What we can learn from the Tories: professionalism

You don’t have to support the Conservatives to learn a thing or two from them.

After all, in amongst the many things they do badly – being decent, principled or equitable spring to mind – there’s one thing they do exceptionally well. That’s winning and holding on to power. That were in government, mostly alone but sometimes in coalition, for two-thirds of the last century, and they look set, barring accidents, to overtake Labour quite soon in this one.

It wasn’t always so. Between 1846 and 1874, the Conservatives never formed a majority government. But that was the time of one of the most exceptional men every to lead that Party, Benjamin Disraeli.

He had to fight antisemitism and the taint of being on the liberal wing of his Party, but he presided over the conversion of the eighteenth-century Tories into the modern Conservatives with their election-winning machine.

In particular, he played a major role in redefining the role of a party in opposition. Disraeli believed that the goal of the party out of government was to take office at the earliest opportunity. Granting the government easy victories, by voting with it, only made the task harder. The opposition had to oppose.

Getting that lesson across wasn’t easy.

Part of the problem, writes Richard Aldous in the Lion and the Unicorn, his brilliant account of the battles between Disraeli and Gladstone, was Disraeli’s innovation. Rank-and-file Tories in mid-century did more than most to justify the Conservatives’ earlier reputation as the ‘stupid party’. What they failed to grasp, or at least appreciate, was Disraeli’s original approach to opposition. He was perhaps the first political leader to demand that the foremost role of the opposition was to oppose. This may seem obvious now, but it was a novel approach in Victorian Britain. Even his most recent predecessors, Lord John Russell and Sir Robert Peel, had maintained a gentlemanly and statesmanlike detachment in the House, challenging legislation only if they really thought ill of it.

We’re under no obligation to stick with a tradition simply because it is a tradition – Voltaire once wrote that what we call a tradition is just an abuse that we’ve maintained for centuries. On the other hand, if a particular approach works, and the Tories’ record shows how well theirs does, we abandon it at our peril.

Indeed, it should be in the kitbag of any professional politician.

Some people have suggested that I’ve been unfairly critical of John McDonnell this week. He’s the Shadow Chancellor, in other words the opposition politician directly focused on financial policy. And my annoyance was caused by his decision not to oppose the government over tax cuts designed to overwhelmingly benefit the rich rather than the poor.

McDonnell is from the left of the Labour Party. He’s a self-proclaimed socialist. This kind of regressive tax ought to be anathema to him.

But, in any case, simply applying the Disraeli maxim that the opposition’s role is to oppose – as Aldous says, ‘this may seem obvious now’ – meant he had to oppose these cuts.

If her were in the same league, McDonnell (right)
could learn a thing or two from Disraeli

The only argument I’ve seen for his not doing so is that the measures would benefit some people who need the support, even though it would deliver far more to people who need it much less. Opposing the cuts would have led to headlines such as ‘Labour: taking money out of the pockets of headteachers and doctors’.

This is a remarkable position to take. Even an amateur commentator on politics knows that the right-wing press will always publish headlines attacking Labour. Try to accommodate Conservative editors? They’ll just change line of attack whereas you’ll have abandoned a principle. A professional should know that.

McDonnell’s failure to oppose the cuts merely attracted derision from the government front bench. He gave Liz Truss, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, a glorious opportunity to mock him, as Heather Stewart pointed out in the Guardian:

”… even the shadow chancellor has welcomed our tax cuts”. She joked that it’s a “shame his party don’t agree with him … you can almost hear Momentum sharpening their pitchforks”.

She added: “I want him to know that all is not lost. Shadow chancellor, you have friends on this side of the House and there is space for you on our front bench. You might have to sit on the home secretary’s knee.”

In attempting to dodge a bad headline, McDonnell opened himself up to ridicule. 

Guess which is more damaging in politics.

Some have asked me what I might have done better. My first answer is that I’m not a politician but, as a literary critic once said on being attacked for not being able to write a book himself, I may not be able to cook but I know when a meal is good. And the one McDonnell cooked certainly isn’t.

