Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on How Ireland Affected ‘The Vital Strings of British Life and Politics’)

“Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world, but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world. That says a lot for the persistency with which Irish men on the one side or the other are able to pursue their controversies. It says a great deal for the power which Ireland has, both Nationalist and Orange, to lay their hands upon the vital strings of British life and politics, and to hold, dominate, and convulse, year after year, generation after generation, the politics of this powerful country.” —Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), then Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, “House of Commons Speech on the Ireland Situation,” Feb. 16, 1922

For those of us of Irish descent, St. Patrick’s Day should be not only for celebration but for remembrance of trauma, struggle, and resilience.  

With all due respect to the poet W.H. Auden when writing his great tribute to William Butler Yeats, it wasn’t simply the case that “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” It was Great Britain that had made Ireland mad in the first place. Among others who forgot this was Winston Churchill.

As long as freedom exists, he will be remembered for rallying Britain against the Nazi menace. His skill as a wordsmith is evident even in this short passage above.

But his not inconsiderable blind spot was arch-imperialism, and it shows here by what he doesn’t mention. British politics and government had been affected through much of his lifetime not so much by quarreling Nationalist and Orange factions in Ireland, as he suggests, but by that government’s fatal decision in the 16^th and 17^th centuries to sponsor plantations on the island, through land confiscated from Catholics and given to Protestant settlers from Scotland.

The most enduring of those plantations was in Ulster, the center of “Orange” opposition not just of independence but of home rule.

Moreover, for all the future Prime Minister’s worship of his father, it was Lord Randolph Churchill who had encouraged longstanding tensions between Protestant and Catholic in Ireland for blatantly political reasons.

When Prime Minister William Gladstone came out in the 1880s for Home Rule, Lord Churchill told a friend that long before he had decided if that came to pass, “the Orange card would be the one to play.” The prospect of armed Orange agreement to any grant of self-determination bothered him little as well: “Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right.”

Arguing for the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Churchill may have felt he was removing the Irish question from British politics once and for all.

It turned out to be anything but, because of issues related to gerrymandering and systematic discrimination of the Catholic minority in Ulster that neither the Liberal nor Conservative governments in which Churchill served as minister moved to alleviate them. 

Those issues lay at the heart of the civil-rights movement launched by Catholics in the late 1960s, sparking a predictable reaction from the descendants of Orange opponents of the prior centuries—and now (with the toxic presence of British troops added to the mix) the nearly three-decades “Troubles” were launched.

Quote of the Day (Robert Buckland, on the ‘Armageddon’ Facing UK Conservatives)

“The Conservatives are facing Armageddon. It's going to be like a group of bald men fighting over a comb.”—Former British Lord Chancellor Robert Buckland, predicting in a BBC interview a tumultuous Conservative leadership battle after the party’s landslide loss last week, quoted by Lucy Fisher, “Recriminations Begin After ‘Devastating’ Defeat,” The Financial Times, July 6-7, 2024

This official portrait of Robert Buckland was taken Jan. 12, 2020, by Richard Townshend. Notice that Buckland is smiling. That’s because this was 4½ years before he’d lose his seat in Parliament. 

If he’s smiling these days, it’s sardonically, before he launches the kind of quip that caught my eye above.

I’m sorry, folks, but as soon as I read Buckland’s sound bite above, I started laughing and haven’t stopped since.

But I’m afraid that not too many other Conservatives are in the mood for merriment these days. Except for copyright reasons, I would have used an electoral map showing a massive dash of red (associated with the Labour Party) over the U.K.

Nothing loosens tongues, and loyalties, like the prospect of losing big. The Conservatives are amid this process now, and America’s Democrats are similarly vulnerable after Joe Biden's disastrous performance in his first debate with Donald Trump.

Let’s see whether the Democratic or British “comb” turns out to be more useful in the end.

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on a ‘Riotously Excited’ Parliamentary Election)

“Party feeling runs so high, and the contest is likely to be so sharp a one that I look forward to the probability of a scuffle before it is over…. Such a ruthless set of bloody-minded villains, I never set eyes on, in my life. In their convivial moments yesterday after the business of the day was over, they were perfect savages. If a foreigner were brought here on his first visit to an English town, to form his estimate of the national character, I am quite satisfied he would return forthwith to France, and never set foot in England again….The polling begins on Friday and then we shall have an incessant repetition of the sounds and sights of yesterday 'till the Election is over—bells ringing, candidates speaking, drums sounding, a band of eight trombones (would you believe it?) blowing —men fighting, swearing, drinking, and squabbling—all riotously excited, and all disgracing themselves.”—English journalist-turned-novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Dec. 16, 1835 letter to fiancée Catherine Hogarth about a Northampton by-election he was reporting on for the Morning Chronicle, in The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley (2012)

I’m indebted to British historian Simon Schama’s historical overview of Parliamentary elections, in last weekend’s Financial Times, for bringing to my attention Dickens’ typically colorful account of what elections were like in the early 19^th century.

Much has changed since then, but the unbridled nature of the proceedings remains the same.

Was it only five years ago that Boris Johnson achieved what looked like significant party realignment by winning an 80-seat majority, making inroads even in former Labour strongholds?

Now, with Thursday’s landslide election, Labour has ended 14 years of Conservative (mis)rule, with current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak so hapless in warding off the electorate’s rebuke that he may well be called Poison Sunak by sour members of his party’s rank and file from now on.

Even so, elections have consequences, and the wreckage the Conservatives have left behind—most of all, through Brexit and former PM Boris Johnson's rampant constitutional violations—will not easily be reversed.

