It remains one of the mysteries of our time. Why have the Tories, who don’t seem over-endowed with clear-thinking, clear-speaking parliamentary ability, not already given Rory Stewart a desk in the Foreign Office or the MoD? Why waste talent? Is there something magical about the wind and water of the Menschs and worse of this world?
Something more than populist clap-trap
Stewart did a decent job for BBC2 with his two-parter on the history of foreign interventions in Afghanistan. Now Malcolm finds him in the New York Review of Books reviewing Diana Preston on Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842. As it happens, Malcolm doubts la belle dame Preston will earn any lasting space on Malcolm’s shelf-space, and he suspects Stewart — in these three pages — knows more and writes a lot better. He skewers her catchpenny pot-boiling through her:
remark that “the political and moral aspects [are] both more subjective and difficult to analyse
noting:
This reluctance to investigate the contradictory detail of policy decisions, and to assess the moral and intellectual foundations of the occupation, is also characteristic of almost every book on the Afghan invasion beginning in 2001. It may also be symptomatic of our culture… Our inability to acknowledge the inherent paradoxes of occupation, to recognise an impossible mission, to expose the flimsiest of national security arguments, or to accept the limitations of government institutions abroad (the prerequisites for any withdrawal), seems a weakness not just of our historians but also of our policymakers.
Stewart concludes with:
British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s favourite line: “Rule number one in politics is: never invade Afghanistan.”
The difference between then and now is not, as Stewart shrewdly notes, there is any valid comparison between Afghanistan in 1838 and 2008, but that attitudes in the West remain unchanged and unchanging.
Another difference is that, unlike Western leaders today, Captain Macmillan of the Grenadiers had been at the Somme. Macmillan never forgot that, of the Balliol intake of 1912, he and one other were the only survivors out of twenty-eight.
Doing as little evil as possible
Similarly, Malcolm reflects on the political chasm, which came oh-so-close to splitting the British Labour Movement in the maelstrom that was the later 1960s.
One of the worthier achievement of Harold Wilson’s premiership may be that he kept Britain out of the Vietnam embroilment. Peter Davies did a fine essay on just this in 2008 — which Malcolm has sadly discarded. To preserve and protect the relationship with the Johnson Administration (particularly when the position of sterling was a paramount consideration), Wilson was prepared to expend diplomatic credit; but that was it.
Malcolm recalls, and shudders, recalling the pressures that the Atlanticists, on Labour’s right wing, were attempting to apply. In due course it became clear just how many of those shrill voices had been bought, albeit indirectly, by CIA money.
It was all, to coin (ahem!) a phrase, a Strange Encounter.
… from today, the PM’s address is finally on Google StreetView for everyone to see.
The public haven’t been able to go right upto the famous black door since the mid 1990s and the days of John Major.
But perhaps the best thing is that Larry the Cat is in the pic – you have to zoom in quite close but he’s there to the left of the No.10 door. Never camera-shy is Larry.
Waugh cheekily suggests an ulterior motive:
FOOTNOTE: Google’s own co-founder Larry Page, may be more than happy to see his namesake.
About the only personality around Downing Street whose reputation does not get savaged by the media, on a routine basis, is the official Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office.
A Malcolmian aside:
When the world was much younger, Malcolm and the Lady who soon thereafter entered his Life full-time wandered across Green Park.
In those gentler days of the summer of 1967, all-and-sundry were still able to treat Downing Street as just another public thoroughfare.
It was chucking-out time after some official jolly, and an assembly of the Great and the Good were on Harold Wilson’s doorstep. The Earl Attlee (who died that autumn) was wheeled out to be loaded into a limousine.
A voice in the crowd on the opposite pavement called, “Good on you, Clem”, to widespread approval and cheers.
Clem and V’s cat at Number Ten was Peter (and succeeded in office by Peter II).
This isn’t Rome, 23rd November, 43BC. That’s when Octavius, Antony and Crassus stitched up an unstable political alliance. As soon as Crassus was off on an errand, the other two were marking his card:
Antony:This is a slight unmeritable man, Meet to be sent on errands: is it fit, The three-fold world divided, he should stand One of the three to share it? Octavius:So you thought him; And took his voice who should be prick’d to die, In our black sentence and proscription.
Our ConDem government is — allegedly — “run” (if only!), and all our fates decreed by a “quad“, not a triumvirate. John Rentoul is no Shakespeare, but, today in the Sindy, he is as trenchant and readable as ever.
He starts with the obvious:
Jeremy Hunt probably will resign …
before adding:
but if he does it will be for his secondary crime of misleading the House of Commons, rather than for his original misjudgement.
