It's happened again. A forced resignation of a prominent man for no reason that makes any public sense whatsoever. First Hugh O'Flaherty and now Peter Mandelson. Neither man did anything wrong; both were approached by people in social circumstances, for whom they undertook to make enquiries, which were then briefly made. That was that. No representations were undertaken, nothing dishonest occurred, nor were any improper favours done; yet both men had laid a charge of gunpowder under their careers.
I have read the Irish Times file on Hugh O'Flaherty a dozen times. I have read the many commentaries on his allegedly heinous conduct, so apparently damaging to the State, the rule of law, decency, civilisation, nunly chastity and peace in our kindergartens; and I still can't see why he was expelled from public life. And I have - sort of (one has only a limited capacity for this sort of stuff) - read about why Peter Mandelson departed Stormont Castle, an exit pursued by a bear garden.
Democracy
I understand as much of it I would a conference on Planck's Quantum Theory, being conducted in Finnish, suddenly ending in the violent beheading of the chief speaker. Then everyone applauds wildly as they caper in the poor bastard's gore and loudly agree (in English, for once) that it was a great day for democracy. B. . b. . but why?, I gasp. And off they go in Finnish again, aakkinnenn maakinnenn suomi plaa kkinenn.
Hugh O'Flaherty did no wrong. Beginning, middle and end. He listened to a woman enquiring after her imprisoned brother, and he asked a court official a question which might, or might not, be relevant to her brother's conviction and imprisonment; but he did nothing to alter events. And though his actions were ill advised, they were not in themselves wrong. Have we all not done deeds which were imprudent, but which leave our consciences clear?
Who hung poor Hugh out to dry? Liam Hamilton of the Beef Tribunal, none other - and nil mortuis et cetera aside, was there ever in the history of Irish jurisprudence a more artfully constructed document, in which no one seems to have been found seriously guilty? Bad enough for Hugh to have his career brought to ruins, but how much worse than it should be done by the author of the Beef Tribunal report.
Phone call
The fate of Peter Mandelson is even more incomprehensible, hinging as it does on a phone call made two-and-a-half years ago. Listen. I can't remember what I said to whom last week; and as for conversations in 1998, well now, lead me by the nose into that conference of Finnish particle physicists, and I can tell you as much about what they're are saying now as I could about what I said back when the French won the World Cup.
For comparable amnesia, Peter Mandelson has been lynched, vilified and humiliated. And it's not that he was Minister for the Blackpool Illuminations, or Secretary of State for Socks, but Imperial Pro-Consul for The Last Outpost of the Empire, who had assembled an extraordinarily complex peace process structure which was understood only by him, Martin Man sergh, and maybe a couple of Finnish particle physicists.
I confess that I don't think that complex political constructions last, especially in a place like Northern Ireland. But at least the maintenance of the structure of the Northern Executive does ensure a peace of a kind that's worth preserving, even if it requires the Northern Secretary endlessly running backwards and forwards spinning plates on poles. He is a uniquely capable man, perhaps the only politician able to keep the competing forces there in balance - and he has been brought to ruin over a single phone call in which no-one knows what was said.
The biggest project in British public life over the past half-century is the attempt to end the Northern troubles by political means. Huge sacrifices - the release of cheery, back-slapping killers, the virtual suspension of the rule of law in hardline ghettos, the deconstruction of the RUC, the closure of investigations into a vast catalogue of terrorist depravity, and worst of all, the deliberate disregard of the grief and the anger of the bereaved in order to propitiate their armed and unrepentant bereavers - have involved the greatest moral compromise in British or Irish history since 1921. The project of peace was deemed worth this vast ethical appeasement.
Fire extinguisher
But it was not deemed worth the contents of a single disputed phone call towards the end of the last century. This is madness, complete and utter barking insanity. In its exquisite querulousness, in its precious and posturing vapidity, it is rather like declining to use a fire extinguisher on a conflagration in a classroom full of screaming children because the chemicals released might damage the ozone layer - and then, by God, odiously congratulating yourself on your moral superiority.
It is Blair through and through, an almost psychopathic failure to spot the difference between the moral mote and the ethical beam. It's what he was, is, and ever more shall be so. He did for Mandelson, just as me lud Hamilton did for Hugh O'Flaherty, just as the scorpion stung the frog doing it a favour. This is what they do.
I understand this; what I don't understand is that nobody else sees it as I do. It is, I think, time to learn Finnish.