TV Quote of the Day (‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ on What Worries the U.K. Government)

James Hacker [played by Paul Eddington]: “Humphrey, I'm worried.”

Sir Humphrey Appleby [played by Nigel Hawthorne]: “Oh, what about, Prime Minister?”

Hacker: “About the Americans.”

Appleby: “Oh yes, well, we're all worried about the Americans.” — Yes, Prime Minister, Season 1, Episode 6, “A Victory for Democracy,” original air date Feb. 13, 1986, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Sydney Lotterby

Forty years after this episode in this hilarious series aired, the British have even more to worry about their partner in the “special relationship” than they did back when it only concerned Americans going crazy about Communist subversion.

Now, the Prime Minister has so much more on his mind—like whether the current American President will destroy the transatlantic alliance, subvert representative governments around the globe, spark a trade war by ratcheting up tariffs, or use Royal Air Force bases for potential unilateral strikes on Iran.

Moreover, the Prime Minister and King Charles are sweating over what else the Americans have in the Epstein files—like whether they could make matters even worse, if possible, for the former Prince Andrew, and, with more revelations spilling out about additional cabinet ministers, whether the government of Keir Starmer could fall.

Quote of the Day (Alexander Waugh, on His Solutions for UK Problems)

“My proposed solutions to the various problems which beset the country are intended as suggestions to be thrown around in the various clubs, clubs and dining rooms. If the Government adopted even a tenth of them, catastrophe would surely result.”—English newspaper columnist, historian, and composer Alexander Waugh (1963-2024), Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004)

Quote of the Day (The Marquess of Salisbury, on ‘First-Rate Men’ and Mobs)

“First-rate men will not canvass mobs; and if they did, the mobs would not elect the first-rate men.”— British Conservative politician and Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903), “Democracy on Its Trial,” Quarterly Review (1861)

We shall see in this election here in the U.S. if shameless pandering to the mob will win out. In any case, it’s harder to be a “first-rate” man—or woman—in the current maddened environment.

Quote of the Day (Boris Johnson, Anticipating His Brexecution)

"My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters. Nothing excites compassion, in friend and foe alike, as much as the sight of you ker-splonked on the tarmac with your propeller buried six feet under."—British Member of Parliament and former Mayor of London Boris Johnson, quoted in Rose Powell, “How Gaffe-Prone Boris Johnson Could Become UK Prime Minister,” Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 7, 2014

With his highly idiosyncratic approach to the mother tongue and his penchant for getting into one scrape after another, Boris Johnson can sound at times like Bertie Wooster let loose in Parliament. Put that together with his keen sense of Fleet Street’s voracious appetite for copy (he was a former reporter and editor of The Spectator), and you have a journalist’s dream candidate, a virtual English Channel of quotes and gaffes.

Except that, at least for the current cycle, it doesn’t like as if he’ll be a candidate for Prime Minister. The astonishing last week in the U.K.—starting with the vote to leave the European Union, David Cameron’s announced departure from Whitehall, and the vote of no confidence in Labour Party leader Jeremy Corwyn—climaxed with the out-of-left-field statement by Johnson, a Conservative leader of the Brexit forces, that he would not, after all, seek the P.M. post.

Cameron’s loss of power led observers to reach back in history for another Conservative
P.M. undone by a grievous miscalculation: Anthony Eden, in the wake of the Suez invasion. But Johnson’s abrupt slide down the greasy pole led commentators to look to drama: House of Cards, where treachery and the velvet power thrust abound.

Briefly, after the Brexit vote, when he still looked like The Coming Man, New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin likened him to Donald Trump in how he outraged elites. All seemed to change once Michael Gove, his comrade-in-arms atop the Leave forces, cleared his throat, said his old college friend couldn’t “provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead,” and put forward the best man for the job: himself. Now, unlike The Donald, Boris is looking up mournfully at the post he tried to attain.