My second answer is that I know that I’m an amateur with no experience of executive responsibility in a major party. I know my limitations and I have no illusions about being able to act as Shadow Chancellor, a position to which no one would elect me in any case.

Unfortunately, McDonnell and his party leader Jeremy Corbyn, have as little experience of executive authority as I do. The difference is that they don’t realise it. They don’t admit that they too are amateurs trying to play a game in which Disraeli showed the need for professionalism.

And, boy, does it show.

Crime and Vice, Tragedy and Farce, Privilege and Rights

My sermon today draws on two readings. 

The first is from an outstanding figure of British, indeed World, Conservatism, Benjamin Disraeli. In his novel Tancred he wrote “what is a crime among the multitude is only a vice among the few.”

By way of contrast, the second reading is from one the founding fathers of modern Communism, Karl Marx. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he pointed out that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

I found the Disraeli quotation in Hannah Arendt’s excellent The Origins of Totalitarianism. She uses it to illustrate the curious phenomenon of the acceptance of certain, exceptional Jews in aristocratic and wealthy nineteenth-century circles. In such an anti-Semitic environment, being Jewish was a ‘crime’ in the masses, but in rare, privileged individuals such as Disraeli, it was merely a vice – something that added piquancy, a touch of the exotic, and was consequently more to be indulged than reproved.

Benjamin Disraeli: made his way into society
by stressing his status as an outsider

Disraeli seems to have understood this phenomenon, and although baptised, he affected an appearance to emphasise his Jewish origins, his status as an outsider, not least in his style of hair and beard. 

It worked. Doors opened to him which would have been closed to most people, let alone Jews. He became an MP, the power behind one figurehead Prime Minister, and then Prime Minister himself. And he was the friend of the Queen, his fairytale princess to whom he offered the fantasy title of “Empress of India.”

In passing, he became one of the dominant figures of world politics of his period. Not always for good, it has to be said: he was a key figure in what became the scramble for Africa, which did little for the wellbeing of the inhabitants of that stricken continent.

Now roll forward a century and more. It may not be as serious a crime as Jewishness among anti-Semites, but it’s still reprehensible to smash a shop window deliberately. The law rightly takes a dim view of such criminal damage, as a great many young people in England discovered after the riots of August 2011. 

A slightly different attitude was taken towards similar antics one Oxford night quarter of a century earlier. A flowerpot was flung though the window of a restaurant in the city. However, the young men responsible were not poor, unemployed or coloured. They were members of the famous – or notorious – Bullingdon Club, an organisation that brings together the wealthiest students of the university so that they can enjoy glorious evenings of drunkenness, sometimes capped by trashing the restaurant where they take place.

Who was in the group that particular night? One was Boris Johnson, now Mayor of London. Another, though it’s possible he went home before the restaurant window was smashed, was David Cameron, now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

But these are members of the few. The happy few. What’s a crime among the masses is but a vice for them. Youthful indiscretion that shouldn’t lead to long-term consequences. As it clearly hasn’t for Cameron, current leader of the Conservative Party, or Johnson, his leading rival, or indeed George Osborne, another former member of the Club, current Chancellor of the Exchequer and also a contender for Cameron’s crown.

Which brings me to Marx. 

With Disraeli, the crime to be converted into mere vice, was Jewishness. And the man whose privileges allowed him to do it was a political giant.

Sadly, as Arendt points out, making Jewishness a vice rather than a crime has its dangers, however well it worked for Disraeli. A crime is an action requiring punishment, but vice is inherent in personality and, when it loses its charm, it can only be eradicated. The sense that Jewishness is innate was the grounds for the Nazi programme of extermination in the century following Disraeli’s.

A harrowing tragedy.

Boris Johnson, George Osborne and David Cameron also enjoyed the privilege of having a crime treated as a vice. They’ve inflicted terrible suffering on the most vulnerable among the masses. But not one of them has yet achieved anything more memorable than their buffoonery in the Bullingdon Club.

A grim farce.

The common thread is privilege. Privilege is a gift to the few which, as Arendt explains, denies the rights of the many.

Which makes me wonder why those of us who lack privilege and depend on rights, persist in voting for any of the farcical lot of them.

