to do the right thing as a matter of principle: taking responsibility for my behaviour and acting with integrity in the light of it.

In my leadership roles I've learned a lot from the Seven Principles of Public Life that people holding public office in appointed or elected roles are required to sign. These roles include health and education, the police, the courts, the civil service and national and local government. The Principles are: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and the example we set in leadership. We are right to prize such ethical standards and measure our behaviour in the light of them. We are right to expect that our leaders and representatives in public life will try at all times to live up to them.

I wonder what answer Emily Maitlis would have got if she'd put them to the Prince?

Things My Father Never Told Me

How old was I? Eleven or twelve? I can't recall. What I do remember is that I did something that brought my father to tears - the only time in my whole life I saw him cry.

What I did was not very terrible, and I meant no harm. I'd gone to the National Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, then in Somerset House on the Strand, to look up my family's history. A bit precocious, you may say. But it was so easy in those days. You simply turned up there and pulled the relevant registers off the shelves. My mother was German-born, so Somerset House was no help as far as her own family was concerned. Anyway, it was my father's side of the family I wanted to explore to see what I could find out about my surname.

I looked up my father's birth date. To my surprise he had no entry. Someone else called Sadgrove was listed as having been born that day, but not with Christian names I recognised. I should have drawn the obvious conclusion and kept quiet about what I'd seen, but things aren't always obvious to a boy of that age, and I was not gifted with tact. I went home and blurted it all out to my father. I was dismayed at his reaction. He took a while to tell me the story of how he had changed his given name by deed poll on reaching adulthood. It wasn't the name in itself, rather the memories it conjured up of how he had been relentlessly bullied as a youngster. Whenever he heard himself called by name, it brought back the vilification, cruelty and scorn he'd been subject to in school days - this was how he put it. He didn't go into details. Then he turned away and wept. And I stood there silent and numb, helpless before these sluice-gates of memory and emotion that I'd unwittingly opened up. It was a defining experience of my life.

I revisit that scene often, reliving the pain of unintended disclosure. I've thought about it on this Fathers' Day. I don't mean my own discomfort that afternoon, for it was nothing compared to my father's terrible grief. What I glimpsed for the first time was how abuse - which bullying always is - has effects on victims that last a lifetime. My father had climbed clear of his childhood, had worked hard, made a success of his life, married and had children. And now, without intending to, I'd uncovered what had lain undisturbed for decades. I was shaken by the capacity of historic wounds to haunt, and hurt, an adult man so many years later. And by my own part in it, even though I was the occasion not the cause. How could I begin to understand? I'm not sure I understand it even now more than half a century later.

As I look back to my own childhood on this Fathers' Day, my memories are of how happy it was. My father played a big part in that. He enjoyed the company of children - I saw later on in life how good he was as a grandparent to my own children. As a three year old he was taking me for walks among the silver birch trees of Petts Wood, teaching me to ride my tricycle and pointing out the Southern Electric "green trains" that ran beneath a bridge we had to cross on the way while I peered down between the girders. We played together in the sand pit in the garden. He built a layout for my Hornby clockwork "O" gauge model railway. One Christmas when I was seven, my parents gave me an 18 inch pavement bike. It had only one brake which failed at the top of Muswell Hill. I can feel even now the terror of wheels beneath me sliding out of control and gathering speed. The steep hill plunged down before me like a cliff. "Steer into those trees!" my father yelled, and I could hear the panic in his voice; "steer left and into those trees!" I did, and have always believed that he saved my life that day.

Perhaps I'm right to regard that visit to Somerset House as marking the end of childhood, or at any rate as representing an important rite of passage. For it showed me for the first time that my father was a vulnerable human being who had had a troubled past. It wasn't that up to then our relationship had been unalloyed bliss. Mine had been a middle-class upbringing like most others with its ups and downs, the good times and the not so good, the fallings-out and reconciliations that make up normal family life. But never had the raw humanity of either of my parents been exposed in the way it was that day. I saw a wound that I guessed would never fully heal. And I was not ready for it, not yet.

