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Good morning.

Last week, commenting on the various pledges made by two of the then candidates for the Tory leadership, the Irish Prime Minister said that politicians tend to campaign in poetry but have to govern in prose.

I have to admit that I am not the most ardent fan of poetry – it’s not that I’m against it or dislike it you understand, just that I’m not really passionate about it. Packing a small case for the proverbial desert island, I probably wouldn’t put in a volume of Byron, Wordsworth or Keats. But there is some poetry I love and would miss – and that is the poetry of the Psalms - and one of the Psalms, Psalm 82, tells rulers, Prime Ministers or otherwise, that they must, in a manner of speaking, govern in poetry.

The Psalm begins with an extraordinary image – ‘God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.’ It is an image from the religious world of the ancient near east in which a chief God, Israel’s God, is pictured in a court room, calling to account the other gods. But by what standard have they gone wrong? Well, according to the complaint of the high God, these other gods have ‘favoured the wicked’ when their job was, as he puts it, to ‘Defend the poor and fatherless; see that such as are in need and necessity have right. [To] Deliver the outcast and the poor; [and] save them from the hand of the ungodly.’

The Irish PM was right about campaigning in poetry. In campaign mode all politicians are given to making lavish promises - poetic license we might call it. But on the morning after the night before, the prose of mundane government will very likely make its claims on the attentions of an incoming Prime Minister – balancing the books, making sure the trains run on time, and sorting out our relations with our European neighbours. But Jewish and Christian commentators very early on saw in the mythical arraignment of the gods in Psalm 82, a calling to account of earthly rulers, not just imagined heavenly ones – and the bar before which rulers are called is the bar of justice, at which the claims of the weak, the fatherless, the afflicted, the outcast and the needy demand a special hearing.

I doubt if our new Prime Minister will have any time for a desert island, but I do hope that he pops the psalms in his pocket when he heads to Chequers and that he will remember the claim which poetry makes not just on campaigns, but also on day to day government.

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