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Boyish-looking politicians – we’ve been here before
• WHEN I interviewed Robert Bly, the American poet/story-teller for the Morning Star in 1990, he was aghast at the immaturity of boyish-looking politicians like Tony Blair and David Miliband (Life in the trenches? Surely too much for young David, John Gulliver, July 31). Miliband could scarcely been out of short trousers and have long left Haverstock School at the time.
Looking like a Roman patrician over 6ft tall, and wearing a dazzling multi-coloured waistcoat whenever he read from the Sufi poets Kabir and Hafiz on high from the pulpit at St James’s Church, Piccadilly, Robert was here for the publication of Iron John, his bestselling book based on one of Grimm’s fairy stories, about young men and initiation into manhood.
It has been completely trodden into dust and forgotten by today’s unhugged young men.
While boyish politicians, unhugged by their fathers and with no actual experience of life as it is, continue to attain high office, “The waste remains, the waste remains and kills”, to quote William Empson, the poet, on his death bed. We all suffer as a result.
JOHN HORDER
, NW6
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