You’ll think I’m joking, but my man of the summer is... Tim Farron. Not for anything he achieved during the final bars of his short-lived gig as conductor of the Liberal Democrats. Nor yet for his electoral accomplishment of upgrading the party’s Westminster rump into a rump with a flash of hind leg.
No, the point about Farron was the dignity of his departure. They have their exits and their entrances, these players on the political stage, and Farron’s exit was a welcome shaft of honesty through the fog of political obfuscation.
As you’ll recall – or possibly not, given the ephemeral nature of the news cycle – Farron resigned in June citing the “impossibility” of combining his Christian faith with the leadership of a “progressive liberal party”. Wearied by constant media probing of his views on gay sex and the like, he finally felt compelled to choose.
“Imagine how proud I am to lead this party,” he said in his resignation speech. “Then imagine what would lead me voluntarily to relinquish that honour. In the words of Isaac Watts, it would have to be something ‘so amazing, so divine, [it] demands my heart, my life, my all’.”
Letting go is never easy. History is replete with the diminished ghosts of those who held on too long; whose hinterlands were too narrow or whose vanity too outsized to go gentle into the good night. From a stroke-ravaged, octogenarian Churchill, rooted in Downing Street while the powers of his heir apparent waned, to a punch-drunk Muhammad Ali soaking up punishment like a sponge, even the best can miss the clang of the closing bell.
It is, in part, a fear of irrelevance. ‘I work/lead/compete, therefore I am,’ is the premise on which many base their lives. Clearly Tim Farron does not believe this. For those who do, however, loss of power or position can become a full-blown crisis of identity.
The opposite pathology is even less attractive. Giving Hamlet’s gloomy utterance a typically toxic twist, the late controversialist Gore Vidal once mocked the human longing for significance. “‘What a piece of work is a man!’ Who wrote that?” he asked rhetorically. “A man!”
Such self-loathing, however, is a counterfeit of true humility. Kumar Sangakkara, the brilliant Sri Lankan cricketer set to declare this month, is far nearer the mark. Asked in interview about his post-retirement plans, he named a surprising pursuit: subsistence farming.
Not punditry? Apparently not. Why, he mused, do ex-players have to tweet about every match simply because they used to be involved? Perhaps the best way to respect the game, he said, is to realize that your time has been and gone; that all the rest now is silence.
For different reasons, and in a different arena, Tim Farron came to much the same principled conclusion. Agree with him or not, there is no doubting the courage of his convictions. He is his party’s Thane of Cawdor. For nothing in his short, unremarkable leadership became him like the leaving it.
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