Mould events. Or watch them pass you by.

With hindsight, William Yale, the main US intelligence agent in the Middle East during World War 1, would criticise the reaction of his President, Woodrow Wilson, to major events. The winner isn’t:

…he who waits to act at some dramatic crisis, but he who consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events. President Wilson and his advisors never seemed to realise this simple truism.

I couldn’t help smiling as I read those words, in Scott Anderson’s excellent book Lawrence in Arabia, since they struck such a bell. Last week, the British Prime Minister Theresa May had to pull a vote in the House of Commons on the Brexit deal she’d spent two years negotiating with the European Union, because it was obvious she was going to lose and lose massively. She wasn’t so much in retreat as in precipitous flight.

Theresa May in the House of Commons
Admitting defeat, in her very attempt to dodge it,
by pulling the Brexit deal vote

Such a government rout would normally present an Opposition with a golden opportunity, to make a bid for office itself. Many of us were, therefore, surprised that Jeremy Corbyn, who as leader of the Labour Party also leads the official opposition, declined to take the obvious next step and propose a vote of no confidence in the government. He said he wanted to wait for the ‘appropriate moment’ to do so.

That seems to mean waiting until the Democratic Unionist Party, with ten MPs, turned its back on Theresa May and committed to vote with the no confidence motion. In other words, he wanted to wait until he could be sure of winning.

Let’s step back over forty years, to 5 April 1976, when Jim Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson as Labour leader and Prime Minister.

With the promised support of the then-Liberal Party (today the Liberal Democrats), Callaghan enjoyed a majority in the House of Commons. He was fairly secure against a no-confidence motion. Besides, a new Prime Minister – you might think he deserved a bit of a honeymoon.

Thatcher gave him just two months.

On 9 June 1976, she brought a no confidence motion against his government.

With his majority, Callaghan could, of course, see it off. She lost by 290 votes against 309. Close, but still a defeat. Many might have dismissed her, feeling that she’d overreached and failed, proving poor judgement.

But that wasn’t the lesson she learned from the experience. Instead, a little over nine months later, on 23 March 1977 she tried again, and was beaten again. Indeed, this time, the margin was even bigger: 298 to 322.

What was she playing at? Let’s be clear: I found Thatcher a bigoted, ruthless, often cruel Prime Minister. But she was an effective politician. Those two failed attacks issued a clear statement of intent: she was going to harry Callaghan and keep on harrying him until she beat him. She was saying, not just to MPs but to the electorate as a whole, that she was serious about taking the top office herself. That displayed qualities much admired by voters: toughness, guts and tenacity.

Finally, in 1978 the Liberals withdrew their support for Callaghan’s government. That’s the equivalent of what Corbyn’s waiting for from the DUP: the withdrawal of support by a small but crucial partner. So Thatcher came back to the attack again. She brought her third no-confidence motion on 28 March 1979. And this time she pulled off the trick, beating him in what became a famous photo finish: 311 votes to 310. Just one vote. And it was enough to bring down his government.

A general election was held in May, which the Conservatives comprehensively won, and Thatcher was in office for eleven years. The Tories, indeed, through her and her successor John Major, were in power for eighteen.

The only no confidence motion she won was in 1979. And even then, there was no guarantee of victory. After all, she scraped through by just one vote. By the Corbyn definition, that made it only barely an ‘appropriate moment’. But she pressed ahead anyway, as she had twice before in the previous three years, though the moments then were so inappropriate that she lost.

The defeats didn’t stop her. Because she moulded events rather than waiting for them to turn favourable to her. Like her or dislike her – and I don’t like her at all – she was undeniably one of those who, in William Yale’s words, ‘consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events’. The reward was eighteen years of rule by her party.

Corbyn’s waiting for events to come to his rescue.

Where Thatcher got stuck in, as a player in the game, and flourished, he’s sitting on the sidelines. Inviting history to sideline him.

Remembering on Armistice Day

A telling anniversary: a century ago, the guns of the Western Front of the First at last fell silent.

We mourn 20 million dead and 21 million wounded on this anniversary. Well, quite a lot of us do, though I note that President Donald Trump only does so if the rain holds off. A fair-weather mourner I suppose we’d have to call him.

That multitude of dead included four I’ve mentioned before: George Edwin Ellison, Augustin Trébuchon, George Lawrence Price and Henry Gunther.

They were, respectively, the last British soldier killed, the last Frenchman, the last Canadian (and last Commonwealth soldier) and, finally, the last American. Indeed, Gunther is generally believed to be the last soldier on any side killed in that war: he died on 11 November 1918 charging a position held by Germans who were shouting at the attackers to stop, since the Armistice would come into effect a minute later.

Maybe it was all down to poorer communications than today, but it seems an extraordinary waste that five hours were allowed to elapse between the signing of the Armistice agreement at 5:10 am and its start at 11:00, however ringing a tone that ‘eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ may be.

American soldiers celebrating the end of the fighting

As well as Ellison, Trébuchon, Price and Gunther, the time gap cost going on for 3000 lives. Which pretty much sums up the futility of the whole war.

Clearly, I know too little about the life of David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister of the time. I learned from the ‘Guardian’ that he, like US President Woodrow Wilson, argued that imposing excessively hard conditions on Germany would only mean that ‘we shall have to do the whole thing over again in 25 years.’