Red Scares without Reds

‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.’ 

These are the opening words of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848. Like many such stirring words, they have little or no relation to the truth. Europe was indeed exploding in revolutions that year, but they were nationalist (against the Austrian Empire, for instance) or for extended political rights (for example, in France and Germany).

The international communist movement was basically Karl Marx working in the British Museum library in London, and a handful of his friends and supporters around the place.

When I was working myself in that same library, back in the eighties, a librarian told me an apocryphal story a colleague asked, on his retirement many years earlier, whether he’d known Karl Marx.

‘German gentleman?’ he’s said to have asked in reply, ‘came in here for quite a while and then we never heard much more about him?’

German gentleman who haunted the British Museum
for a while before fading into obscurity

Communism didn’t really come out of its obscurity until a party claiming to be communist in inspiration seized power in Russia in 1917. But, wow, did things change then. If the Nazis came to dominate Germany, it was in part because a great many people, and not just in Germany, saw them as a possible barrier to the apparently irresistible progress of Communism.

Nowhere was as haunted by the spectre of Communism as the United States. America fought an indecisive war in Korea to stem its advance and then, most disastrously, took the first defeat in its history in Vietnam, a glorious example of a self-fulfilling hypothesis: US justification for war in Vietnam was the domino effect, whereby Communist victory in one country would lead to several others going the same way. When US forces had to pull out of Saigon, Communist movements had taken over Laos and, most sickeningly, Cambodia.

Fear of Communism also led to what must be still today the most shameful period in US history: the McCarthy witch hunts against alleged Communists in the fifties. All the worst aspects of a police state were there, including anonymous denunciation, conviction on suspicion and assumption of guilt.

But then along came Nixon and showed that even a right-wing President could make common ground with regimes claiming allegiance to Communist thinking. Ping-pong diplomacy opened up China to US links and, even today, the US finds itself perfectly able to work with those particular Communists.

That left the Soviet Union as the whipping boy for the anti-Communists. Until 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then the satellite nations quickly slipped away both from Russia and Communism and the West claimed the Cold War won.

For a brief moment, we were treated to all sorts of panegyrics to the newborn Russian democracy. But then we discovered that what had replaced the Soviet regime wasn’t quite as democratic as had been claimed. An invasion of Georgia showed that the Russian republic was quite as ready to behave unpleasantly towards its neighbours as the Soviet Union had, though it was perhaps incapable of acting on quite the same scale.

Several murders of critics, and the imprisonment of many others, have shown that it’s happy to be just as nasty towards its internal adversaries as those from abroad. Nowhere has this been more clearly demonstrated as in the condemning to hard labour of two members of a punk group, Pussy Riot, for being offensive towards the lay and religious authorities.

But now Russia has gone one step further. It has offered temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, who got right up the noses of the US establishment by revealing evidence of its misbehaviour. Putin is clearly not acting out of democratic motives; his action has to be a calculated insult to the US, and it’s had exactly the desired effect. 

Senator John McCain is the man who won himself a reputation for clear judgement and faultless political instinct, by picking Sarah Palin as his running mate in his vain bid to win the presidency against Obama in 2008. This was the woman who amazed us with her farsightedness (literally) on matters Russian, by claiming that she could see the place from her home in Alaska.

McCain is now gracing us with his own views on the country in response to the Snowden affair:

‘Russia’s action today is a disgrace and a deliberate effort to embarrass the United States. It is a slap in the face of all Americans. [...] We cannot allow today’s action by Putin to stand without serious repercussions.’

McCain: didn't do his reputation for judgement any good
by his selection of a running mate. But he's mad now...

Those of us who lived through the Cold War may recognise the tone of this pronouncement. And yet the Communists are gone. So here’s my question: was the animosity ever really about Communism? Or actually just about Russia? Did the Red Scare have anything to do with Reds?

I only ask because this kind of talk isn’t new. Here’s a rising star from the British Parliamentary Opposition demanding to know whether the best means had ‘been employed by the Government to establish the equilibrium, and put an end to the preponderance of Russia in the Black Sea’.

