Loyalty is the first casualty in the age of ‘Wonderful Me’

No love lost: Omarosa Manigault Newman and Donald Trump
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What do the avenging tribes of the Markle family, the (sort of) aide who has released a recording made in the White House situation room to a US news network and Boris Johnson have in common? I refer you to Big Bird’s anthem in Sesame Street: “Who is a bird who stands out in a crowd? Me! Wonderful me!”

By harping on about being denied the chance to give a speech at the royal wedding — after selling staged paparazzi pictures — Thomas Markle wants to show us his wounds and blame the “cold-blooded” royals. A chorus of indignity about “hurt”, “selfishness” and “sociopathy” from the poisonous relatives provides the backing track.

Elsewhere in the sociopathy champions’ league Omarosa Manigault Newman, the reality TV star turned White House junior aide, ate her revenge hot after being fired for “serious integrity breaches” by the President’s chief-of-staff. She has aired a recording of a conversation about her sacking made illicitly in the high-security briefing room.

Back home, Johnson has been keeping up the pressure for a bronze in the show-off Olympics, stockpiling off-message pronouncements, from his “f*** business” outburst to lavish praise for Donald Trump’s abilities and now a wholly unnecessary storm about the burka, at a time when the last thing the Government needs is an uninvited culture war.

Anne McElvoy

These stories have different objectives and milieu. Collectively they demonstrate a shift in norms, in which individuals regard themselves as much more important than any institution or previous loyalty.

Markle initially aroused sympathy as a “sad dad” with a mini-series load of family and health problems feeding his public dejection. He might add that, like America’s founding fathers, he owes no respect to a royal family thousands of miles away. But the tone of his rants treats his daughter’s privacy and dignity as mere collateral damage in his revenge and even an addled dad must realise that he is adding a sour note to transatlantic memories of a cheerful wedding day and adding stress to his daughter’s marriage.

Remind me, if you will, that revenge is as old as the Old Testament — but humans do show extraordinary ingenuity in turning the knife in different ways. One impact of the immediate score-settling and the breakdown of rudimentary ideas of what information it is proper to share (and what isn’t) has caught us all off guard: when in doubt, shout it out. A refreshing burst of whistleblowing and a decline in deference has turned fast into a culture in which denunciation is more ogled at than questioned.

Manigault Newman’s leak from the situation room in Washington was a major threat to safety — and another sign that institutions which pride themselves on control now lag behind the pace of change in our mores.

True, it’s hard to keep a straight face at the President being out-Trumped by one of his own hires. Brought on board to add a veneer of TV glam to his poor relations with African Americans, she has appalled her former master by behaving exactly like he does. He has, in turn, regressed to his P T Barnum incarnation, tweeting: “Wacky Omarosa, who got fired three times on the Apprentice, now got fired for the last time.”

Ah well, Britain is not America. Not for us the sour slew of insults garnered to grab 15 minutes of heedless fame. Well, not so fast with the sage smugness. One insidious effect of the Brexit rows has been to raise the temperature of politics to a rolling boil while lowering the bar for self-awareness on both sides of the divide.

"The balance of individual  advancement in politics and loyalty to your party is often unstable"

It is the perfect subject for those who want to vent their self-importance, secure in the knowledge that their team will cheer and their opponents boo, whatever the quality of their arguments. This is the mood that Johnson is milking in the burka row.

Until he fired off the verbal Gatling gun in his newspaper column, there was no obvious reason for the former Foreign Secretary to bring the matter up at all. It did not seem to perturb him much in office so why now — except to gather leadership votes as a Ukip-lite candidate?

Sound arguments can be made that the burka and the niqab conceal more than just the face. I would share Johnson’s conclusion — face-covering is an unwelcome accretion that is by no means central to Muslim life in Britain. My conclusion is that a liberal society can discourage such attire but not forbid it — and Johnson has worked his way around to that view

Nevertheless, how and when sensitive subjects are raised does matter — the more so when you are a prospective leader. At least Jack Straw, after lighting on the subject in the early 2000s, then continued to explain his logic. Unless I am wrong about its importance to Johnson, this looks more likely to create a dog-whistle effect and shore up his support on the Right — before he heads off to the next useful topic.

The balance of individual advancement in politics and loyalty to your party is often unstable. We forget, because the Westland helicopters affair has lapsed into the Trivial Pursuit archive, how Michael Heseltine’s challenge to Mrs Thatcher aggrieved so many Tories in the mid-Eighties.

One of the most telling leaked memos from the Blair era was one in which he sought “eye-catching initiatives with which I am personally associated”. Politics is the trade of the star rather than the compliant corps de ballet. But a core sense of loyalty is the asset which, once lost, is hard to regain. In the ostentatious age of Wonderful Me, we’re mislaying it a bit too often.

  • Anne McElvoy is senior editor at The Economist. She presents the debate series Across the Red Line on Radio 4 on Wednesdays at 8pm

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