The end and the means
Well, they nailed Al Capone on tax evasion. In the last resort, all that matters is the cat gets skinned. And, in English politics, lying to Parliament ranks more worse than treason or regicide: remember John Profumo.
Rentoul goes on to a forensic dissection of Hunt’s “misjudgement”, but not before his typically-shrewd comment, a chilling reminder of the realities of political life:
As All the President’s Men taught us, it is the cover-up that brings down the powerful, rather than the original offence.
In any case, sacking your special adviser by telling him “Everyone here thinks you need to go” ought itself to be a sacking offence. A politician who cannot bring himself to say “I have decided, and I am really sorry about it, that you need to go” is not worth a place in the Cabinet.
What remains unexplained there is exactly what happened on 24th-25th April, when Adam Smith was disgraced. The Guardian‘s running blog on the Inquiry has it like this:
Smith was warned that evidence from Murdoch might be relevant to his position at the DCMS.
He watched Murdoch’s evidence on TV, he says. His initial reaction was that it wasn’t the “whole picture”.
12.37pm: Jay says there was a “vast” amount of text messages and phone calls between Smith and Michel that preceded the emails. Smith says that is fair.
Smith spoke to Hunt after Murdoch’s evidence and he was able to read the emails online.
He told Hunt that he would resign if the pressure became too great.
Hunt replied “It won’t come to that,” according to Smith.
Smith says he told Hunt that the emails were one-sided and in many cases exaggerated.
12.39pm: Hunt accepted Smith’s explanation at that point, he says. Smith had a drink with Hunt and the other special advisers in the office that evening.
“Was the mood upbeat?” asks Jay.
“It wasn’t in a relaxed manner,” says Smith.
It was very pressured and one of the most stressful days that certainly I’d had to deal with.
12.40pm: The next morning Hunt had various meetings at which Smith wasn’t present.
Then Hunt told Smith in a meeting: “Everyone here thinks you need to go.”
Read it again: Hunt had various meetings at which Smith wasn’t present. That’s as telling, in its own way, as any rat behind the arras.
Someone, somewhere, during that morning (was it Number 10, where Smith’s resignation letter was being composed?) put a bit of fibre into Hunt’s backbone: “a shiver ran through the government front bench, looking for a spine up which to run”.
A Malcolmian aside:
That’s not Miranda Lambert. It’s not Paul Keating. It’s not Winnie Ewing. It’s probably not even Harold Wilson (though that was Malcolm’s first encounter). Malcolm has a faint recollection (which he will endeavour to pursue) that it comes from Disraeli, or that era.
And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other for the scapegoat.
So Adam Smith got the wrong side of the spinning coin. Even so, Hunt’s usefulness is limited, and his days are still numbered. Atonement is nigh.
It’s all somehow curiously reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Rome (and we’re still in the same scene):
… though we lay these honours on this man, To ease ourselves of divers slanderous loads, He shall but bear them as the ass bears gold, To groan and sweat under the business, Either led or driven, as we point the way; And having brought our treasure where we will, Then take we down his load, and turn him off, Like to the empty ass, to shake his ears, And graze in commons.
Malcolm takes some stick because he hides behind a pseudonym. Admittedly, in his/my own small way, it induces schizophrenia— particularly so when “Malcolm” concocts a juicy bon mot that needs retailing.
TAKING a break from pondering the crisis in Libya, your blogger was asked to join a BBC radio debate this morning about politicians on holiday, and whether it is reasonable to expect prime ministers, presidents and their underlings to rush back from Tuscany, Martha’s Vineyard or wherever when a crisis breaks out.
I was up against a media historian, Jean Seaton …
By a venerable tradition, Economist pieces are anonymous. So, those of us attuned to BBC Radio 4′s Today on Tuesday heard:
Is it good for politics that we are in the habit of calling our leaders back from holiday when a crisis breaks?
“Although we all know that at some level this is nonsense, it kind of reflects the lives of voters too,” according to David Rennie, of the Economist magazine.
In practice, the Bagehot identity is a very thin disguise: it has been penetrated by the The Guardian and by wikipedia.
Anyone who feels that the London media represents a very tight circle should note:
David Rennie is son of Sir John Rennie.
Rennie père was a spook — and a very big cheese in Spookland at that — Harold Wilson’s nomination (1968) as Head of MI6, no less. That caused ructions in Spookland — Rennie was outside the magic circle; and thus earning the strong distrust of an even bigger spook, Sir Maurice Oldfield, who believed it was his turn. There were two further complications of Rennie’s tenure as ÜberSpookMeister:
On Ted Heath’s suggestion (1971), he sent an MI6 officer, Frank Steele, to Northern Ireland. This breached the rule that Ulster was an MI5 fiefdom (and the full inter-departmental ramifications of that may not be fully unravelled this side of the next millennium); but it also opened a back-stairs channel to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness (which is why the ultras will never fully accept either).
