Last March two RAF engineers were each ordered to pay £2,725 (€3,100) repair costs by a court in southeast England after grievously maiming a cheap, small statue of Paddington Bear.
The district judge described their actions as “the antithesis of everything Paddington stood for”. The values espoused by the bear are all those good things: kindness, generosity of spirit, honour and upstanding citizen behaviour. He would never vandalise a monument to himself.
I don’t know precisely when the United Kingdom’s judiciary began to derive its moral language from a fictional bear. But I do know that this judge was not the first to invoke the ursine Peruvian immigrant as a model for what it means to be a good Brit.
When Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022 an image went viral: a cartoon rendering of Paddington and the queen walking hand in hand as he accompanied the beloved woman to heaven. The sound you hear is Walter Bagehot, that great and earnest 19th century theorist of the monarchy, spinning at a clip in his grave somewhere in Somerset.
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This all comes back to me now because Paddington the Musical – no doubt buoyed by the enormous success of the film franchise – has recently hit the West End. Paddington is “played” by an intricate puppet. Or as the Guardian (you know, that esteemed paper of record) excitedly announced: “Big belly, wavy fur and a nose for trouble: we exclusively reveal the new-look Paddington”.
It is hard to conjure any process of national self-infantilisation worse than all of this. Here we have a fictional character, who inhabits a moral universe calibrated to the intellect of children, held up as a standard bearer for a country that once ruled half the world.
Ireland displays its own state of arrested development, too, of course.
When former president Michael D Higgins arrived (to rapturous applause) at the inauguration of his successor Catherine Connolly, RTÉ posted on X a clip of the moment: “We’re not crying, you are” accompanied by two teary-eyed emojis. That’s not just mawkishness; that’s functionally client journalism from a state broadcaster hiding behind a curtain of whimsy.
And that’s before we even think about the diminutive nickname “Miggeldy” or the childish obsession with his Bernese mountain dogs – pets that might know the commands “sit”, “stay” and possibly “paw” taken as evidence, somehow, of the then president’s advanced humanity. Higgins pushed the boundaries of his office to uncomfortable places (hosting on his website, in 2022, a letter by his wife about the need for a negotiated ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, for example). But isn’t he wee. Don’t you love that photo of him on the bike.
Take this project of self-infantilisation further and you will find yourself lurking in even muddier places. President Catherine Connolly has said some rather outré things in her time: likening Germany’s re-militarisation in 2024 and 2025 to the 1930s Nazi regime strikes me as wantonly destructive of Ireland’s global image. But (but) she can do keepy-uppies and isn’t that neat.
Like or dislike the pair, I might suggest in either case that this is an odd way to think and talk about the heads of our state.
In Infantilised: How our Culture Killed Adulthood, the academic Keith Hayward witnesses a world driving itself into the ground at the altar of this immature wittering.
Maybe you have been non-consensually dragged into a universe that speaks to adults like they’re children – via advertising or celebrity influencers or the political class itself – or maybe you’re the more pernicious group who aids and abets this doom loop of unseriousness (“Síoda really was a lovely dog”).
But no matter the case we have to think hard about where it takes us: a shared vocabulary of toddler-babble where we can only describe the national mood in Britain via the psyche of fictional bears – and Ireland is not too far behind.
More than a decade ago the novelist Jonathan Coe wrote his treatise about the state of British satire: “Sinking giggling into the sea”. He contended that the country was self-destructing because it was easier to laugh off the moral lassitude of its leaders as a harmless product of rakish charm.
Fast forward and you have these rakish charmers crashing Britain out of the European Union without a plan and cycling through four prime ministers in five years, eviscerating the economy while they’re at it. Sinking, yes. But who’s giggling any more?
Call me po-faced, but in this great pyjama party of self-debasement all I can find are tastemakers and the middlest of middlebrow consumers in lockstep, afraid to confront earnest realities.
This is no case against humour, one of the most prized virtues. But it is an entreaty for seriousness. Because if we don’t take anything seriously, then how is anyone supposed to take us?