You can picture John McCain asking that kind of question. But in fact the speaker was Benjamin Disraeli, later to be British Prime Minister. He was speaking in a debate on 4 June 1855, when Britain, along with France, was actually at war with Russia in its Black Sea territory of the Crimea.

An actual shooting war, not a cold one.

Charge of the light brigade in the Crimean War
Good subject matter for poetry, not such smart politics

Seems the West’s had problems with Russia for quite a while now, certainly since long before Communism. 

With Communism way behind us, are we stoking them all up again?

Immigration: stop protesting, start celebrating

Back in the 1990s, the rising star in the Conservative Party was Michael Portillo. The darling of the right, he shone in the Thatcher firmament. As it happens, since he left politics and recycled himself as a broadcaster and author on history and on morality, he seems to have become more liberal and shown admirable qualities that he kept well hidden when he was a politician.

In the years of the Blair Labour government, the Conservatives ran through a string of party leaders before settling – God help us – on David Cameron. One of them was Michael Howard. He never made it to the top job, but he’d had ministerial positions under both Thatcher and Major, despite one of his colleagues, Ann Widdecombe, saying that ‘he had something of the night about him’.

Jumping back into the previous century, one of the giants of Conservative politics was Benjamin Disraeli. Among his more dramatic coups was buying the Khedive of Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal. Because the government simply didn’t have the money to buy them, Disraeli persuaded Lionel de Rothschild to stake him and pulled off a remarkably beneficial acquisition on his own personal authority.

Disraeli: grandchild of immigrants
but worth a cartoon by John Tenniel

Why do I mention all these people? Because they are all of immigrant stock. These were not men of the left, but of the solid respectable establishment (you certainly don’t get much more solidly anchored than a Rothschild, in particular), but they came from families who had only recently arrived in this country. Yet they played prominent roles in its life.

And they were far from alone. In the arts, we’ve had a Joseph Conrad or a Salman Rushdie; we had Sigmund Freud launching a psychoanalytic school that is still going strong; we had Ludwig Wittgenstein doing his philosophical work in this country.

These are all celebrities, figures whose names at least are familiar to most of us. But there are many others who have come from abroad and enriched our life as private individuals, even if it’s only by running a shop that stays open late, or providing an affordable and reliable minicab service; immigrants supply nurses, doctors and managers to the the health service; they pick our fruit and till our farmlands (during a previous anti-immigrant campaign in the early years of this century, many farmers were concerned at the departure of so many Poles, if only because it would be impossible to get the strawberry harvest in).

In addition, most of the criticisms of immigrants are less likely to be involved in crime than natives; they are less likely to be drawing benefits; they are less likely to be in social housing. And we have fewer immigrants, per capita, than the US, Switzerland or France.

So what is it about our nation that’s causing a growing proportion of the people to be tempted by the anti-immigrant rhetoric floating around these days? Why is David Cameron trying to ride this wave? Even more dangerous, what is the attraction of the anti-immigrant party UKIP, the wittily named ‘United Kingdom Independence Party’ (as though any nation our size has a chance of independence in today’s world)?

After all, if the worry was overpopulation, we might expect a campaign to concentrate on the birth rate (700,000 babies born a year) rather than net immigration (100,000 more arrivals than departures a year).

But is this concern really to do with the economic or cultural impact of immigrants in the first place? Or is it really to do with the fact that they speak a different language or belong to a different religion? Or, horror of horrors, that some of them are of a different skin colour? Isn’t that all this comes down to in the final analysis? Simply another outbreak of racism seeking to cover its ugliness in pretended worries about the impact of large numbers of arrivals from abroad. It’s sad that so few of our politicians speak out against it.

So let’s remember the vast majority of immigrants who have enriched our national life, even if a few of them did it in the Tory Party. Some have made major, globally-recognised contributions; most contribute on a smaller scale daily; only a tiny number do harm.

Let’s celebrate them and reject those mean-spirited figures who refuse to join in the celebrations with us.

Delights for the eye and ear give food for thought

If music be the food of love, painting isn’t far behind. So it was good to get a good dose of both this weekend.

