Sherlock Holmes may now vote Labour, but he certainly isn't leftwing

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/14/sherlock-holmes-vote-labour-leftwing

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Over the last couple of weeks there have been a few grumbles that Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss have played fast and loose with Sherlock Holmes's politics in the third series of their acclaimed updating of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective. First there was the thinly disguised mockery of Boris Johnson's proposal to build an airport in the Thames estuary, then the even more thinly disguised portrayal of a Rupert Murdoch figure as the most unscrupulous man in London who blackmails the great and the good. Given that neither Moffat nor Gatiss have ever made any secret of their political leanings, here was clear evidence – according to the Daily Mail – of yet more leftwing bias at the BBC.

Leaving aside the more obvious consideration of whether to oppose Boris Johnson or powerful media barons is intrinsically leftwing – many Tories do too – it raises the questions: a) what are Sherlock Holmes's politics; and b) have Moffat and Gatiss hijacked them for their own ends?

The first is rather more simple to answer. Doyle's Holmes might be a free spirit who is as equally at home in the finest houses of the land as he is among the Baker Street Irregulars, but there's little evidence of any leftwing leanings. He's proud to have served the king of Bohemia, the king of Scandinavia and the government of France, and he takes on counterintelligence work for the British government. Like his creator and many other members of the British establishment in the late 19th century, he has an ongoing fear that Russian anarchists are about to bring down civilisation as he knows it.

Holmes may be committed to justice – though he's not above breaking the law himself – but he has no strong sense of social justice. Poverty, inequality, education and poor healthcare don't concern him in the way they did many of Dickens's characters. At heart, Holmes is a man too self-absorbed to care for others: his own pleasures and intellectual pursuits are what interest him most. Take his drug of choice: cocaine. Hedonistic, vacuous, self-important and delusional. And still as beloved by the well-connected of today as it was by them back then.

But is it conceivable that Holmes might have been a Labour voter now? Possibly. New Labour changed the rules of political engagement. What the Daily Mail still doesn't quite get is that voting Labour is no longer a challenge to the establishment, it's a part of it. There is no major redistribution of wealth and power for the right to fear.

Holmes wouldn't need to be particularly committed to principles of social justice these days to vote Labour. He'd just have to think that, on balance, Labour might do slightly less damage to the economy and the NHS than the Tories. So, if he had a bit of time off the coke and could be bothered to make it to a polling station, he might well vote Labour.

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