Britain’s New Prime Minister Is An English Major

I hadn’t known that Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, is a fan of Philip Larkin—England’s premier poet since Auden. It aligns with Burnham having read English at Cambridge, making him rare among a long line of prime ministers.

I find that refreshing—not because English majors possess superior virtue, but because the finest literature is fundamentally moral in its urgings, even in unsettling works like A Clockwork Orange or Joyce’s Ulysses. As for poetry, moral resonance often defines its very existence.

Of course, Larkin has come under fierce attack, his published letters revealing objectionable racist and sexist views. It’s the familiar, troubling dilemma of separating an artist from the work.

I’ve just finished reading Sue Prideaux’s revelatory Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, with its unsettling account of his relationships with young native girls. Picasso physically abused several of his partners. Richard Wagner was a vehement anti-Semite, yet his music endures in our concert halls. Even foundational thinkers—Hume, Kant, and Hegel—harbored implicit racism, while Aristotle viewed women as flawed versions of men.

But back to Burnham. What does he see in Larkin? Will his affinity for the poet make him a more responsive leader, attuned to his nation’s pressing domestic needs?

This much is clear: Larkin possessed an extraordinary gift for bringing poetry into quotidian life, capturing present urgencies, human longing, despair, and the precise mood of the British landscape. I can still hear the train wheels rhythmically clicking along the rails, carrying newly married couples, in “The Whitsun Weddings.”

Larkin rendered poetry conversational and, in doing so, deeply palpable.

What better guiding text for a new prime minister than these lines from “The Mower”?

…we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Or from “Going, Going”:

Their kids are screaming for more
More houses, more parking allowed
More caravan sites, more pay.

Reading Larkin might just keep Andy Burnham anchored to the everyday lives of working people in an era of corporate autocracy, widening economic disparity, and self-interested oligarchy.

Larkin reminds us that ordinary lives matter, not a bad script for a new prime minister to follow.

–RJ