The other Rennie son, Charles, got done for a heroin bust, and was gaoled. Der Stern, doubtless without too much provocation, in a fit of Germanic rectitude promptly named Rennie as Head of MI6, thus allowing — in due succession — Oldfield to re-assume the pallium, and peace to be restored between Spookdom and their political helots.
and —
Jean Seaton is the widow of Ben Pimlott.
Pimlott was one of the formative spirits of decent “Labourism” in the Thatcher years, exposing the Party’s lack of a credible economic alternative. He was a political biographer of major stature — his work on Wilson (see above) was far more exhaustive, and favourable, than others would like. Above all, he maintained that the post-War Butskellite consensus of British politics was a false conception. To nobody’s great surprise, his intellectual honesty and leftism were out of fashion when the Blairites took over.
Pimlott earned the unfailing suspicion of one of Fleet Street’s finest — Chapman Pincher. Pincher was, in E.P.Thompson‘s neat description, a kind of official urinal in which ministers and defence chiefs could stand patiently leaking, fully conscious it would be retreaded in the Daily Express next morning. Pincher (dribbled on, doubtless, by the likes of Peter “Spycatcher” Wright) was convinced Harold Wilson and other prominent Labour politicians were Russian agents.
What would be really, really interesting is to learn — not in fifty years or so, when Malcolm in all identities will be lost and gone before — is which present government ministers are sidelining on behalf of foreign powers — as Michael Stewart was for the CIA in Wilson’s Cabinet.
In passing, MI6 issued its first recruiting advertisement (April 2006) — in The Economist. Philby, of course, was one of several journalists who double-jobbed for The Economist and MI6.
_______________________________
Once upon a time, before computer analyses became available, Malcolm experimented with dendrograms of connections. It was truly illuminating to pair up individuals and their activities through comparisons of published sources.
A tree of the links between the BBC, the intelligence services, The Economist, the London School of Economics and … oh, say for examples … Policy Exchange and/or the Heritage Foundation.
See! It’s not just schizophrenia, it’s rampant paranoia!
Gary Gibbon, Channel 4 News political editor, posting at 10 a.m. this morning, concluded with this:
By the way, it was the New York Times, watching British politicians creeping out of their bunkers and daring to challenge Murdoch, who coined the phrase “British spring” for the current events.
Which is fair comment
Except that Gibbon should not claim credit credit for noting the term. More properly, Torcuil Crichton, the Westminster Editor of the (Scottish) Daily Record, had the same thought a day earlier, and seems to be about the first twitching in the local media. He gave a full hat-tip where is is properly due:
David Carr, observing the spreading phone hacking scandal from 30,000 feet, writes: “In truth, a kind of British Spring is under way, now that the News Corporation’s tidy system of punishment and reward has crumbled. Members of Parliament, no longer fearful of retribution in Mr. Murdoch’s tabloids, are speaking their minds and giving voice to the anger of their constituents.
Meanwhile, social media has roamed wild and free across the story, punching a hole in the tiny clubhouse that had been running the country. Democracy, aided by sunlight, has broken out in Britain.“
far, far away country about which we know very little. That, presumably, is why the leaky nature of Dunfermline Hospital, andthe later prurient interest by Dr Andrew Jamiesonhave gone largely unnoticed in these southern climes.
Which is as recursive a reference as one could get, a hypertextual Ouroboros, so we have two of them heading this post.
Even if the reason for Crichton re-generating that as two separate sentence-paragraph is because mere Brits cannot cope with run-ons, there remain a couple more oddities:
The “British spring” metaphor can be dredged back to its origin, which is datable precisely to January 5th, 1968. Alexander Dubček replaced Antonín Novotný as First Secretary of the Czech Communist Party on that date, and his reforms were being implemented until the night of August 20th-21st, when two thousand Soviet Bloc tanks, and twenty thousand troops occupied the country. A seven-month long spring.
The Brezhnev invasion of Czechoslavakia provided another British political metaphor. Harold Wilson addressed a put-down to Hughie Scanlon of the AUEW: “Get your tanks off my lawn“. The lawn in question was Chequers (right). The pity is that it’s taken this unconscionable interim for Murdoch to be given the same advice.