Psychoanalytic theory teaches us how important the moment is when we realise that our parents are flawed human beings like us. It's a real threshold in our growing up, a necessary step towards adulthood to recognise that for all that they have given us, they are not the omnipotent, infallible beings we believed them to be in our infancy. You would have to ask my own children at what point my own brokenness and fallibility became clear to them, when they learned that I could never be the perfect father, though I could still aspire (and hope) to be the "good-enough parent" they would always need me to be. I knew that I did not love my father any the less for what I had found out, indeed, I believed I would respect him for being candid with me about it. I also knew that he would not love me any the less for discovering it. How did I know? Because, I think, the foundations had been laid by a good-enough father that could bear the burden of what subsequently came to light. And when in adolescence, family relationships became more complicated, the memory of that event proved stabilising and strangely reassuring.

I once wrote a book* that explored stories in Genesis and Exodus about sons who were "lost" for various reasons. Abel, for example, who was murdered by his brother, and Ishmael who was banished to the desert by his father; and Isaac who was nearly offered up as a sacrifice, and Joseph who was exiled to Egypt out of envy, and others. Among the characters who populate these stories are all-too-many broken, wayward, self-serving fathers who paint an unlovely picture of humanity at its most compromised. Immersing myself in those texts got me thinking hard about my own personal history as a father to one man and a son to another. (You'll forgive the non-inclusive language, but biblical masculinities were central to the theme of the book.) The controlling narrative throughout was the parable of the Prodigal Son. Pondering that marvellous story made me ask the questions, in what ways have I been the prodigal "lost" son needing to be welcomed home and forgiven, and how in turn could I be that loving father towards my own children?

On Fathers' Day, I want to give thanks for and honour the memory of my father to whom I owe the gift of being alive, and to whose "good-enough" parenting in the critical years of childhood my adult self owes so much. As for the father I have been in turn for more than forty years now, I pay tribute to my four children whose capacity for understanding and forgiveness is one of the miracles of family life. That loving father in the parable is the inspiration for all of us who are lucky enough to be fathers. And all of us in every relationship in which others look to us for protection, kindness and care. For he shows us what God must be like, the Father who loves his creation and every living thing, who longs to welcome us home; and who when we make the journey back from our far country comes running to meet us.

********
The image at the top of this blog is a medieval wall-painting in a church in Budapest that shows God the loving Father listening to his Son's prayer of agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Fathers' Day seemed a good occasion on which to share it.

*Lost Sons: God's long search for humanity, SPCK 2012.

Europa - an Archetypal Victim to Inspire the EU

This week a pro-Brexit group was reported as posting a video suggesting that the EU is guilty of "raping" its citizens. It shows a woman fleeing from a man with the caption "Rapin". The EU flag is prominent. This was roundly accused of being offensive by Remain supporters on the grounds that it made light of sexual violence.

I tweeted on Christians for Europe: "@Vote_Leave may not know their classical myths but they are good at making up their own." This prompted a furious riposte: "What about @StrongerIn's lies, deceit, distortion, hypocrisy and insidious rhetoric of #ProjectFear?" We shall miss all this sound and fury after 23 June. Or then again, maybe we won't.

What was I on about, alleging that Brexiters don't know their classical literature? It goes back to the ancient Greek myth of Europa. Have you ever wondered how Europe got its name? The story takes various forms as most myths do. The commonest version depicted in classical and renaissance art tells how Zeus noticed the beautiful Phoenician maiden Europa in the fields with her father's herds. The god changed himself into a white bull and concealed himself among the cattle. Europa was gathering flowers when she noticed the handsome bull and started caressing it. So gentle was he that she clambered up on to his back. Zeus seized the moment and darted off with her into the sea. With her on his back, he swam to Crete where she became a queen.

My point on Twitter was simple: that in mythology, far from being the (female) perpetrator of rape, Europa was herself a victim of precisely the crime Brexit was accusing her of! In the classical tradition, she is more sinned against than sinning. It's only a myth, of course. But that "only" shouldn't mislead us into thinking too lightly about its potency. Story has a power that lies deeper than facile notions of whether or not "it really happened".

