Steve Jobs, Philip Gould and Gary Speed were great men, we should honour them with dignity not shrines

12 April 2012

Steve Jobs, Philip Gould and now poor Gary Speed. All dead before their time. All deserve admiring obituaries and professional respect for what they achieved. But they are also symptoms of an inglorious new wave of wallowing in famous deaths.

Last month Jobs was not only treated to the candles-and-shrine outside Apple stores. The scene in New York was a bit like the Mexican Day of the Dead, with images of Jobs styled somewhere between John Lennon and Jesus Christ adorning the pavements. A loud urban sneer always meets the news that the Pope is about to embark on a canonisation of a new saint. Perhaps this is because we have taken to doing the job ourselves.

So the passing of Labour's strategist Philip Gould earlier this month turned Britain's political class into professional mourners, competing to outdo one another in superlatives and significance.

No one should detract from Gould's extraordinary resilience in the face of death and his defiant humour in describing the cancer that was killing him as simply "Adolf". I do just wonder whether, as a man who did not suffer fools (and quite a lot of other people) gladly, he would not have seen the absurdity in the reams of rather cloying wordage devoted to his life as a political street-fighter.

It bowdlerised a character who was abrasive as well as astute. By the time we got to the Guardian headline, "He taught us how to die", we were teetering on the brink of sentimentality rather than remembrance.

Only a few years ago, "Dianification" was being derided as the grief-indulgence of a lot of silly women, who perceived echoes of their own lives in the fate of a tormented, indulged royal beauty.

Now male mourning has reached the same level. Honouring the dead feels suspiciously intertwined with showiness in the living. In Speed's case, suicide can bring added layers of prurience. His family home, where there must be real, hard grief at an incomprehensible death, is getting the shrine treatment of football shirts and candles. If we look at the Ashmolean Museum's Egyptology section and its objects packed with the dead for their journey to the afterlife, we haven't really come so far.

You might say, this is fine. Death confuses and disorients us, and if we need to resort to primitive ways of marking it, then so be it. It's just that the rituals lack something that is long associated with death for very good reason - and that is dignity.

Watching Remembrance Sunday on TV with our children, I noticed that the silence at the Cenotaph is catching: even six-year-olds and clattering teenagers get the point and feel the solemnity. It works, year after year, because we see the most famous in the land bow to the dead in the simplest of rituals - a wreath and the Last Post - to mark the sacrifices. It is not about the mourners but about the mourned.

I fear I cannot feel the same about the footballer with a shirt daubed in "RIP Gary" messages. The showmanship grates. It fell to Ryan Giggs, a figure rarely praised for restraint, to say that he lacked words for the shock of his colleague's death - and extend condolences to the family. Well said, Mr Giggs. Now let's leave the shrines to the Aztecs.

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