Since then we have had several “springs”, most recently the “Arab spring” (which started on 18th December 2010 and, supposedly, continues to the present). Far form being “Arab”, most of the successes — and even they are questionable — have been in North Africa.
At least, though, the metaphor is not as tired as the rival “Hackgate”. The Watergate break-in of 1972 took a precise name from the Watergate building in Washington DC. Since when the -gate suffix has became so hackneyed it requires a whole Oxford English Dictionary heading of its own. A quick Malcolmian scan of that produced:
Dallasgate; Volgagate; Koreagate; Whitehallgate (the Jeremy Thorpe business); Irangate; Billygate; Floodgate; Totegate; Motorgate; Lancegate; Muldergate; Cartergate; Stalkergate (the RUC); Oilgate; Cattlegate …
Those who have not been catching Dominic Sandbrook’s What if … alternative histories for the New Statesman immediately should. Previous pieces have gently mused on topics such as:
what would have been the consequences of the 1975 Euro-referendum going the other way (Britain … its entrenched social democracy and its taste for meatballs, is all a bit dull … a small price to pay for trains that run on time, redistributive taxes and the world’s leading whaling industry)
Sandbrook’s essential problem is that he is a historian, born a decade and more after 1963. Malcolm, and those of Malcolm’s generation, lived that period. We are history. Indeed.
19th January 1963
This was one of those days fixed in the memory, when one recalls exactly where one was.
Malcolm was in the house of the Copleys, Uncle Ernest and Aunt Kit, at Worksop Road, Netherthorpe, Aston, Sheffield. Don’t go looking for the house: it’s long gone. A lorry loaded with detergent took it out, prompting the headline Tide comes in at Aston. The loss of his beloved garden promptly killed Cop. Today, sandstone foundations may lie under the grass roadside embankment. Ernest Copley was a Labour man: he had been President of the Waleswood NUM Miners’ Lodge, and had fronted the stay-down strike of 1948. For no accountable reason, Cop’s morning newspaper was the Daily Mail (this had not greatly worried the infantile Malcolm, because he could read the Teddy Tail comic strip).
Now, that morning Malcolm was about to continue his ride back to Dublin, TCD, and the Hilary term. His aged but worthy Lambretta 150LD had brought him to Aston the previous freezing day of that bitter winter. Then ensued a heavy night, among the dominoes school in the Yellow Lion. So Malcolm, a trifle the worse for wear, was further taken aback by Saturday’s headline that Gaitskell was, suddenly, unpredictably, dead.
Until that moment Gaitskell had been something of a bogeyman for Malcolm: the Clause IV debates and the anti-CND rhetoric mattered then. Yet: de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Among the real Labour men of South Yorkshire waiting for the bus for the Wednesday or United game (whoever was at home and if the pitch had thawed out), there was a feeling of sorrow and regret, and — as Sandbrook would appreciate — of what might have been. Clause IV, among the pitmen, was a shibboleth, but — for heaven’s sake, nobody of any sense or reason could contemplate de-nationalising the mines, or the railways: good grief, look the mess that was steel!
The 1964 Election
In one respect, Sandbrook correctly reads the runes. The Tory Government, in power since 1951, was doomed to defeat in 1963-4. Despite the Sandbrook tabloid of history, that was not just because of the sexual shenanigans of the Profumo affair. The peasants, we ordinary folk, had no illusions about the doings and morals of them as wuz above us. No: it was the economic climate, and the mood which had changed, a wind of change that would blow hard for the next three decades. And only then briefly relent.
It took two General Elections to complete the deed, to be rid of the Tories for the moment. Like all vermin, they keep coming back. The other side take the same view: Malcolm remembers the Daily Telegraph promising the faithful, on 10th October 1959, that Labour in defeat was finished for a decade — if not a generation. That, in itself, convinced Malcolm that next time round would be different. Similar prophecies were made in 1970, 1979, 1983, 1992 and — heaven help us — may be in 2010. So: watch this space.
Probably with Gaitskell the 1964 campaign, Thirteen wasted years, would not greatly have differed in theme. We might even have more easily believed the white-hot heart of technological change. Whoever the leader and new Prime Minister, the new stars in the political firmament would have been, as Sandbrook suggests, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland and Anthony Wedgwood-Benn. To which Malcolm would add Barbara Castle and Douglas Jay and Denis Healey and George Brown and Richard Marsh …
…in 1967 came the final blow. Amid the hoopla surrounding You Only Live Twice, the new James Bond film, Private Eye dropped the bombshell that the prime minister had been sleeping with the wife of Bond’s creator for the last decade.
Sandbrook’s misconstruction there is to be a Beatles, rather than a Stones man.