Voters have less patience and shorter attention spans than formerly, and Keir Starmer will have to continue moderating the toxic stands of former Labour chieftain Jeremy Corbyn even as he shows tangible progress on the issues on which the electorate found the Conservatives wanting.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan’s sharp warning from three years ago to American politicians applies equally well abroad: “Politicians are never so dangerous as after a triumph.”

One element of modern political life that also seems to have carried across the Atlantic is the specter of far-right extremism. At this point, the so-called “Reform UK” party has won five seats in the House of Commons and a 14.3% share of Thursday’s vote, making inroads at the expense of the Conservatives.

Reform leader Nigel Farage has vowed to “change politics forever" through the party’s stances on taking immigrants in small boats back to France, a public inquiry into vaccine harm, protecting defense forces from human-rights inquiries, and adding 10,000 detention places.

Despite Reform’s current small representation in Parliament, he ought to be taken seriously, as history is replete with fringe political parties wreaking damage, whether in combination with others or by seizing power themselves. 

This Day in Crime History (Death of Jeremy Thorpe, Fallen Politico in ‘A Very English Scandal’)

Dec. 4, 2014—Jeremy Thorpe, who lost his chance at becoming a power broker in English politics when his hiring of a hitman to take out his homosexual lover was exposed, died at age 85 of Parkinson’s disease.

Hugh Grant, who played Thorpe in the BBC One miniseries, A Very English Scandal, summed up, with characteristic wit, the difference between how different countries might handle such embarrassing situations, in a December 2018 interview with Michael Schneider of Indiewire:

“If you imagine a Russian plotting a murder it would probably go quite well. Or a Saudi. Or an American. The Mafia do a good job. But [here] it’s English because it’s such a failure!”

English political sex scandals, to elaborate on Grant’s distinction, differ not so much in number as in kind from their American counterparts. American scandals tend to involve someone at the office (Monica Lewinsky) or an affair that shocks a politician’s “base” (e.g., Protestant fundamentalists—at least, before Donald Trump).

In contrast, English sex scandals involve the Establishment closing ranks—even if not necessarily very successfully—behind one of its own. It all comes to naught when really, really wild circumstances come to light.

In the Profumo scandal of 1963, for instance, it involved a Secretary of War sleeping with a call girl who was also intimate with a Soviet military attache—opening up the possibility of state secrets being shared with the Kremlin through pillow talk.

The case of Thorpe revolved around nothing with such high national-security implications, but it was certainly more bizarre and, as Grant implied, seriocomic. 

It not only involved the head of a rising political party employing the services of a contract killer to off a young stable hand-turned-aspiring male model, Norman Scott, whose services the politico had employed for—er, a rather different purpose—but that said killer botched the job—catching up with Scott on a remote country road, all right, but wasting his ammunition on the young man’s dog, a Great Dane named Rinka, only to have his gun jam when he aimed it at Scott.

Four, maybe even three, decades later, after national attitudes had relaxed, Thorpe might have told Scott to do his damnedest with his account of their homosexual relationship. But, though homosexuality had been decriminalized in 1967, it was still considered political kryptonite. 

At a time when he was maneuvering the Liberal Party as a potential junior coalition partner in the government—maybe even enough to win him a Cabinet seat—Thorpe felt he had to squelch the scandal at all costs. With payments to ensure Scott’s silence no longer effective, he allegedly felt stronger measures, like murder, were in order.

But the fall from political grace was sharp. Having become the youngest leader of any British political party in a century when he took over the Liberals in 1967, Thorpe now became the first British Member of Parliament to stand trial for murder. Having tripled the party’s vote count, he was now forced to yield the mantle of Liberal leadership.

In an elemental sense, Thorpe survived his legal ordeal, in no small part due to the judge in the case, who instructed the jury that Scott was "a hysterical, warped personality… a neurotic, spineless creature, addicted to hysteria and self-advertisement"; that the prosecution witnesses were not trustworthy because they could sell their stories to the press; and that the jurors were entitled to consider the entire career of Thorpe. The jury, not surprisingly, acquitted Thorpe. 

The contrast between a patrician defendant and low-class accuser was as stark in the Thorpe case as it was in Profumo’s, but it could not save either man from the loss of power. 

Even after the acquittal, voters turned Thorpe out of office in 1979. He tried tenaciously and repeatedly to win appointment to another position, but it was not to be, and eventually Parkinson’s sapped his energy and will.

Had Thorpe’s career not gone into the ditch, he might have effected a remarkable comeback for a party that, under David Lloyd-George, had been instrumental in the first decades of the 20^th century in paving the way toward British social-welfare legislation, leading the nation through the tumultuous Great War, and affecting the destinies of new nations such as Ireland and Iraq. 

The Liberals, whose crash in the 1920s had coincided with the rise of the more militant Labour Party, would have stood, under Thorpe, as a potential centrist alternative to Labour and the Conservatives. But it all came asunder with Thorpe's fall.

 

Quote of the Day (Enoch Powell, on Immigration)

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.” – British politician Enoch Powell (1912-1998), speaking out on this date in 1968 in Birmingham not only against proposed anti-discrimination legislation but against unchecked immigration from British Commonwealth countries to the U.K.

(The “Roman” that Powell alluded to was Virgil, who in the Aeneid wrote of the Sibyl’s prophecy of “wars, terrible wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood.” For all his brilliance and maverick tendencies, Powell publicly displayed his racist views in this speech, which resulted in him being kicked out of the Tories’ Shadow Cabinet. He later left the party altogether to become an Ulster Unionist.

Conservative Republicans who are restless about John McCain’s pro-immigration views might ask themselves if they want their party to share Powell’s fate in the political wilderness for years to come.)