The most famous scene from Mad Men – a 2010s TV series about an advertising agency – involves two men in an elevator. Michael Ginsberg, the young, plucky and aggrieved employee, tries to rattle Don Draper, the old, established, alpha boss of the agency. “I feel bad for you,” Michael says. “I don’t think about you at all,” Don replies – self-assured, haughty, devastating.
It has become a favourite meme on the British right when it comes to the Anglo-Irish relationship. Michael is Ireland – insecure, striving, arriviste – and Don is Britain. Ireland, so goes the implication, spends all of its time chattering about the UK or England or Westminster. The press was obsessed with Brexit, and a disproportionate amount of national energy was devoted to spitting resentments about the Tories. And all of this, just for Britain not to care a jot. Britain is above this immature sniping, it doesn’t care what Ireland thinks, it doesn’t even notice what it says. Ireland – and this is their ultimate insult – thinks it is a gadfly when it is hardly even a gnat.
I do wonder, however, why the British right – who apparently don’t think about Ireland at all – spend so much time thinking about Ireland. Last week, Sonja Hyland was appointed as Ireland’s new Ambassador in London, following the departure of Martin Fraser to New York. A statement described Hyland as the Ambassador to Great Britain, which is a long-standing diplomatic norm reflecting the complicated constitutional status of Northern Ireland.
You might have thought the Department of Foreign Affairs had issued a decree to shoot the king on the spot, given the clamour from the right. In calling her Ambassador to Great Britain – rather than Ambassador to the United Kingdom – Ireland had, by way of rhetorical subterfuge, laid territorial claim to Northern Ireland, they said. The unionists in the North were predictably riotous, but so were the English Tories. “I don’t think about you at all” … apart from those days spent last week accusing Ireland’s diplomatic corps of Twitter-based irredentism.
Even conversation over dinner that night, with friends I otherwise deem sensible, kept returning to the accusation. It was in the very least suffused with a tone of gentle outrage. My polite objections were batted away by those who claim, once again, to not think about Ireland, at all.
It occurred to me in advance of Donald Trump’s visit this weekend, first to Dublin and then to Doonbeg for the Irish Open. I wonder what sorts of conniptions the British right might will themselves into over the course of the trip. If it is anything like Joe Biden’s state visit in 2023, then we are in for a long couple of days. I remember the Westminster media fury at Biden’s apparent Hiberno-favouritism (“Joe Biden has gravely insulted Britain” went a typically instructive headline). He was an indulgent “Paddy” who didn’t know where his real friends lay. Meanwhile, the Irish were malevolent fools – that you cannot be both at once went under-discussed – who would get what they deserved in the end.
Please. I don’t mind the excessive concern, I do not even mind the criticism – the valid comments are useful, and the swivel-eyed are entertaining. But I find the superior, high-minded and snobbish claim that those on the right in Britain are above even thinking about Ireland rather dishonest. Perhaps they just lack self-awareness, somewhat a lesser crime. Mostly I think the insistence that they do not care, against all evidence, a bit teenage. Own up to your passions.
The obsessive pedantry isn’t one-sided, of course. Liberal Ireland – one thing the Mad Men meme did get right – spent years of its life clanging on about Brexit, the Tories, and the folly of it all. Plenty of that time was pierced with nasty Schadenfreude that ought to be beneath any country, but clearly wasn’t.
Have podcasts like The Rest is History killed the ‘Dad Book’?
And the Irish establishment can feign grave offence at the behaviour of the English too. Just look at Andy Burnham’s recent visit to Northern Ireland and his comments about a Border poll being “off the table”. Michael McDowell deployed some elegant understatement in these pages when he wrote that the prime minister had “caused a flap” among certain circles. Claims that the prime minister had betrayed the strictures of the Belfast Agreement were particularly risible.
Call it the narcissism of small differences. The interminable bickering is almost Balkan in its manners – opaque to outside observers but seemingly of enormous importance to everyone involved. The worst thing you could say to either side of the argument is that, well, you are extraordinarily alike in temperament and methodology (if random, directionless tantrums over the other counts as methodology). But it’s true, and encapsulated in one neat week with Burnham on the Belfast Agreement and Ireland’s new Ambassador to Great Britain. I suspect it might continue when Trump touches down on Saturday.
And so, it would just be easier to drop the Don Draper act, no?