Yes, in Britain, in 1967, Let’s Spend the Night Together was acceptable for prime-time family television. Only on the US networks, and for the Ed Sullivan Show, was bowdlerising needed.
Sandbrook, though, is correct in his essential conceit: Gaitskell could not have survived the 1960s. He would, presumably (after his principled stand on Suez), have been as reluctant to get involved in the Vietnam mess as Wilson was. That, in itself, required an expert balancing act (not often celebrated) by the Foreign Office, keeping the Atlanticists, the graduates of the CIA schools of patronage, in play but not in the driving seats.
Where things would have gone sadly adrift is the terminal failure of Butskellism. The economic consensus of the 1950s was past any sell-by date. Macmillan, with or without that 1959 mis-quotation, had stoked up a consumer demand which the state of the economy could not afford. British metal-bashing industry was totally out-classed in the new dispensation. The right-wing of the Tories was going rogue: witness the proto-monetarism that emerged at the 1970 Selsdon conference. Heath could not resist the inevitable, which was then presented to the British electorate as wolf-dressed-as-lamb.
What would have been different is that Gaitskell (in, say, the aftermath of a 1966 landslide) would have been supplanted by a leftist, more socialist Labour administration. Doubtless Harold Wilson, cannily positioned in the left-centre, would have emerged. That would have left the “loyalists” to be bought or to go into the wilderness. In 1970 the British electors could have have a more positive choice. None of which would have prevented the dire, drear sterility of the 1970s.
With the situation in Northern Ireland ripe for explosion.
With the European debate still to be had.
Which leaves just two thoughts
Malcolm has been here before. When one passes up Church Row in Hampstead, one passes the grave and memorial of Hugh (“Fortitude and integrity”) and Dora Gaitskell. It’s a nudge to do what Sandbrook does: to consider the numerous “might-have-beens”
Malcolm’s Pert Young Piece was one of Sandbrook’s pupils at Sheffield. It would seem that Sandbrook left the History Department at Sheffield in a puff of sulphuric smoke. He had been offered a contract for a populist history, a development frowned on by his superiors. He merely shrugged his shoulders, cited the money, made no apology, and left..
I DO think that [Cameron] – and the country – needs a Referendum, regardless of the Lisbon Treaty or any other agreements, just so we can find out, once-and-for-all, how the British people truly feel about this whole EU concept.
We’ve already done that. Been there. Still got the pamphlets (if the tee-shirt rotted long ago). It was 6th June 1975. Two-to-one the Great British Public voted for EU membership. Curiously enough, the arguments then against membership (mainly coming from the Left) sounded very like those today coming from the Right. Try this one:
TUC General-Secretary Len Murray … remained adamantly opposed to the EEC. “Many of the most important decisions about our future can only be taken here in Britain,” he said.
Or, for real UKIPpery try the selected speeches of Tony Benn.
Malcolm went into the Referendum campaign a convinced anti-marketeer. He spoke from platforms, denouncing the whole Euro-thing. During the campaign, he did the politically unthinkable: he listened to the argument. At some point, he recognised it was a lost cause. He had to acknowledge he had been wrong. Come the day, he did not even use his vote. As Alcuin had it, twelve centuries gone, and dismissively as a matter of fact, Vox populi, vox dei.
But, of course, the matter will never be settled to the satisfaction of the lunatic fringes in either direction. Memories are short — political memories barely reach the intellectual capacity of a gold-fish. So, we are doomed to go through this febrile cycle in each and every generation.
Once more Malcolm is reminded of that sad, instructive story of the English tenor, singing at La Scala. His soaring aria was concluded in wholesale, deafening applause. The tenor bowed graciously, and went into a reprise. Again, the audience rose as one and demanded a repeat: encore! encore! After the third iteration, the tenor came to the front of the stage to express his gratitude; but demurred. Only the great Gigli had ever had a fourth encore at La Scala: that was a record he could not want to match. A voice from the Gods called down: You will do it again. And again. Until you get it right!
Last week, the New Statesman had a neat little fantasy by Dominic Sandbrook (who was a mentor of Malcolm’s Pert Young Piece, while both were features of Sheffield University’s History Department). In it Sandbrook invented an alternative history: what if the 1975 Referendum had gone the other way?
Today, no household is without its beloved New Zealand butter and Canadian cheese, yet it is a chilling thought that if Britain had stayed in the EEC, we might have become a nation of Brie and Gorgonzola addicts. And if we had remained in thrall to Brussels, we would never have had the chance to forge such strong links with Europe’s other freedom-loving nations, now our political and cultural partners – our Scandinavian cousins in Iceland and Norway.
