9 August 2003  
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ANCIENT AND MODERN

 Peter Jones
 The MP John Redwood has hired a London PR firm to raise his profile. The firm is keen for him to feature in lifestyle articles, when he will talk about his great love of windsurfing, films and theatre. ‘John is happy to talk about a wide range of subjects,’ we are told, including ‘his favourite restaurant/food and his passion for motoring.’ It sounds an exciting prospect — how one longs to hear about why he loves going vroom — and all too horribly typical of Plato’s democratic man.

‘Have you considered expressing your pain through clay modelling?’

In his Republic, Plato analyses the way in which societies degenerate over time and mutate from one type of political system to another. Oligarchies, he argues, tend to become democracies (the fourth lowest system in Plato’s ranking, only one above the worst, tyranny), and democratic man is characterised by his poor upbringing and lack of values and sound habits. Refusing to allow older and wiser minds to guide him, he ‘spends as much time, money and effort on unnecessary pleasures as on necessary’. All pleasures come alike to him, and he moves restlessly from one to the other — ‘one day he gets drunk at a party, the next he’s sipping water and losing weight; then he takes some exercise, then he takes things easy, and sometimes he’s apparently a philosophy student’. Then he gets involved in community affairs and public speaking, then joins the army, then goes into business. ‘His lifestyle has no rhyme or reason, but he thinks it enjoyable, free and enviable and he never dispenses with it ...he becomes multi-hued and multi-faceted, a gorgeous and varied patchwork ...his way of life can be admired by many men and women because it contains so much variety in it.’

Not the sort of person Plato would have liked to see in politics. As he points out elsewhere, communal happiness depends crucially on everyone doing their part. He agrees one could make farmers and potters very happy by allowing them to lounge around all day talking about their exciting lifestyle (as it were) or going vroom, but that would not induce communal happiness. True, Plato continues, if a cobbler pretends to be what he is not, it is no disaster for the community. ‘But if people who guard a community and its laws forget about who they really are and start to pose, they are destroying the very community whose management and happiness are in their hands and theirs alone.’

On top of all this, Redwood also insists that he has ‘no political ambitions’. What the hell is he doing in Parliament, then — or does he have ambitions to become Cherie Blair’s new lifestyle guru?

© 2003 The Spectator.co.uk