So why should Europe have a founding myth that speaks about victimhood? And why should the European Union adopt the image of Europa as one of the badges of its identity on coins, stamps and banknotes? (So its iconography is a lot more than a big football league.)

I don't know that there's an easy historical answer to the question, how did "Europa" grow from its local Greek origins to becoming, by Charlemagne's time, a significant slice of a continent. But we can play with the symbolic significance of the name as we think about the EU and Britain's place in it.

I rather like the idea that the story of a victim and her ordeal should lie at the heart of our identity as a continent. The story itself is brutal and ugly. Rape always is, always, without exception. There is no defence or special pleading that can make it otherwise. The Brexit video was a shocking lapse in taste in a campaign that has not been distinguished for its sweet reasonableness and depth of serious argument. But in Christian thought, God takes the side of the victim. Those who suffer because of the abuse of power are under his special protection. This is precisely what God himself has experienced in the passion and death of his Son Jesus.

So if we take this central aspect of Europe's founding myth seriously, we ought to find ourselves looking out for all the poor Europas of our own day: the victims of all forms of tyranny, enslavement, poverty and indeed sexual violence committed against the weak and vulnerable. You could say that Europa was the original trafficked slave who was seized against her will and made to dance to the tune of a violent, depraved master. That she was transported across the wine-dark seas of the Eastern Mediterranean only adds to the contemporary resonances. Wherever we see desperate migrants, refugees and asylum seekers looking for a place to call home, we see echoes of the Europa myth. We see images of Christ suffering in all who bear the mark of pain.

In terms of our continent and next month's referendum, what does the story say about the European Union today?

It's not hard to mythologise the threats that will continue to face the EU, whether we are part of it or not. I think there are two powers that threaten to overwhelm the Union in the future and which could all too easily "abduct" Europa and carry her off to strange, alien places or even destroy her altogether. The two words are separated by just one letter. I mean rationalism and nationalism. By rationalism I'm not thinking of the capacity for rigorous analysis, argument and thought, one of Europe's great legacies to the world through the Enlightenment. It's the deadening effect of being closed off to the spiritual inheritance of our continent that I have in mind. It was a sad day when, despite the pleas of faith communities including the Holy Father himself, the preamble to the Maastricht treaty consciously omitted any mention of the part religion has played in shaping Europe. It ignores the vast contribution made by Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the values and ideals of the EU. It's an ominous sign that the EU could be taken over by the kind of doctrinaire secularism that is opaque to the redemptive dimension of a religious vision and a lived faith.

The other threat, nationalism, is easier to see all round us in the populist politics of 2016. Patriotism and nationalism are not at all the same thing. I've constantly argued that it is a fully patriotic choice for this and every other nation to pool sovereignty in the interests of promoting the common good. It is good for nations and peoples, good for the continent and good for the human race. We should love our patria, our homeland. We owe it our loyalty. But it's not the only loyalty we have. What isn't good is to collapse our belonging down to the nation state as if that were an end in itself. This is the mantra of far-right movements across the continent not least in Greece, Hungary, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and France. It should worry us that vast numbers of people are giving up on the idea, so fundamental to the Christian founding fathers of the European Project, that we are "better together". To me, the slogan "we want our country back" is deeply sinister. It's an omen of a fragmented future that goes against everything I believe about what it means to be human and to live together and flourish in community.

The antidote to both nationalism and rationalism could be to think more carefully about the Europa myth. If she is the archetypal victim, then her story can perhaps empower us to resist the intellectual, political, cultural and spiritual tyrannies that threaten to carry us off and enslave us today. It begins, I think, with our own consciousness of who and what we are, and the dignity with which we are invested as creatures made in the image of God whose service, as the Anglican collect says, is "perfect freedom". One etymology of the name Europa is that it means "having an open face". This is why I believe our future lies in the European Union, because we want the UK to be a nation that is outward-turned, generous and inclusive in a Europe that has an "open face" to the world, and especially to its victims.

To vote to remain in the EU could be an unafraid act of joyful liberation, the very opposite of the gloomy worries that plague Brexiters. It could confidently proclaim that there is a better vision of humanity than any we have yet found. The Europa myth could inspire us to reimagine it.