Culture Vultures
Steyn, Mark
CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Wales of a Sex Scandal I yield to few in my admiration for this great Republic, but I was born a subject of the Crown and I hope I'll be forgiven for suggesting...
...It turned out the reporter was referring to Gerald Regan, former premier of Nova Scotia and Trudeau cabinet minister of impeccable liberal bent, now accused of eight sex-related charges...
...Most Britons assumed that after this performance the cabinet minister would retreat to the Welsh valleys and ne'er be heard from again...
...But there surely has never been a parliamentary statement like Ron Davies's: In explanation of his behavior, he revealed that he had had a difficult childhood and been abused by his father...
...It's no secret that, throughout his long ordeal, President Clinton has always been able to rely on the public support of such glittering personages as Barbra Streisand and Steven Spielberg...
...Anyway, when this radio station alerted rue to the cabinet minister's difficulties, I didn't bother getting back to them immediately...
...But, no...
...Labour Members looked away in embarrassment and Tories wondered whether they'd wandered into an "Oprah" taping by mistake...
...Ron Davies insisted that his sham sheaf of celebrity endorsements was "an honest mistake," and I can well believe it: This is a guy so sunk in Clintonian self-absorption he genuinely feels his inept moonlighting on Clapham Common merits the support of Diana Ross...
...I find it hard to say whether or not Gerry Regan is guilty: As often in suchcases, the prosecution witnesses are not always what one would wish...
...On the TV news, Bill Clinton was preparing to settle with Paula Jones, on the grounds that after four years, what with impeachment and all, he now had too many other scandals to give this one the attention it deserved...
...Tragically, Mrs...
...Davies ended by echoing the First Act Finale of La Cage Aux Folles, reflecting ruefully that "We are what we are...
...To the horror of his colleagues, the old bruiser is making a grisly attempt to recast himself as a mawkish neo-Clintonian victim figure...
...Perhaps, sitting around with Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, chewing the fat about the vicissitudes of a life in Welsh politics, Miss Ross had said, "You know, this guy's going through hell...
...Sex scandals, for example...
...And on Tuesday, you're opening the letter from the prime minister regretfully accepting your resignation but understanding your wish to be with your family at this difficult time and assuring you that the nation will long honor you for your sterling work on the Stansted Airport (Parking Facilities Expansion) Bill...
...For example, just as Toni Morrison famously dubbed Bill Clinton "our first black President," so the Prince of Wales has more or less declared himself Britain's first black prince...
...The line about entrances and exits was, indeed, from Tom Stoppard the playwright, but he'd written it in a play, not in a letter to Davies, with whom he's never corresponded and has no intention of so doing...
...But Ron Davies is a first...
...CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Wales of a Sex Scandal I yield to few in my admiration for this great Republic, but I was born a subject of the Crown and I hope I'll be forgiven for suggesting that there are still one or two things the old country does better...
...Here we go again, I sighed, assuming I was back on the old Clinton merry-go-round...
...David Mellor, one of John Major's closest lieutenants, fingered by a mistress who revealed he liked to have his toes sucked while dressed in the kit of the Chelsea soccer team, lost his cabinet postbut now hosts a show on Classic FM, in which each week he forces a different celebrity— rock stars, game-show hosts to listen to classical music for two hours...
...I am a republican," he declared and, as for the Prince of Wales, "anyone who spends his time killing wildlife and instructing nine- or twelveyear-old children in killing wildlife is not fit for anything, let alone to be king...
...It's a parliamentary tradition that a minister of the Crown is allowed to make a resignation statement to the Commons, which all members are obliged to listen to respectfully...
...He understood what it was like to suffer prejudice because you're black, he said...
...Meeting some of the British army's black recruits, he insisted that he, too, felt their pain...
...Davies would surely stay put, while subpoenas were issued to his secretary, and other cabinet secretaries protested his innocence, and he went on TV and wagged his finger and said, "I did not have sexual relations with that boyor and Welsh Office spin-doctors denounced the vast right-wing conspiracy, and members of the Rastafarian community said that he'd always stood up for their interests, and former sweethearts posed nude for Hot Stud Monthly, and DNA tests were run on the foliage of Clapham Common, and more young men turned up, and some of them had been offered high-profile jobs with the Welsh Language Unemployment Benefit Leaflet Translation Office in Llandudno, and Davies insist-ed that, according to his official Welsh dictionary, it didn't count as sex if no druids were involved, and a Royal Commission had to be appointed under a distinguished former Lord Chancellor, who was promptly reviled as an extreme right-wing sex-crazed religious whacko with links to the fascist National Front, and in the House of Commons Select Committee Labour Members of Parliament attacked the Commission for its unprecedented number of leeks...
...By now, I was sufficiently Americanized to assume I had maybe ten months of lucrative on-air punditry to look forward to...
...But to find the former premier in the dock is still startling...
...London park, Clapham Common, in pursuit of some Rastafarian "rough trade...
...Generally, where sex scandals are concerned, I prefer the British system: The U.S...
...So Davies decided the British people deserved to know that he, too, had his celebrity cheerleaders...
...I'd almost forgotten this blissfully unchanging trajectory the other day when I found a message on my answering machine from a British radio station asking me if I wanted to comment on a sex scandal that had ensnared a fellow called Ron Davies...
...Unfortunately, the day after Davies released these testimonials to his character and courage, it emerged that Diana Ross, the Connecticut-based singing superstar, had written no such letter...
...The evening began straightforwardly enough when Ron spotted "Boogie," a respected crack dealer and pimp, and beckoned him over...
