And what is everybody really talking about?

Literature festivals are not only arenas for discussing literature; they are also spaces for debating on politics and the arts more generally. The top stories during the festival’s first week were the scandal over MP expenses and Ruth Padel’s resignation from the Oxford Poetry Chair.

Both news stories were reported in European newspapers, but obviously not on such a large scale, so I will offer a brief summary for the European reader.

The MP expenses scandal hit the UK like lightning. This was the classical whistle-blowing story. A former employee at the accounting office of the British Parliament leaked information about the expenses claims of MPs to ‘The Daily Telegraph’. The story escalated within only a few days as it turned out that several MPs of the two main parties – Tories and Labour – were implicated. What was their wrongdoing? Well, they overdid it with their claims for expenses, some going as far as to claim tax relief for mortgages they had never received etc. There were repeated calls for new elections – despite the fact that the Tories seemed more implicated in the scandal than Labour – for renewing the political class (and its spirit of public service) and for more democratization. The Tory Leader, Cameron, even went so far as to invite non-Party members interested in participating in politics to step forward. He also called for the police to arrest those implicated in tax fraud, but then it turned out that he, too, might have claimed more than he should have when deciding to buy a new house in his Oxford constituency. Frankly, after a while it was just too little, too much – it would have been boring, had it not been downright dangerous in view of the upcoming European elections. In conjunction with a low voter turnout, the MP expenses scandal might help the extreme right-wing British National Party (BNP) to enter the European political arena.

The Ruth Padel story was just as sad – and equally unnecessary. Ruth Padel was recently elected the first female professor of poetry at Oxford. Her main rival for the post had been the Caribbean poet and Nobel Laurate Derek Walcott, who, however, withdrew his candidature at the very end. It turned out that he apparently did so following allegations that he had been involved in a sexual harassment case (or cases) back in the 1980s. These allegations were in part leaked to the press by Ruth Padel. She was therefore accused of heading a smear campaign against her rival. The result: the Oxford Poetry Chair is again vacant, and academics in UK (and at Hay) are divided as to whom to support. AC Grayling came out explicitly against Padel; Jeanette Winterson in her favour.

There is nothing like a nice little smear campaign among academics to fill in the hours between literature sessions: academics have something to talk about and non-academics have something to wonder about with respect to academics. As for the European elections, those really interested could participate at a roundtable moderated by Peter Florence and bringing together the leading candidates for the four Welsh seats to discuss their positions on Europe. Not more than 200 participants turned up.