You are unlikely to see Trump—or, to be fair, any current U.S. politicians—drop allusions to Greek and Latin literature in their speeches, as Boris has been known to do. But the derailed politico’s story and tone are going to seem oddly familiar to Americans long since used to Trump, and for reasons going beyond the tonsorial styles that made them presumptive hairs apparent to their nation’s highest office. Consider the following:

*Brashness. Johnson’s style is unfiltered, running counter to the typical British reserve (including that displayed by recent occupants of 10 Downing Street). In Trump’s case, “brash” seems to be permanently connected to the word “billionaire” (and, I suppose, will do in a pinch, to avoid overusing other “b” words such as “bumptious,” “bombastic and “bullying”).

*A libido that, in years past, would have marked him politically Dead on Arrival. Boris has had three known affairs resulting in an abortion, a miscarriage and a child born out of wedlock, not to mention his sacking from the Tories’ “front bench” back in 2004 when he was less than candid with party chief Michael Howard about one liaison. Despite that, he rebounded back into contention in the race to become PM until his latest stumble. Trump, of course, is a twice-divorced adulterer, world-class female objectifier, and even a guy who creepily said his daughter was so hot that if they weren’t related, he could date her. None of this, of course, made the slightest difference to religious conservatives, who voted for him in great numbers in the primaries.

*Lying. Boris is a glib liar. Even before he prevaricated to Howard, he got fired from a prior job in the newspaper business, by making up quotes. The sheer brazenness of that act prepared him well for politics, where—as demonstrated in the latest Brexit campaign—he could make promises and offer "facts" on flimsy evidence, then walk them back. Trump is an even greater master of mendacity. Long given to hype, he is now utterly unable to distinguish truth from falsehood. He lies about masses of Muslims celebrating 9/11, about never settling cases, about Ronald Reagan liking him, about always being against the Iraq War. Not content with being a chronic liar, he is also a pathological one, a tendency born of ineradicable narcissism.

* “Did he REALLY say what I thought he said?” There’s an entire book called The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson. Personally, I’m not too sure about the “wisdom” part, but the outrageous factor in it is quite high. The following is as good an example as any to illustrate the point: “For ten years,” he once wrote, “we in the Tory party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing, and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour party.” Forced to apologize to the government and people of Papua New Guinea, he offered a non-apology apology: “I meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea, who I’m sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity.” As for Trump, once you start on all the individuals and groups he’s insulted—Mexicans, the disabled, reporters, Iowans, African-Americans, POWs, Megan Kelly, Rosie O’Donnell, Pope Francis—the question then becomes, who hasn’t he dissed? Imagine Spiro Agnew, but with a billion dollars.

* Non-ideological conservatism. Boris has been known to be oddly blasé about his convictions, including the degree of his devotion to Thatcherism: "I realise that there may be some confusion in my prescriptions between what I would do, what Maggie would do, and what the government is about to do or is indeed already doing ... I don't think it much matters, because the three are likely to turn out to be one and the same." Trump is similarly blithe about his beliefs: “Folks, I'm a conservative, but at this point, who cares?”

*Irresponsibility. Johnson lent the Brexit movement a credibility lacking from its most diehard zenophobes. Once he won, splitting the EU, his party and perhaps his nation in two, he tried to downplay the positions he had only recently taken. This, as much as anything, may have sparked the rebellion of Gove, who had been set to serve as campaign manager in his PM bid. Similarly, Trump has divided his party and the nation as a whole with his inflammatory rhetoric.

*Faux populism. Boris contends that he speaks for the working class. It would be more correct to say that he has exploited its real troubles and that his closest associates are more likely to come from the tony schools from which he graduated, Eton and Oxford.  Truman’s advocacy in this vein is even more preposterous. How the populist mantle can be worn by a billionaire landlord who has tried to hustle tenants out of his buildings and imported foreign workers to work on his signature Manhattan property is beyond me.

*Branding. Boris is such a well-known quantity in the U.K. that he is one of the few politicos to be known by his first name, in the manner of Madonna. Trump’s business holdings use his name, based on the notion that they will exert a broad brand recognition. His rise to the top of the GOP field was smoothed by this high recall, as well as with their recall of his role on reality show The Apprentice.

