The art of the resignation letter
I don’t have any preference when it comes to the outcome of the current Tory leadership race, mainly because I don’t care which establishment shill wins it. Whoever appears at the end of this distraction will willingly embrace the paradigm that caused them the problem in the first place. They will announce a congeries of nonsense pledges; professed obligations which they have neither the ability nor intention to enforce.
That’s fine. That’s the game they are playing and one that the rest of us seem content to spectate.
It’ll be a change of driver but, at best, a maintenance job on the direction of the railway tracks. Where is all this stuff headed? It’s sorted.
I don’t think it matters who “we” get. What’s the difference between these candidates? These are not people who interest me, because I believe the contours of their personal ambition are eminently flexible. And I am not a fan of untrammelled personal ambition.
But it’d be good if a candidate could write a decent letter. Or at least a decent resignation letter.
I’m thinking of the letter writers: Bram Stoker and Jane Austen, Saul Bellow… writers who realised that the pen in their hand was the best opportunity to make your point in the most succinct way available. Because you didn’t have much choice: Twitter was not available — you get one go.
We seem to have lost that epistolary competence and the loss became very clear last week, in the Westminster Theatre of the Absurd, when minute by minute the former special advisors in some sort of collective-like Salem groupthink all wrote what was — it seems to me — the same letter, calling on Boris Johnson to resign because they’d suddenly become aware that he is serially dishonest.
These MPs are culturally impoverished. If you can’t write, then you can’t think. And they seem to have confirmed, en masse, that they can’t write (having previously, to be fair, confirmed that they can’t think).
The whirlwind of ambitious epistolary mediocrity attracted my attention and reminded me that these people – preposterously — take themselves seriously.
The resignation letters? They were rubbish: a collective boilerplate of anodyne and pro forma announcements: “It’s been a privilege to serve…”; “I love my country before this government”; “My integrity means more to me than anything else”.
If you’re going to write a resignation letter, then disclose some residue of resentment. Why not let that bleed into the letter? Your guy was on the ropes. Be honest and stick the boot in, otherwise what’s the point?
The resignation letter is a possibly non-repeatable opportunity to really get things off your chest. But I’m not suggesting a full-on type of thing. The best resignation letters are contextualised within a framework of passive aggression. You want the (former) boss to be not quite sure if you’re joking or not. The final paragraph should be the teaser (otherwise the boss has already given up reading).
This one is my favourite. Written by a friend of mine who lives in a housing association property at the south end of Lambeth Bridge. Andy was on the committee before he fell out with them. It might be the case that we had a couple of beers beforehand.
Final paragraph:
“ As regards records management, I take it I should follow usual records management procedure? Stick the papers in a cardboard box, wait for the rain, and allow the documents to be scattered liberally over the nearest available waste ground?”
That’s almost up there with Johnson’s “Them’s the breaks”. His own resignation statement was not bad. A linguistic tour de force in comparison to the pellucid verbal offerings of the people who knifed him.
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