Indeed, if the decision had gone the other way, many of our 21st-century tastes and habits might be very different. Would Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim still attract hundreds of thousands of British holidaymakers? Would Reykjavik be a Mecca for spa lovers and stag parties? Would the National Gallery’s Edvard Munch exhibition have been such a blockbuster? Would the RSC put on its sell-out Ibsen season every winter? And for that matter, would pickled herring still have become the nation’s favourite comfort food?
There are always those who think that we would have been better off staying in the EEC, and that today’s Britain, with its environmentally friendly monarchy, its entrenched social democracy and its taste for meatballs, is all a bit dull. But it’s surely a small price to pay for trains that run on time, redistributive taxes and the world’s leading whaling industry. And who wants to be like Italy, anyway?
Remember the early ’90s. The GOP dinosaurs ran rampant through proto-Clintonian Washington. MegaNewt Gingrich (the arch adulterer) and Tom DeLay (indicted abuser) ruled the Congressional roost. Nirvana for the Christian Right was imminent.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.
Bob Tyrrell, the founder and editor of the American Spectator, was in and of the belly of the Beast. He made denigration of the Clintons his mission in life. Tyrrell can describe himself as a “libertarian conservative” but also say “I’m the last Communist left”, the son of a Chicago Democrat,
and I learned my politics from the Daley machine.
His political pantheon is inclusive:
FDR and Ronald Reagan both were the unique individuals who changed the course of American policy, both domestically and with foreign policy.
In 1992 he published The Conservative Crack-up. Tyrrell saw the neo-Cons failure to put Bork on the Supreme Court Bench as harbinger of present weakness and future further failings:
… in the Bork nomination and the failure to get him on the Supreme Court … we saw the conservatives’ typical weaknesses that have hampered their ability to create the kind of political culture that I think is important for a conservative movement. The conservatives had not reached out. They had not reached out and created the kind of alliances and networks — they hadn’t expanded them — that would have helped them. They underestimated the opposition.
He then wonders where the neo-Con ideology is going:
There were three elements that went into the founding of the conservative movement in the late ’40s. One was libertarian economics and philosophy, as embodied in the work of Friedrich Hayek and others. The other was traditional Western values …
… the final element in the conservative movement was anti-communism and an awareness of the menace to the whole Western world that Russian communist totalitarianism represented. The conservatives in the late ’40s often thought we were going to lose. They were very fatalistic, and Whittaker Chambers was one of those people who wanted to wake America up to the menace of communism, not just Soviet communism.
In other words:
monetarism and resource management by market forces:
The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources — if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality.
— Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945)
authoritarianism. Since Tyrrell specifically refers to Richard M. Weaver as his guru here, we are into rightist populism (not excluding the Old South as a model) and warnings of the continuing degeneracy of our society into an imminent dystopia:
This is another book about the dissolution of the West. I attempt two things not commonly found in the growing literature of this subject. First, I present an account of that decline based not on analogy but on deduction. It is here the assumption that the world is intelligible and that man is free and that those consequences we arc now expiating are the product not of biological or other necessity but of unintelligent choice. Second, I go so far as to propound, if not a whole solution, at least the beginning of one, in the belief that man should not follow a scientific analysis with a plea of moral impotence.
— Introduction to Ideas have Consequences (1948)
and social control by the exploitation of the fear factor (which, historically, has been the Yellow Peril, the Red Menace, and now Islamophobia: the perceived threat changes; but the method remains the same).
Tyrrell was prescient: the neo-con operation fell apart, spectacularly, in the last years of Bush II, culminating in the pile-up that was the McCain-Palin ticket last year.
Even so, Tyrrell could be dismissed as a curiosity, a poseur, and ignored as a triviality. This piece would belong across the road, in Malcolm Redfellow’s World Service, were it not for the start of new meme or troupe, which has parallels with Tyrrell’s thesis:
The fragility of the Cameroonie conspiracy
Quite where the Tory Party is going is anyone’s guess. At one level there is this engaging assumption that the General Election of 2010 is a foregone conclusion. The error there is that the Tory share of the vote (currently sampled at about 40%) is way, way below Thatcher in 1979 or Blair in 1997. If — when — it slips below that level, everything is up for grabs. That is
why the fellow-travellers, for one obvious example Mike Smithson, scrutinise the runes and extrapolate hyperspatially;
why the Tory bloggers follow Smithson’s every twitch so avidly; and
Then there is the lack of any ideology in the present Tory leadership. Cameron has made a fetish of being a “modernizer“, of being pragmatic (or whatever non-Wilsonian synonym the snake-oil salesmen can conjure up). In swift order we have had Cameron-the-successor-to-Blair, green Cameron, true-blue-Cameron, unionist red-white-and-blue Cameron, Cameron-the-spender, Cameron-the-cutter, Cameron-the-flipper-of-his-mortgage, Cameron-the-appalled-at-expensesgate … all of which amounts to Cameron-the-rootless, Cameron-the-unprincipled.