Harsh conditions were imposed, and indeed the whole thing had to be done again not 25 but 21 years later. With the additional spice of totalitarianism and a Holocaust.

I’m not quite sure what my relatives were doing on Armistice Day in 1918.

One grandfather may have been working with other members of his unit to dismantle an artillery emplacement, preparatory to heading home and demobilisation. He would be taking shrapnel with him, embedded in his hand, as well as the memory of falling victim to a gas attack.

His brother, on the other hand, would soon leave for Russia, to continue fighting, this time with the small British contingent supporting White Russian forces battling the newly-installed Bolsheviks. His experience provides a vivid illustration of the fact that fighting in Europe didn’t end on 11 November, it merely ended on the Western Front.

That great uncle of mine had joined up, illegally, at the age of 15. His mother wrote to his colonel to demand that her son, far too young to serve, be sent home. The reply came from a junior officer informing her that Private Beeson had assured him he was nineteen, so they wouldn’t be sending him back.

Next time you meet a fifteen-year old boy, try to picture him in uniform with a weapon he’s been trained to use to kill people.

As for my other grandfather, he must have been thinking that he’d be released from prison quite soon. He’d been sent there because he refused to fight, but with the war over he could get back to ordinary life, his career as a lithographer and even to finding a possible wife with whom he could start a family.

She, however, would not at that stage have been a potential life partner for him. She was already engaged. However, many of the men returning from the war barely had time to feel relief at having survived the carnage before they were caught up in one of the world’s worst epidemics, Spanish influenza. He’d survived the shelling and the gas, but my grandmother’s fiancé succumbed to the flu. So in the end she married my grandfather instead. Leading to several lives, including my own, which wouldn’t otherwise have been possible.

Like many others, they picked up the threads of a civilian existence. That meant facing different problems: finding jobs, finding housing, educating families. Barely over ten years later, with the great crash of 1929, that became a great deal harder. And ten years after that, each in their own way, my grandparents were doing it, as Lloyd George said, all over again.

An experience worth remembering as we celebrate the centenary of that Armistice. The war it ended wasn’t the war to end all wars. Just the beginning of a lot more problems that persist to today. And between then and now, there have been plenty more wars.

Which is perhaps the most important thing to remember on Armistice day.


Postscript: the First World War was by no means the first world war. Arguably, that would have been the Seven Years War (called the French and Indian War in America) of 1756-1763: it pitted European powers against each other, but alongside combat in their own Continent, it was fought in the Americas, West Africa, India and the Philippines, as well as at sea in many parts of the globe. That seems to fit any sensible definition of a world war, doesn’t it?

Progress isn't always all it's cracked up to be

When Mark Mazower wrote his powerful history of Twentieth Century Europe he entitled it Dark Continent. This struck me as unduly cynical. After all, the century gave us victory over bacterial infections (at least temporarily, for as long as antibiotics remain effective), huge classes of people pulled out of hunger and sub-standard accommodation, to say nothing of great increases in access to culture: for example, at the beginning of the century, the cinema was in its infancy; by the end, its products could be enjoyed in our living rooms.

Mazower’s point is that it was also the century in which mankind learned to be more destructive and more vicious to itself than at any time in the past. This reverse progress, the dark mirror-image of the extension of enlightenment, is probably most striking expressed by how attitudes changed in the space of just a few decades towards the killing of civilians in warfare.

An excellent example is given by the use of submarines against merchant shipping in the First World War.

The rules governing the use of military force against maritime commerce had come down to us from the eighteenth century. They specified that the military ship must ensure that its victim belonged to an enemy or was carrying contraband goods to an enemy port. If it could establish either of those, it was entitled to take possession of it or, having evacuated and taken into safety all the crew and passengers, to fire on the ship and sink it.

The trouble with those rules is that they’re practically impossible to apply in submarines. You can’t tell the nationality of a ship through a periscope. To carry out the search means surfacing, which means giving up the one tactical advantage a submarine has: caught on the surface it is particularly vulnerable to an enemy coming to the rescue of the merchant ship. In addition, a submarine simply doesn’t have the space to take on board the crew and passengers of its victims.

What does that mean? In order to use submarine warfare against merchant ships, nations in the twentieth century had to abandon standards of civilised behaviour established in the far more primitive eighteenth. This was made clear by US President Woodrow Wilson writing to the government of Imperial Germany in 1915, whose attention he drew to:

… the practical impossibility of employing submarines in the destruction of commerce without disregarding those rules of fairness, reason, justice and humanity which all modern opinion regards as imperative.

What strikes me most strongly in Wilson’s words is their moral content, their appeal to fairness and humanity.

Twenty-five years later, in the Second World War, there was no expectation that any such moral concerns would limit the use of submarines against commerce. In the Atlantic, Germany drove Britain nearly to defeat by destroying its maritime supply lines; in the Pacific, the United States meted out similar treatment to Japan.

Thirty years after the Wilson letter, we had the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Clearly, by then we had reached such a pitch of enlightenment that the killing of hundreds of thousands – literally – of civilians seemed perfectly acceptable in the pursuit of war aims. Such had progress been.

From our standpoint today, the twentieth century looks pretty dark. If we don’t want it to look merely grey and overcast from the point of view of the end of the twenty-first, it might be a good idea to start doing something about it now.