Essays in Idleness

It has come to my attention that Britain has a new prime minister, BoJo the Clown (known to his friends as “Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson”). I gather Mrs Maybe, previously raised to that office under some gender equality programme I suspect, didn’t work out. Mr BoJo has already been criticized for having unkempt blond hair (and small eyes, I have noticed). Too, he was educated at Oxford University, which is still somewhat élite. He was able to use the word anaphora in a sentence (here), and shares with Churchill (and Trump) an ebullience, a buoyant exuberance, that his enemies invariably discount to their cost. He is a reminder that one man (and I have named three) can change the course of history, and the fate of nations.

Not necessarily for the better, of course.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, Member of Parliament for North East Somerset, is suddenly elevated from the backbenches to the front bench; from persistent articulate rearguard rebel, to House Leader in the Mother of Parliaments; and, Lord President of the Council.

Born to rule (the son of an editor of The Times), the now right honourable gentleman stands as a throwback to 1529, when the last indigenous Catholic was appointed to that office. (Though I am not entirely clear what were the Privy Council arrangements under Good Queen Mary, before the return to Erastian apostasy under Bad Queen Bess.)

Not merely a Conservative but a member of the party’s (“Faith, Flag, and Family”) Cornerstone Group, and a diligently practising Roman Catholic with forty children or so, Rees-Mogg has already made a mark in his new rôle, by imposing rules of style and civility upon his staff, if not the Tory caucus, the British nation, worldlings, &c. Extremely useful, and ought to be widely leaked.

Mr BoJo, too, was christened a Catholic, though it has not so far had much effect. He has rabbinical Jewish and infidel Turk antecedents, too, and learnt Anglican hymns at Eton. He is thus a kind of one-stop shop for nominal Abrahamic associations, but to the point, the Orangemen of Ulster are already calling him “England’s first Catholic prime minister” — and what’s good enough for Belfast is good enough for me.

So … (Rees-Mogg says never begin a sentence with this word.) … After nearly five hundred years of absence without leave, can England be walked back to Rome? …

Pourquoi pas? I ask you.

The young daughter of a close friend, watching some royal wedding on TV, asked her mother about the affiliation of Westminster Abbey. The announcer said it was Anglican, but this little girl said it sure looked Catholic to her. Her mother quickly explained about the Reformation; how the Abbey was built by the True Church, but expropriated by the demonic Henry VIII, &c.

After puzzling on this for a moment, the wee daughter inquired: “So why don’t we storm it and take it back?”

Another example, I should say, of ebullience; we can’t really know what is possible till we try.

Western Civ is in decline, I am told (plausibly). Our societies have been “secularized,” and the great majority of Europeans and Americans no longer even pretend to be Catholic.

So why don’t we storm them?