Lessons in losing, from Cleopatra to Thatcher

A short history of defeat

By Matthew Sweet

Victory is a great leveller. In triumph, most of us stick to the script as we enjoy the sweet sugar rush of success. We smile. We reach, giddily, for people to thank. We may weep. Exceptions to this rule are transgressive – which is why so many people have shared the clip of the novelist Doris Lessing clambering out of a taxi to be informed by a kerbside journalist that she has just been awarded the Nobel prize in literature. “Oh Christ,” she said, as if she’d been told that she’d left the bath running.

Defeat comes with a greater repertoire of responses. Do we spit and stamp like Rumpelstiltskin? Do we embrace it, like the comedian Bob Newhart, passed over seven times for an Emmy, who nevertheless agreed to spend the 2006 ceremony on display in a glass box. (The audience was told that if acceptance speeches were not kept to time, he would asphyxiate.) Do we protest about the unfairness of the universe, like the water-soluble Wicked Witch of the West? “Oh what a world, what a world,” she wails, on discovering that she occupies a reality in which little girls can liquidate regimes that run on black magic and flying monkeys.

Good grace at such moments need not be incompatible with self-interest. During his campaign for the White House, John McCain was attacked from the left as a hawkish and irascible neo-con who cheated on his wife. When, during his concession speech, he chastised his supporters for booing the name of Barack Obama, he created the event that allowed him to spend his last years as a symbol of civility and consensus.

Something similar occurred with George Bush senior, no figure of national unity until people who never voted for him started to copy and share the letter he left for his successor. “Dear Bill,” he wrote, in a friendly, generous hand. “Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.”

Might Joe Biden receive such a note in January? Even its absence would be eloquent. This is the cool clear beauty of defeat. However we respond, it reveals us.

The mummy trap Cleopatra 30BC
For a client monarch under the Roman Empire, defeat after rebellion was followed by a punishing tour of shame – transport to the imperial capital, a procession through the streets and delivery for execution at the Tullianum, in the dungeon of Rome’s public jail, before the party at the Temple of Jupiter really started.

As Shakespeare tells it – and why quibble with him? – Cleopatra feared participation in another spectacle, and the audience at the Globe would have stroked their beards to show they got the joke. She dreaded having her story turned into theatre. More dreadful, she expected to be obliged to attend the opening night. (“I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/I’ th’ posture of a whore.”)

It’s an argument for suicide and it is her showstopper. Taking the asp from its basket, nursing it, encouraging it to bite, makes her loss richer than the emperor’s victory. Octavius Caesar retains his prize, his titles. But her death turns him into a kind of Fortinbras, the guy who comes on at the end to announce the play is over.

The last breakfast Napoleon Bonaparte 1815
On the morning before the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was big with the pithy soundbites. “I tell you Wellington is a bad general,” he said. “This affair is nothing more than eating breakfast.” As the joke goes, you can’t make an omelette without killing 4,700 men and 7,000 horses.

A few days later (and contrary to the ABBA song) Napoleon was in Paris drafting a sorry-not-sorry letter to the Prince Regent. “A victim to the factions which distract my country,” he wrote, “I have terminated my political career.”

Napoleon planned to disappear to America, and had already picked out his linen, his hunting guns and a pseudonym: Colonel Muiron. Might George, he wondered, be willing to ease him into a respectable retirement? He wasn’t. Instead Napoleon was obliged to accept a kind invitation to die in exile on a rock 1,200 miles off the west coast of Africa.

Waterloo’s winner showed more quiet wisdom: “I am wretched even at the moment of victory,” wrote the Duke of Wellington, “and I always say that next to a battle lost the greatest misery is a battle gained.”

He could be serious John McEnroe 1980
John McEnroe, captured in the act of protesting a decision during the Wimbledon tennis championships in 1980 (opening image and above), was the player at his purest, his body racked in a rigour familiar to parents in supermarket lines and 1880s French medical students taking notes on the hysterics at the Salpêtrière.

What happened next? If McEnroe had been Dr Bruce Banner, ballooning muscles in gamma-ray green would have split those little shorts asunder. No transformation occurred, but his anger was parlayed into a kind of cultural super-strength.

An ill-tempered dialogue at the following year’s championships gave him a catchphrase – “you cannot be serious” – and an argument about a ball that became the basis of a novelty record that reached number 19 in the British pop charts. (“Chalk Dust: The Umpire Strikes Back” concludes with McEnroe being shot dead by a frustrated Wimbledon official.)

Yet despite the ridicule, McEnroe, the sorest of sore losers, was adored. His present career as a pundit explains the paradox: he was spoilt but he was authoritative. He cared. And in the case of that ball, he may have been right.

Top of the flops Eddie the Eagle 1988
Sporting achievement is great. The Olympics are great. But when Leni Riefenstahl made “Triumph of the Will” in 1935 she didn’t invent all that imagery from scratch: those clean-limbed Übermenschen striving for gold were already part of the story.

In 1988 a British ski-jumper, Michael “Eddie the Eagle” Edwards, with his publican’s moustache, unflattering nylon jackets and hyperopic eyes blinking behind steamed-up goggles, offered an antidote to sport’s humourless struggle for perfection. He was a failed downhill skier from Gloucestershire who took up ski-jumping because the sport had no other serious British competitors. Getting Olympic accreditation was easy. So was coming last in most of his events.

