David Blunkett writes in today’s Guardian that he is not King Herod which, of course, clears up the confusion in many people’s minds.
For those of you who don’t know much christian mythology, Herod ruled parts of the Middle East as a puppet king under the Romans at about the start of the first century CE. Christians believe that he was so worried by predictions of the birth of a new king (i.e. Jesus) who might usurp his throne that he killed all children under the age of two. Jesus escaped this fate as he had received advance warning from an angel and his family were hiding in Egypt. All sounds pretty unlikely doesn’t it.
I hadn’t read of Blunkett being mistaken for Herod, but it was probably because of the new Immigration and Asylum Bill which proposes that the children of families who refused a free flight home after having their asylum application rejected could be taken into care.
Any excuse to link news with christmas :)
The legend of King Herod is most ancient and venerable, as it’s also one of the old mythological memes that have the greatest number of variants (compare baby Jesus with baby Moses, baby Cyrus, baby Oidipous, baby Paris, baby Zeus, …) so it’s probably officially OK to use it as a common cultural reference. That said, I fail to see what’s the point of that kind of void, meaningless reference to it, apart from agitating the old emotional argument–“stop killing the babies!”