Tsarina McVey. (WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

So Esther McVey has been made Britain’s Common Sense Tsar. One can imagine the scene around the Cabinet table, as Rishi Sunak calls on various of his ministers to sketch their plans for the future.
First to speak up is the Chancellor, who in a voice trembling with excitement outlines his vision of an economy which has abandoned money altogether and reverted to a form of barter. The Minister for Health follows with an update of her imaginative new scheme to ease staffing problems in the NHS: a limited number of patients will be allowed to carry out minor surgical operations on themselves, starting by extracting their own tonsils and progressing to self-appendectomies. Finally, the Climate Minister announces further details of his campaign to control the emission of methane gases by cattle: all cows will be issued with a neat pair of buttock-hugging Lederhosen, some of them manufactured from the hides of their relatives, which should ensure a dramatic upswing in the planetās chances of survival.
At a nod from the PM, Esther McVey, dressed in cap and bells like an Elizabethan clown, swoops on these wretched visionaries and belabours them about the head with a pigās bladder rattling with dried peas, while the rest of the Cabinet thump the table in approval. Common sense has been restored.
The problem, however, is that common sense isnāt just opposed to silly ideas. A lot of it is hostile to ideas as such, which is one reason why there is so much of it around in the philistine British middle class. Unlike the high-rationalist French, idealist Germans and mystical Russians, British culture is suspicious of grand abstractions. In the United States, the word ādreamā is central to public discourse and used for the most part positively; over here, dreamers are people who forget to turn the taps off and bring the ceiling down.
If one wanted a figure typical of plain British sense, one could do worse than nominate the great 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson, whose bluff, downright, demystified observations raise common sense almost to an art-form. Asked whether the Giantās Causeway was worth seeing, Johnson replied: āWorth seeing, sir; not worth going to see.ā The dry, downbeat, practical tone of this is the tone of common sense. There are other examples in the literature of the nation. Asked what book he would choose if marooned on a desert island, George Bernard Shaw proposed Practical Hints on Boat Building.
If grand abstractions are to be avoided, it is partly because they are associated with the revolutionary Left. One wonders therefore why God, nation, law and order, all abstract notions beloved of many conservatives, arenāt to be spurned as well. Instead, we’re told that people who trade in ideas lack feeling, as well as being eccentric, unsociable and in sore need of a haircut. They are rootless, robotic creatures who cut you off from nation, family, lineage and locality, whereas what matters for the conservative is sentiment, piety, faith and intuition. The Left has concepts, while conservatives have customs.
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