...Thatcher's trade minister, Cecil Parkinson, who disappeared after his secretary gave birth to his "love child," never managed such a successful mid-life career change and was eventually reduced to returning to the cabinet as energy secretary...
...In a rational political culture, just rendering oneself a laughing-stock, as both Bill Clinton and Ron Davies have done, ought to be an impeachable offense...
...On Monday, your wife is photographed with a rictus grin standing beside you outside your country house pledging her support...
...When she looked up, he had opened his fly and exposed his erect penis...
...Tory MP Harvey Proctor, betrayed by teenage rent boys who used to come round to his flat and whip him, subsequently opened a shop selling quality men's shirts...
...And through it all Davies would just sit at his desk, venturing out only for starry fundraisers with Welsh celebrities like Anthony Hopkins and, er, Tom Jones and, and, urn, well—did I mention Anthony Hopkins...
...Miss Ross wrote: "It is impossible to imagine your hurt yet I feel it as though it were my own...
...The prince was "an absolute pillock" and, what was more, he was "an adulterer and a deceiver...
...equivalent of the ones Americans get thrice a week assuring them they've won $12 million...
...Sir Tom wrote: "Every exit is an entrance somewhere else...
...And, by the time I called back that radio station the following day, they didn't want to know...
...We should not waste tears on the former Welsh secretary who, for most of his time in Parliament, has been a loudmouthed oaf...
...Boogie inquired whether Ron wanted a woman, but Ron explained that he was in the mood for a young black male...
...The Clinton White House meets Clapham Common...
...And Ron Davies couldn't even make his last a week...
...44 January 1999 • The American Spectator 0 3 O 0 But now, having been exposed as an adulterer and deceiver himself, Davies seems to be the only one in Britain to feel his swift ejection from the corridors of power was unjust...
...I was, frankly, impressed that Diana Ross had taken such an interest in the travails of an obscure British government minister...
...The only genuine missive was the one from Richard Branson, and he's so tiresomely ubiquitous in British life that a letter from him is the U.K...
...In 1996, on BBC Wales, he took a shot at his principality's eponymous prince...
...Branson wrote: "Just to say, on behalf of everyone I have talked to at Virgin, how much we are all feeling for you...
...46 January 1999 The American Spectator...
...If the Fresh Prince of Wales can claim victim status, surely his secretary of state can...
...The British system of instant resignation acknowledges that, if you're careless enough to get your peccadilloes splashed across the tabloids, you're no longer, in Bill Clinton's phrase, "politically viable," Conversely, if you're not prepared to rely on the natural safety valve of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers and instead erect a vast legal apparatus to police sexual conduct, you should at least use it: Like Clinton, Regan was popular and pro-feminist, but that didn't deter the Crown from hauling his butt into court...
...They'd moved on to Nick Brown, Tony Blair's minister for agriculture, who'd been outed by a fetching young man who'd sold his story to a tabloid...
...I'd seen maybe two lines about the Davies resignation in the American papers, yet somehow his sacrifice had made itself known to the glamorous Motown diva...
...after all, he had suffered prejudice because he was a prince...
...Well, not technically the first Black Prince —that was Edward Plantagenet (1330-1376), known as the Black Prince—but the first authentically black prince, the first African-American, er, African-Welsh prince...
...Alas, from there things went sadly awry...
...To Tony Blair's evident discomfort, the guy refuses to accept that he's history, he's finished, it's over...
...It came instead from a Miss D. Ross, resident of the London suburbs and with no known distinction in vocal performance...
...Instead of spending the evening in the arms of some muscular hunk, poor Ron found himself relieved of his wallet, and, when Boogie and his chums went through it, they discovered that their hapless client was, in fact, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Wales...
...It's difficult, looking at the dithering wimps in Congress scrambling to find a way out, not to conclude that the American system comes a poor third and represents the worst of all worlds: a protracted formal congressional process, but one that Congress is too craven to use...
...It seems that Ron, a married man, had made a comically inept nocturnal foray to the shrubbery of a South MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...But Davies had other ideas...
...As we enter the second year of what Bill Clinton calls "this journey we're on" to get "to the rock-bottom truth of where I am and where we all are," a journey that—like the president—never reaches "completion," I find myself pining for the uncomplicated, quickfire climax of a British sex scandal: On Sunday, you and your paramour(s), the whips and manacles and cross-dressing outfits are plastered all over the News of the World...
...The American Spectator • January 1999 45 it...
...T here is life after sexual scandal...
...Despite being forced to resign, he feels he has the right to inflict his anguish and torment on the public ad nauseam...
...What's the hurry...
...Two weeks after his resignation, he released a collection of "letters of support" from the likes of Diana Ross, Virgin Airways supremo Richard Branson, and the playwright Tom Stoppard...
...It's the latest worrying sign of the Clintonization of British life: Everyone's a victim, every politician is a "me" politician...
...Canada's sexual harassment laws aren't so very different from America's, but the difference is that, unlike the president, Regan is in court being prosecuted by the Crown on criminal charges of sexual assault...
...But instead Ron Davies just...resigned...
...After watching Ron Davies self-destruct for a few days, I flew on to Canada and switched on the news: "...She said he cupped her breast and squeezed Ladies and gentlemen, watch your wallets...
...House impeachment inquiry performs the same function fulfilled in the British Constitution by the front page of the Sun —and, on present evidence, it isn't as effective...
...I was stunned...
...One of us should write...
Vol. 32 • January 1999 • No. 1
