Obituary writing is a difficult skill. No matter who the person or what they’ve done, you’re supposed to be balanced. Measured. Impartial.
Laying out the facts, maybe a little flick here and there to give a hint of their standing, but on the whole dead (I know, I know) straight.
There are exceptions, of course. I got sent – I collect these things – a scathing one from the Florida Times-Union, that a son had written about his estranged father.
“It will be challenging to miss Lawrence Sr,” wrote Lawrence Jr, “Because he was narcissistic. But his death proves that evil does eventually die and it marks a time of healing, which will allow his children to get the closure they deserve.”
Ouch. You can’t really print that sort of thing. But there you are.
The obituary of a political career is tricky too. Particularly in the case of the (slowly) outgoing PM.
In this case it’s hard to get the tone right. These are joyous days but no-one likes crowing.
Secondly, I’ll only believe has truly gone when the moving vans arrive and the next man or woman (probably man) has taken over.
I mean, what can you say? We’ve already been through his back catalogue: his gaffes, lies, mismanagement and naked opportunism, the various things that drove him out of office.
And I have, to the disgust of many of you, been banging on about him for a while. A clown, a charlatan, unfit for office and all that.
If you ever needed to sum him up, it was in that leaving speech: “Them’s the breaks”. Not a shred of contrition. No apology – although I guess he’s spent the past few months apologising and he’s as sick of it as the rest of us.
Covid families, disgraced ministers, sleaze up to the eyeballs: “Them’s the breaks.” I think that’s what I said when I got fired from Blockbuster. It’s not a fitting way to go out of high office.
But it was everything you needed to know: “Them’s the breaks.”
He tore everything up in the pursuit of what he decided was his destiny: Prime Minister, a couple of election wins (maybe more, according to him), statues, the Golden Age of Boris.
And I tell you, I got text messages from people who were near him when he was vowing not to go, and I cannot tell you how close he was to destroying not just the Conservative Party but the whole thing.
It was very close. God help us, it’s not over yet.
When he’s finally out there’ll be some proper retrospective to be done. Until then, we continue to gather material.
A few days after US presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan died in 1925, H.L. Mencken (himself a dubious fella) wrote the most horrifying and incredible obituary in my collection.
Of Bryan – who had tried to ban the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools – he wrote:
“Was he, in his day, of any dignity as a man, and of any value to his fellow-men? I doubt it. Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker.
“The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him.
“He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment’s notice.”
There is nothing – and no-one – new under the sun.