That does not mean there are no ideologues in the ranks of Toryism: John Redwood; David Willetts; Oliver Letwin all have their moments. All are kept (in view of previous disasters) on a short rein. Even William Hague (heaven help us) might chip in if they were short-handed. Then there is Dan Hannan, who would love to be elevated to a role. Any, or all of these would find approval in the Right world of ConHome. And therein is the problem: the Right is where any pretence of Tory intellect can be located. It is a rarefied world well adrift from those opportunist Etonians and rough-and-tumble City Slickers currently in charge.
Win or lose next year, things must fall apart when there is no centre to hold.
Already there are several defenestrated Tories — most recently, Edward McMillan-Scott — with grievances. There are many more, particularly among the ersatz squirearchy, would feel they were discriminated against, sold out in the long-running expenses row — the most recent gesture to the pursuing wolves being Alan Duncan. For the duration, the affronted will sit on their hands, bite their tongues, cherish their resentment and keep it warm. Individually, even collectively, after the Election, revenge will be taken; and the fall-out thereof shall be magnificent to see.
Then there is the embuggerance factor. Last Tuesday, First Post gave Donald Malcolm space (well, they never have much of real worth to fill it) to rubbish Labour in London. In the process another vein was opened:
By May or June 2010, unless he’s knocked over by a bendy bus, David Cameron will be prime minister. A year on – less, possibly – he is likely to have become one of the most unpopular prime ministers in modern history. It doesn’t matter that pollsters are currently recording a desire for public service cuts rather than tax rises. The public will be thinking very differently by the time those cuts begin to bite.
Unless an economic miracle intervenes, Prime Minister Cameron and Chancellor Osborne will oversee a bloodbath in public service cuts.
The trickle-down – make that pour-down – effect will be something to behold. ‘Soft’ Labour voters now happily rubbishing Gordon Brown will again have a flag to rally around. By the end of 2011, the Tory government will be heading into mid-term having outraged many members of their new fanbase and re-energised Labour supporters.
Sounds familiar?
That was the scenario is 1979-81.
As Malcolm has pointed out on previous outings. Let us remember Thatcher doing her bit:
Now recall: the self-styled “Lady” was addressing her own Party Conference. She was soliciting support from the blue-rinses and golf-clubbers of her rank-and-file over the heads of her dissident Cabinet colleagues. Her position was so precarious that, short of the Argentinian junta rushing to her aid, her tenure would near-certainly have been abbreviated; and more voter-friendly, middle-of-the-road measures introduced.
What Thatcher had, which Cameron has yet to show, is determination, commitment and a sense of direction (from Keith Joseph).
how long a “Prime Minister” Cameron can survive? Who wields the knife?
whether Philip Hammond’s intended bloodbath of cuts pushes unemployment beyond 4 million? Or does the failure-of-nerve and the U-turn come earlier? Do we get the double-dip depression?
does the Great Tory Schism derive from economic policy or merely the old European heresy? Do the Europhobes and crypto-UKIPpers get their way?
is the only real beneficiary of all this the amazing self-basting Salmond?
There then follows a paeon of praise for Bob Ainsworth’s stiff upper lip:
A solid, unflashy model served him well on the production line at the Jaguar car plant and in his rise through the tough ranks of trade union activism.
But the moustache he wears now is a more close-cropped, bristling beast, more suited to a regimental sergeant major barking orders on the parade ground than a left wing rabble rouser – entirely in keeping with his new job as defence secretary.
That’s not the comparison Malcolm originally reached for. And Ainsworth as a “rabble-rouser”? Decency forbids!
Now, Malcolm has to tread carefully here. His brother, the Professor, wears a ‘tache. It started as the full-blown late-60s sideburns and extras (think Dennis Hopper inEasy Rider or Elliott Gould in M*A*S*H). Then it … sort of … mutated into a Zapata, before being trimmed back to a drooping generic bandito. Finally, it is more of a disciplined thing, the hirsute equivalent of a well-preserved, if over-gentrified, Grade 2 listed building. It still needs a double swipe after a swig of ale.
