Don't worry about the plot, just listen to the music

Spectator, The, Dec 30, 2000 by Parris, Matthew

All those old interminable disputes about the Enclosures, the Corn Laws, Catholic Emancipation or the Thirty-Nine Articles seemed to demand the same close textual analysis, the same furrowed brows, the same Jesuitical claims and counterclaims, the same urgent insistence that we read the precise wording of Article 19, Clause 7, Sub-clause 2 (a), which - aha! - proves the point. When Gorbachev met Reagan in Reykjavik to begin the 1980s historic detente between their two great nations, we were as eagerly absorbed in the details of the precise measures of disarmament each was offering. No doubt somebody did need to understand. But did I? I now doubt it.

So I shall watch the coming general election as I watched Nabucco. There will be goodies and buddies and I shall guess who they are by the way they walk and the way they sing. There will be obsessives and lunatics and I shall divine this by their swivelling eyes and jerky hand-movements. And, all the while, there will be great choruses and moving solos, and waves of applause and shouts of `Bravo!' and the occasional jeer and hiss. These are the stuff of politics. The rest is detail. Life is short.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.