“Peace, I will stop your mouth”

The punchline of Much Ado About Nothing isn’t funny any more

Why is this so incredibly difficult to come to terms with? Why does it feel like such a seminal defining moment, even compared to similar days in the recent past? And do I really have anything new to say about it, any valid contribution to the debate?

I’ve woken up to days like this before - June 2017, the day of the Brexit vote here in the UK, which shocked me to my core in a way nothing else ever had, before or since. I was terrified watching the Twin Towers fall, but it was still someone else’s problem, at least at first. It’s a huge, hard wake-up call to realise how little you have in common with your countrymen (and women) and for a while you look at everyone through different eyes, not least yourself. You shudder at your own complacency, the way I inwardly laughed when someone at a family dinner two months earlier said that he was taking the threat of Brexit seriously and moving some of his assets around. We’ve watched so many movies. They tend to come right in the end - either someone figures out the solution to everything in the nick of time, or a superhero shows up. Especially in America.

Then there was the first Trump victory and the growing disquiet as we realised something like a pattern was emerging here. And, in some ways the worst of all, for me at least, the election of Boris Johnson, of all people, as Prime Minister in December 2019. The way he purged his party of moderates simply for trying to compel Government to avoid a hard Brexit at all costs - a descendant of Winston Churchill among them. His contemptuous language towards a female MP pointing out that hate-speech on the floor of the House of Commons made women feel unsafe. There have been so many moments when it seemed we were through the looking glass and none of the old rules applied any more.

I have one friend, until recently a lifelong paid-up member of the Labour Party, who couldn’t sleep for over a year after that election result. Ultimately she tore up her card, as did one of my children (the other moved out of the UK seven years ago), and many other principled people who couldn’t come to terms with what the Labour Party was becoming. But I held on. I put my trust in Keir Starmer, in the tide turning, in the arc of history bending towards justice. I felt I had nothing left to believe in, other than that. I stopped discussing politics with my son, who rejected the whole concept of compromising your integrity to stay electable. Live in the real world, I said. What choice do any of us have?

Yesterday was the day I realised that even that choice had gone. When the country you have always looked up to, even when it was hard to do so, as the shining city on a hill, elects a convicted felon and rapist, for the second time, it feels like the San Andreas fault has opened up between your feet.

I read Keir Starmer’s fawning congratulation note to Trump yesterday and felt visceral disgust.

So now what?

I wish I knew. I don’t really think that the democratic system, the one Tony Blair and George Bush forced us into a war 25 years ago to impose on Iraq like manna from heaven, is the answer to anything any more. I could be cynical and say that there was no point in looking out for anyone other than yourself, that even the elected governments of the “free” world stand helpless against the whims of oligarchs who have priced in the destruction of the planet itself.

And yet I sense that, like a rhizome silently multiplying underground, another way of looking at the world and the place we rightly occupy in it is being born. A way that makes a space for the sacred, the imaginal, the magical, the liminal, the local, the communal, the indigenous.

For decades I’ve been trying not to listen. Or at least to stop my mouth and think I must be wrong. Instead I’ve listened to people who said nothing that couldn’t be proved rationally was worth taking seriously. That what we could see around us was all there is. And I never quite believed it, but who was I to know, because some of those people were clever, and male, and even people I loved.

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare, directed by Jeremy Herrin .With Charles Edwards as Benedick, Eve Best as Beatrice. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre

There’s a line in Much Ado About Nothing that sends shivers down my spine whenever I think about it. Not “Kill Claudio”, though that is an amazing emotional beat from a master of dramatic tension. No, it’s right at the end, when smart, gobby Beatrice and commitment-phobic Benedick are finally united, and he pulls her into an embrace, the exact nature of which is a matter for the director to establish, and says, “Peace, I will stop your mouth.”

It often gets a laugh. After yesterday, it doesn’t seem nearly as funny.

I was having a particularly nasty filling done a few weeks ago, and normally I’m pretty stoical about that kind of thing, but I have a tiny mouth and a massive overbite, which makes me hell for the dentist to work with, so he shoved a rubber sheet in my mouth and pinned it down. 90 minutes later, while he was still drilling and the local anaesthetic was wearing off, I flinched and he told me off for making too much fuss. He told his aide that I had a reflex that made me keep my mouth shut. And I was still shaking, still traumatised, 24 hours later.

It was more than a difficult crown prep. It was a lifetime of keeping quiet, of internalising pain, of reading the room before I opened my mouth, a habit ingrained from earliest childhood. And I’d had enough. Something broke in me that day, just as the side of my molar had snapped off a few weeks before.

“Peace, I will stop your mouth.” I’ll tell you it’s for your own good, I’ll pretend it’s a gesture of affection, that you’re just neurotic to make any fuss about it. Stop being such a Beatrice. Stop being a shrew. Stop persisting.

Because why the f**k am I keeping quiet anyway? When we have just seen how massively, how completely all that playing nice has failed us? Why not expect them to listen to us for a change? Why not stop assuming they have the monopoly on what is real, what is sensible, what is obvious, and we have nothing to contribute?

Can we honestly look at the train-wreck of Nov 5th, 2024 and say that biting our collective tongues has got us anywhere a sane species would ever want to be?

I’ve deliberately left this post unresolved and raw, because that matches the way I’m feeling right now. This is Ground Zero. We need to stop playing nice, stop waiting for them to listen to us, and start talking to each other without embarrassment, qualification or shame. If anyone tells us we aren’t being realistic, we need to say that engagement with reality left the building a long time ago, so who are they to call us out? Nobody is coming to save us, that’s clear. If we don’t figure out a new way of dealing with reality, defining reality, then the consequences are too ghastly to contemplate. And they are already here.