During the Winter Olympics in Calgary in 1988 spectators felt the sympathetic magic of his cheerful recklessness. That year Matti Nykänen, the “flying Finn”, monopolised the ski-jumping golds. He sold his medals, took to drink, married six times – twice to the same woman – and died in 2019 at the age of 55. Edwards, still very much alive, was the subject of a biopic in 2016. It was the 15th highest-grossing British movie of its year.

She finally turned Margaret Thatcher 1990
In “The Iron Lady”, Meryl Streep played Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street exit as grand opera. A wistful smile, a hand traced down the banister, a quiet nod of affirmation dispensed to a chorus of tearful female office workers.

On the soundtrack Maria Callas gives us a gale-force Italian aria. (Not “Aida”, as Thatcher chose on “Desert Island Discs”, but Bellini’s “Norma”, a tragedy about an infanticidal druidic priestess.) Then Phyllida Lloyd’s camera finds her star’s court shoes in progress across a checkerboard floor strewn with roses. Stray petals, too, to make us think of spilt political blood.

The figure captured by the news cameras, however, goes unrepresented. A frazzled 60-something with a crack in her voice and a handbag at her elbow. Her steadfast use of the first person plural, possibly the royal kind. Her smile, almost as effortful as the one she flashed at the schoolteacher who asked her, on live TV, about the sinking of the Belgrano.

Figure of hate Tonya Harding 1994
Tonya Harding’s tale of figure skating had frills and frou-frous as well as a female protagonist and sharp blades. The case survives in the cultural memory as a variant of one of those “Dynasty” catfights in which Joan Collins and Linda Evans hurled each other into racks of dresses. But it was not Harding who clubbed the knee of her rival, Nancy Kerrigan, in order to improve her chances in the 1994 Winter Olympics. That was the work of Harding’s ex-husband.

It didn’t work. Kerrigan went home with silver, Harding finished eighth – and when the conspiracy was detected, received a lifetime ban from the sport. But in pleading guilty to obstructing the investigation, her name became a byword for bad sportsmanship.

Culture is strange. Harding was humiliated. Dead rats were stuffed in her mailbox. She appeared on “Dancing with the Stars”. She told interviewers about the violence in her domestic life, but only the 2017 biopic “I, Tonya” drove the point home. Perhaps, in the end, it didn’t matter: the media and the public didn’t care much about her defeat or victory. They just wanted her as a character in the parade – wicked, wounded, sequinned, storied.

A close shave Radovan Karadzic 2008
For a deposed head of state with little to look forward to but a war-crimes tribunal, the options can be limited: the bullet, the cyanide pill, capitulation or hiding in a hole until they pull up the floorboards. Elaborate schemes involving plastic surgery and Argentina rarely progress beyond airport fiction.

The fate of Radovan Karadzic – published poet, trained psychiatrist, chief administrator of the Bosnian genocide – demonstrates how such plans play out in real life. Seedily. Farcically.

Despite the efforts of the American government, whose failed schemes to capture him included one that involved a Delta Force squad and a gorilla suit, he evaded justice for 13 years, until someone noticed something familiar about Dragan Dabic, a New Age healer in Belgrade with a Santa Claus beard and a topknot tied with a black ribbon.

On his website Karadzic sold amulets that claimed to “protect from harmful rays” by triggering “a turbulence of energy of the chakra”. Whatever power they carried, they failed to extract contrition from their seller, or indulgence from the judge in The Hague.

Total eclipse Ariadna Gutiérrez 2015
It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. Thanks to the carelessness of Steve Harvey, compère of the Miss Universe contest in 2015, Ariadna Gutiérrez, a model from Sincelejo, became an exemplum of loss of the sort you find on tarot cards or the pages of Bunyan.

Harvey declaimed the name of the winning country. Gutiérrez wept, waved to the crowd, made the peace sign. Her rose-gold frock shimmered. She accepted an armful of flowers, the Miss Universe tiara and a little paper flag of her home country.

When Harvey skittered forward to confess that he’d read out the wrong name, she was puzzled. In the clip, you see her trying to compute the new data, realisation moving through her like cold poison. But she is burdened by the paraphernalia of victory, and has to bob down to allow her predecessor to uncrown her.

After the ceremony, she confessed to feeling humiliation. But that’s not visible in the footage. She is gracious, it seems. And so are we, because we only had to watch the video.

What a dump Shaughna Phillips 2020
“Love Island” is a Stanford Prison Experiment for primped and frictionless young people who feel no fear of the thong. The prize goes to the couple who can form an alliance that will satisfy the scrutiny of the audience – which favours candidates who display candour, respect for process, teeth like the heatproof tiles on the Space Shuttle and buttocks off which you could bounce a low-denomination coin.

However, as the Duke of Marlborough discovered at the Battle of Malplaquet in 1709, sometimes victory can undo the winner and sustain the loser. Best “Love Island” example? Shaughna Phillips (left) from season six of the British version, a 25-year-old Londoner who took leave from her job as a local-government Democratic Services Officer to spend 30 days bibbing Negronis in a villa above Cape Town.

On Day One she coupled up with a tousle-haired Mancunian scaffolder with a Kabuki mask tattooed on his left pec. She and Callum looked like winners until he came back from Casa Amor (oh do keep up) with her replacement. “Congrats, hun,” was her perfectly judged response. She now has her own clothing line and 1.5m followers on Instagram. He’s spending lockdown baking and doing jigsaws.

Images: Getty, Tate Images, Alamy, Shutterstock

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