* “Who Do You Think You Are?” Boris appeared on an episode of this BBC series about family history. The tone of the question for the series’ subjects is meant to be quietly inquisitive, but voters on both sides of the Atlantic would be best advised to adopt a far more challenging—and, yes, derisive—tone as they consider the record and damage left by Boris and The Donald.

 

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on the Nazi Invasion of Russia)

“I see the 10,000 villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play. I see advancing upon all this, in hideous onslaught, the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents, fresh from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, so delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey. And behind all this glare, behind all this storm, I see that small group of villainous men who planned, organized and launched this cataract of horrors upon mankind.”— Winston Churchill, radio address on Germany’s invasion of Russia, June 22, 1941

Even as he made history, Winston Churchill sought to shape how it would be interpreted. He didn’t wait until he penned his bestselling six-volume  war memoirs in retirement, nor even as he departed Whitehall in 1945, when he carted off 68 bundles of state papers to help him with this massive proect (as revealed in David Lough’s recently published No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money). 

The British Prime Minister did so, quite memorably, as early as Adolf Hitler’s disastrous decision to abrogate the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on this date 75 years ago today.

Twenty-two months before Hitler’s troops opened fire on the Soviets, without either a declaration of war or even an ultimatum, Joseph Stalin had made a cynical secret deal with his fellow dictator: a division of the spoils that allowed them spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, subjecting that region's inhabitants to exploitation by these conquerors. (See my prior post on the background to the event.)

Though stunned by Hitler’s treachery—initially, it seems, almost to the point of paralysis—Stalin should not have been. Hitler had shown an insatiable appetite for land; he had broken the Munich agreement that Churchill’s predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, had naively negotiated; and, as secret agents and Allied leaders (such as Churchill himself) had told the Soviet dictator, Hitler planned to turn on him.

When he addressed his country after hearing this news, Churchill was already calling it one of four “climacterics,” or “intense turning points,” of World War II. (The others to that point, as listed in the speech, were the British decision to fight Germany alone after the fall of France, the performance of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, and the American decision to provide aid through the Lend Lease Act). This, though, may have been the turning point that sealed Hitler’s fate, for Great Britain would no longer be facing Germany by itself on the battlefield.

In the quote above, Churchill resorted to benign images of the common Soviet folk because he wanted his own countrymen to identify with people who had just become their allies. Even this, however, wasn’t enough. He also felt compelled to acknowledge his own past: “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years.” Nor would he retract a word of it even now.

But the crimes of Hitler were so “monstrous,” he noted, that “We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose….to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime.”

Though Hitler had approached the decision to invade the U.S.S.R. with mounting anxiety, he could not shed the same logic that had doomed Napoleon Bonaparte over a century before, General Walther Warlimont would note later:

“Why Hitler invaded Russia is, in my opinion, that he found himself in exactly the same situation as Napoleon. Both men looked upon Britain as their strongest and most dangerous adversary. Both could not persuade themselves to attempt the overthrow of England by invading the British Isles. Both believed, however, that Great Britain could be forced to come to terms with the dominating continental power, if the prospect vanished for the British to gain an armoured arm as an ally on the Continent. Both of them suspected Russia of becoming this ally of Britain’s.”

For all his vivid imagery, Churchill surely could not foresee the extent of the grievous harm inflicted by Germany on the U.S.S.R.: more than 26 million lives lost. Nor, for all the fighting spirit he praised among the Russian common people, could he have anticipated that the Soviet military would ultimately be responsible for approximately 70% of the Wehrmacht loss of life over the next four years, as the powerful German war machine first became trapped by the winter weather, then by Hitler's refusal to walk away from a quagmire. Churchill remained convinced, as he wrote in his memoir The Gathering Storm, that “Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism.”  But he also believed that allying now with the Soviets was the only feasible way to destroy Nazism and to preserve Britain as a nation.