The paintings were at the pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the Tate in London, and what a glorious display it is. I always think of pre-Raphaelites as being a mixed bag: the occasional outstanding piece that speaks straight to the heart; but also a few pictures that leave me wondering, ‘oh, right. And there’s a lot of fuss about this canvass, is there? With its figures that look as though they’ve been cut out and pasted in place afterwards?’ 

But there are so many of the outstanding paintings in this exhibition that the others simply don’t impinge. I was delighted to get to know some painters I knew not at all – William Dyce, for instance, and Arthur Hughes – and one at least who I knew far too little – Edward Burne-Jones. But above all I was glad to discover paintings I didn’t know, including some by John Millais, the member of the group I had always felt stood head and shoulders above the rest, a view the show did nothing to dispel. 

John Millais, Mariana. A glorious discovery (for me)
That pose – so natural and yet with such erotic overtones

The music was a completely different experience. We went to see Papatruck, a bluegrass band in a jewel of a Church, St Michael and All Angels, in the Chiltern Hills, North-West of London on the way to Oxford. The band’s sole female musician is Nia, a school-friend of my stepson’s. It was the first time we’d seen her in twenty years, but hey, blood runs thicker than water, and it was a joy to meet her again and another to hear the music.

It was also magical that they were playing in a Church whose crypt contains the remains of my favourite Conservative politician bar none: Benjamin Disraeli.

The Queen's tribute to Disraeli.
Ben's disguised as 'Earl Beaconsfield' in the
time-honoured English style of preferring aliases.

Queen Victoria, who lost her husband Prince Albert shockingly young, always adored Disraeli, no doubt in part because he flirted with her outrageously. She had a memorial plaque to him raised in the Church. It made me think of a story our history teacher told us, that she’d offered to visit him on his death bed, an extraordinary offer by a reigning monarch to a man who’d been born a commoner (and of Jewish extraction, to boot). 

‘Oh, no,’ Disraeli replied, ‘she’ll only give me a message for Albert.’

I loved it that the concert was taking place in an Anglican Church. We were addressed twice by the vicar who managed to talk about the purpose of the evening – to raise funds for the care of the homeless of High Wycombe – without once mentioning God, the Church, faith, hope or charity. You see what I meant in an earlier blog? The Church of England belongs to us all in this country – it doesn’t even make a point of thrusting anything potentially contentious, like religion, in our faces.

Glorious setting for music to set the pulse racing

Thanks to the spellbinding novels of Hilary Mantel, I’m steeped at the moment in the sixteenth-century world of Thomas Cromwell and Tudor England, when ‘our Church’ first emerged. In those days the European presence in the Americas was essentially Spanish. Certainly, there was no English presence though eventually, and long after Cromwell’s death, English colonies would take root in the northern part of the landmass. In time, some of the settlers would penetrate into a territory which they would name, after the Iroquois word for meadowlands, Kentucky. 

Eventually transformed into a commonwealth and then a State, Kentucky would grow so strongly and successfully that it developed its own distinctive style of music, called after the startling wealth of those meadowlands, ‘bluegrass music’. And the music travelled back to the old country so that in 2012, we could sit in the knave of one of the churches that owe so much to Thomas Cromwell, and listen to five of his descendants play those haunting songs to us.

Would old Cromwell have approved or disapproved?

I have a nasty feeling he would have been shocked by the irreligious nature of the music, in a place dedicated to the glorification of the gospels. I wonder whether he would have thought of Kentucky, if he had ever thought of it at all, as a savage land and its music as no better. And I imagine he would have been horrified at the secular message of the priest, as he would have been by the fact that the audience for the concert was significantly larger, I suspect, than any congregation to assemble in that Church these days.

‘Was it for this that I struggled, lived and died?’ I suspect he might have asked.

I rather fear it might have been, Tom. And I hate to say it, we had a great time. Lutheran hymns just don’t do it for us the way Bluegrass music does, especially superbly performed the Papatruck way.

Papatruck - inspirational though far from Kentucky.
Nia's on the left (of course). Her instrument's on the right.