Antigone
Jason and his supporters spent several years trying to win support within the Kingdom for their position. It was of the gravest necessity, they said, an urgent matter of survival itself, for the Kingdom to retreat and regroup, to abandon the fiction of a different external organisational form, known as the Alliance, to which the majority, led by King Edward, stubbornly clung.
Antigone
People like to talk about the “political landscape”. Like physical landscapes political ones can change dramatically under myriad, uncontrollable influences and in a very short space of time. An event beyond the horizon or too multifaceted to fully comprehend can change the landscape from calm to turbulent in a flash. Perhaps politics is not so much a landscape as a seascape, for like the sea it exists within an environment that is not only unpredictable but with often unfathomable depths.
Antigone
In hindsight it could be said that the court squandered the opportunity offered by the untimely death of King Oscar to look anew at the question of succession and leadership in the Kingdom. Some historians have said that it was a failure of imagination that the court did not even countenance the possibility of abolishing the position of King altogether and fashioning a new, more democratic and less authoritarian political structure; or at least one less open to the temptations of personal abuse and the misuse of power.
Antigone
Once upon a time there was a King. Let us call him Oscar.
Oscar was a big strong man with a powerful personality and physical presence. He naturally dominated any group he was in. This wasn’t entirely due to factors such as his size, booming voice, verbal facility and thunderous laugh. He’d studied and then deliberately applied techniques he gleaned from popular psychologist’s books on body language.