Brian Wheeler ponders on why the ‘tache went out of style for politicos, and cites Mandelson, Hoon, and Byers, in full fig and illustration. He could equally have noted the amazing disappearing facial hair of Harold Wilson. Which raises the question of whether it was all a distinctive break with the Attlee years: the “white heat of technological change” against Harold Macmillan’s pseudo-Edwardianism.
Once upon a time (circa 1964-5), in the side-bar of O’Neill’s in Suffolk Street, the full intellect of Dublin University Fabian Society‘s ideological dynamos (hey! have we been purged from wikipedia?) was applied to formulating the Grand Theory of Commy Beards (GToCBs). This attempted to explain the contrasting styles of Marxism (as untrimmed as any overgrown Leylandii) versus the severe discipline of Leninism. As the pints followed one after the other, the GToCBs developed into something that made dialectical sense at the time. At this distance in years, Malcolm cannot recall how Iosef Stalin was fitted into the schema. Nikolai Bulganin reverted to the neat Leninist set. Krushchev went clean skinned. It’s pretty clear where Che and Fidel fitted into the syllogism. And that was about it for the GToCBs. Closing time at O’Neill’s.
Meanwhile, the West had long gone the Gillette route. Finally, we had the “Be Clean for Gene” moment of 1968, which effectively finished facial hair for American politicians and wanna-bes.
So a small cheer for Bob Ainsworth’s bristle. However, don’t expect Malcolm to adopt the mode.
The annual file-fest that is the release of State Papers got its brief hour of publicity. This fills up newsprint between the stale turkey and the New Year’s Honours (more turkeys). For most sub-editors it is a delight because it can all be pre-processed. The real dirt takes longer (and the commitment of some ambitious PhD student).
Malcolm found the gem of the 1976 State documents (as so far revealed) was the Wilson memorandum, more particularly his fears over a Unionist putsch and UDI.
To show that little changes in the minds of some folk, we should refer to Eric Waugh in the Belfast Telegraph as recently as 7th December.
Waugh proposed “an independent state of Northern Ireland”. Typically, as Unionist parlance since 1921 has had it, he confuses “Northern Ireland” with “Ulster”. Malcolm finds it somewhere between irritating and incredible that he repeatedly needs to clarify that Ulster (Uladh) comprises nine counties, six of which are “Northern Ireland” (though the most northern county of Ireland is not in “Northern Ireland”).
Waugh’s tissue of speculation is that some statelet could opt out of the Union, out of the island of Ireland, out of the European Union, and survive as a tax-haven. His model is the Isle of Man (population something like 78,000).
Meanwhile, the rest of us would be expected to contribute generously, for “the new state would require bolstering for up to 20 years by the UK, the EU – and possibly the US and even the Republic”. That, of course, ignores the continued tax revenue bled away by this parasitical “new state”. Let’s put that into proportion. Government expenditure in Northern Ireland is something in the region of £16B, which exceeds by a degree the £780M of gross expenditure by the Manx government.
Malcolm suspects that Waugh’s ideal would be more modest: pulling the wagons into a circle around the defensible Protestant heartland of Antrim, Down and Portadown, perhaps. This nicely unhitches the Nationalist baggage train, and leaves Dublin and Europe to pick up the pieces in the high unemployment areas.
Wilson was a pragmatic (one of his own favourite words) politician: Malcolm expects his oft-maligned reputation will enhance with time (for one example and modern comparison, in denying Washington’s pressure to engage in Vietnam). His opinions and fears remain relevant and should not be lightly discounted (as they were then by those omniscient mandarins of Whitehall, who managed to get things so “right” in the intervening thirty years).
It remains one of the mysteries of our time. Why have the Tories, who don’t seem over-endowed with clear-thinking, clear-speaking parliamentary ability, not already given Rory Stewart a desk in the Foreign Office or the MoD? Why waste talent? Is there something magical about the wind and water of the Menschs and worse of this world?
Stewart did a decent job for BBC2 with his two-parter on the history of foreign interventions in Afghanistan. Now Malcolm finds him in the New York Review of Books reviewing Diana Preston on Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842. As it happens, Malcolm doubts la belle dame Preston will earn any lasting space on Malcolm’s shelf-space, and he suspects Stewart — in these three pages — knows more and writes a lot better. He skewers her catchpenny pot-boiling through her:
One of the worthier achievement of Harold Wilson’s premiership may be that he kept Britain out of the Vietnam embroilment. Peter Davies did a fine essay on just this in 2008 — which Malcolm has sadly discarded. To preserve and protect the relationship with the Johnson Administration (particularly when the position of sterling was a paramount consideration), Wilson was prepared to expend diplomatic credit; but that was it.
