The Death of Shame

This week: what Liz Truss can learn from John Profumo; how the continents got their names; and a map of metropolitan sprawl.

John Profumo was, by any reasonable definition, an impressive man. Born in 1915, he’d grown up to become a war hero, storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, fighting in Italy and rising, by the time he left the army, to the rank of Brigadier. Long before then he’d become a Tory MP, elected in a 1940 by-election to become the youngest member of the House of Commons; he’d almost immediately defied the whip to help end Neville Chamberlain’s premiership, thus clearing the way for Churchill. He lost his seat in the Labour landslide of 1945, but was back in 1950, a junior minister from 1952 and in the Cabinet, as Secretary of State for War, from 1960. All this by the age of 45.

To history, though, none of this matters a damn – because the only thing anyone remembers about John Profumo was his affair with a 19-year-old model named Christine Keeler, who was also shagging the senior naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy. That meant national security risks, which meant a scandal when Profumo was proved to have lied to the House. The “Profumo Affair”, as it’s been known ever since, helped finish off another Tory prime minister, Harold Macmillan. Less than a year later the party was out of government.

There was a third act to Profumo’s life, however, which is frequently forgotten, too: the decades he spent working as a volunteer at Toynbee Hall, an anti-poverty charity working in London’s East End. Profumo’s work there has often been described as “cleaning toilets”, when “phoning rich pals demanding money” would be closer to the mark, and it was only possible anyway because of his vast inherited wealth. Nonetheless, while John Profumo’s name will forever be associated with scandal, he spent the second half of his life trying to atone. He only died in 2006.¹

I first learned of this story some years ago when thinking about his successor at what had once been the War Office, Liam Fox. His career, too, had come to an end through a scandal involving security. But Fox hadn’t left politics: in line with the sin bin approach to disgraced ministers that had held since at least the Blair years, he seemed to think he could just wait things out and return to the front bench. 

He was right. In 2016 I wrote a column arguing that Fox had soiled himself so badly that he should, henceforth, be described by his full title of “the disgraced former defence secretary Liam Fox”; it caught on, and for a time Google would autocomplete “disgraced former” with his job title and name. Theresa May still appointed him to her Cabinet before the year was out. The contrast with Profumo feels telling. 

Perhaps these are rose tinted glasses, a feeling that these last few years of government has plumbed previously unimaginable depths, but I feel almost fondly towards Fox these days. He may have been deluded about what he’d done wrong, but he did at least seem to understand that other people thought he’d done something wrong: that, apparently, was one reason he was so determined to show the rest of us he wasn’t done.

Many of those who followed have shown no such awareness. Nick Timothy, the former chief of staff who did so much to lose May her majority at the 2017 election, moved straight to a Telegraph column titled, hilariously, “Ideas to win”, and is now the candidate for a seat so safe that even with today’s polls he is likely on course to be a Tory MP; he has never, that I’ve noticed, accounted for his mistakes. Suella Braverman continues to position herself as a potential future leader, despite both her almost uniquely terribly personal ratings and the fact she’s twice been sacked from the same front bench job. She has not been disciplined for her recent assertions that Islamists now run Britain. Lee Anderson has been disciplined for that, losing the whip because he attached his claim to a specific human being who could, apart from anything else, sue. But he has not really walked his comments back or done anything else to suggest he feels an ounce of shame.

Most incredibly of all there’s Liz Truss, the mayfly Prime Minister who used the share of her seven weeks in Downing Street not taken up with mourning the Queen to drive both household finances and her party’s poll ratings to previously unimaginable depths. Yet there she is in the Telegraph or on the US lecture circuit, sounding off about the need to save the west, all the same. It all makes Fox look almost dignified.

The reason this is possible, of course, is that there’s now an entire right wing social media industrial complex which did not exist in 1963, which has an interest in promoting conservative ideas and blaming their failures on other people. (The fact Truss’ book was published by specialists Biteback rather than one of the big publishing groups does at least suggest this complex has its limits.) Nonetheless, it speaks of a quite dreadful decline in political morality since the time of John Profumo. We shouldn’t have to hear from these people: they’ve had a go and they’ve failed, and in a better, less shameless world they would accept the fact and stop bothering us. And yet they remain.

It’s a pity. There are an awful lot of toilets out there they could be cleaning instead.

How did the continents get their names? 

The planet Earth has, by common consent, seven different continents. Actually, this is a surprisingly contested figure, an observation I’ve repackaged as content on multiple occasions, including in the very first edition of this newsletter, but for our purposes today let’s assume there are seven. This is a good number for this kind of a listicle, if only because it enables me to stop writing.

Where, then, did they get their names? Well I’m very glad you asked. 

Africa: A label originally applied by the Romans to the chunk of the landmass around its great rival, Carthage, covering roughly what we would call Tunisia. Various imperial reorganisations extended the label first to neighbouring provinces (Tripolitania, Numidia, Mauretania Caesariensis), then to much of the north African coast west of Egypt. Finally, long after the Romans had ceased to be a going concern, their successors in the European imperialist game applied the name to the entire landmass.

The name seems to come from the Afri tribe, who lived in the area around Carthage, but that was an exonym – a word applied by outsiders – so just shifts the question to why the tribe was called that. It may have come from the Latin word aprica – “sunny”; the Berber word ifri, “cave”; the Greek word aphrike (ἀφρίκη), “without cold”; or, given the Carthaginians’ origins, the Phoenician word afar, “dust”. 

So, to sum up, we don’t know. And since it is anyway attached to places thousands of miles from anywhere those who came up with the word were even aware of, it hardly seems to matter. Moving on:

Asia: Another one whose roots are lost in the mists of ancient history. The Hittites, who dominated what is now Turkey in the 2nd millennium BCE, referred to the western extremities of their empire on the eastern bank of the Aegean sea as “Assuwa”. That seems to have ended up as the Greek Ἀσία, “Asia”, applied to all or part of what we’d today call Anatolia. That label, too, was adopted by the Romans as a name of a province.

What the word originally meant, no one has the faintest idea. Possible roots include “Asis”, an Aegean word for “muddy and silty” (for the nature of its coasts); or asu, a Semitic word meaning “rising” or “light” (for the direction of the sunrise, a name which suggests an eastern land; although how anyone squares this with the fact it was to the Hittites’ west I have no idea). Anyway the name, like Africa, came gradually to extend over a much vaster landmass, to the extent that the land it originally applied to quite possibly wouldn’t be in the first dozen countries you’d list if asked to name a state in Asia.

Europe: Originally the Greek name for the western bank of the Aegean sea, because – unfamiliar with the geography far to the north as the Greeks then were – it seemed plausible at that time it was an entirely different landmass, rather than two halves of the same thing which met on the far side of the Black Sea. The roles of wars against eastern powers in both ancient literature (the Iliad) and contemporary reality (Persia) probably encouraged the Greeks to distinguish the two regions, too. More on this in A History of the World in 47 Borders, out in less than two months, book fans! 

But what of the etymology?