Strange how the fascination with dynasties continues...

It’s amazing how difficult it is for us to rid ourselves of belief in the power of “blood” as the main determinant of anyone’s qualities. We all know it isn’t true, but we still somehow believe that mere birth will make someone better qualified than anyone else to lead, or to rule, or just to lord if over everyone around.

I mean, look at Prince Charles. You want proof that high birth doesn’t guarantee high qualities? Look no further.

The prejudice clings on even in a country where deliberate steps were taken to put an end to this preposterous notion. “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States” claims the Constitution of that fine nation. And yet the sixth president, John Quincy Adams, was the son of the second, John Adams. Just as Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd, was the grandson of William Henry Harrison, the ninth. Even the two Roosevelts, though not closely related, were distant cousins.

The dynasty that never fulfilled its promise was the Kennedys. Bobby and Ted both held high office, under or in the wake of their brother JFK, but both were cheated of going further by death: in Bobby’s case his own, in Ted’s that of Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned when he drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick.

These instances of keeping things in the family weren’t always bad. John Quincy Adams, for instance, strikes me as rather a fine fellow. He was defeated at the end of his second term by a cruel, bigoted and authoritarian successor, Andrew Jackson, the man who drove the Cherokees and other native Americans away down the “trail of tears” and had far less than enlightened views of the role of African Americans (he felt slavery was right for them). 

Undeterred, Adams got himself elected to Congress where he served 17 years, up to his death. And he appeared as a lawyer for the (successful) defence of the rebel slaves of the Spanish ship Amistad when their case went to the Supreme Court.

William Henry Harrison.
Distinguished only by the shortest presidency
And having a grandson who also achieved the office

Many of these blood relatives, however, were a pretty sorry bunch. William Henry Harrison’s presidency was distinguished only by being the shortest ever (32 days until his death from pneumonia); his grandson Benjamin’s presidency is undistinguished by anything at all.

But when it comes to sorry dynasties, we have to come forward to the present day for the sorriest. With Jeb Bush declaring his interest in the presidency, we have in prospect for the first time ever a candidate who is not merely the son of a President but the brother of another. And yet the father was unprepossessing in office, the brother lamentable.

Now this kind of thing can happen in a monarchy, as in Britain. George III lost his mind by the end of his reign; he was succeeded by his vainglorious, self-indulgent son George IV; and then by a younger son, William IV, who though slightly brighter, was never going to set the Thames alight.

Surprisingly like the Bush bunch.

Now, that this can happen in a monarchy is sad but understandable. But in a strongly established republic? With two or three hundred million people to choose from? It seems amazing.

What’s particularly striking is that every presidential election between 1980 and 2004 – seven of them – had at least one Bush or Clinton on one of the tickets, running either for President or for Vice President. And 1992 pitted one of each against each other: Bush the father against Clinton the (erring) husband.

Well, if Jeb Bush gets his way, and Hillary Clinton gets hers, 2016 could see a re-run of that battle of the dynasties. Proof if any were needed that, whatever the Constitution says about actual titles, notions of aristocracy run as deep in the US as they do anywhere else.

Hillary Clinton: a more inspiring representative of dynastic politics
Besides, she's not really a member of the dynasty

To be fair, one of the possible outcomes would again prove that this kind of dynastic politics doesn’t always have to be bad news. A Hlllary presidency could be a great result, and not just because she would be first woman president, after the first African American, but because Hillary is even brighter than the other half of the Clinton duo – and in any case, she wasn’t a Clinton by birth, only by marriage.

Which naturally brings to mind the old story about the couple. Skip it if you know it, but in case you don’t, it bears repeating here.

The Clintons were filling up with petrol – gas, I should say – at some miserable filling station in the wilds of Arkansas. Bill was struck by the strange looks passing between his wife and the station attendant.

Once they were back on the road, he asks what that was all about.

“Oh, we dated for a while back then when we were in High School,” she explains.

Bill laughs.

“Well, just think what a different life you’d have had if you’d married him! You wouldn’t have got to the White House.”

“Oh,” replies Hillary, “if I’d married him, he’d have been its occupant.”

Let's get out of the EU just like we got away from the US

To be chief of staff to Tony Blair is a bit like being keeper of the curious compounds to the Borgias, so I’m not always inclined to regard Jonathan Powell with relaxed confidence. Nevertheless, he spent a while in diplomacy – another of those jobs not always marked by its qualities of straightforwardness and frank speaking – so he probably knows a bit about how one state ought to handle their relationship with others.

Powell: probably an authority but, hey, a Blairite. Lock up the spoons.

So it was interesting to read Powell’s paper in Monday’s Guardian about David Cameron’s long-awaited speech on Britain’s relationship with the European Union. As he argues, the speech was designed to win Cameron an immediate boost in short-term popularity, and it seems to have worked: the latest polls show him 3 or 4 points closer to the Labour opposition than he was before.

However, as Powell says, Cameron’s made any such gain at the cost of launching a five-year campaign over whether Britain stays in the EU or not.

Cameron has said he will only campaign to stay in the EU if he is first able to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s membership. Until he pulls off that fairly improbable feat, he’ll presumably have to hold his peace; and if he fails, as seems likely, what will he do? He claims to be a convinced Europhile: would he have to argue against his conviction?

In the meantime, the Eurosceptics will be under no restraint to silence their increasingly virulent attacks on British membership. On the contrary, they’ll take encouragement from Cameron’s having declared open season on the EU.

So our membership of the EU is at risk. The Eurosceptic current in the population is delighted. They see the millions it costs us to be members but somehow miss the hundreds of millions in additional trade it provides us; they see the way it forces us to let Johnny Foreigner in but don’t see that new arrivals are less inclined to claim benefits than native Brits and do jobs we can’t persuade anyone else to take on; they see that the Union imposes legal restrictions on us but don’t see that the same provisions guarantee us rights, including the opportunity to live and work in any of 26 other countries.

Now there’s nothing new about this kind of unenlightened thinking. Most peoples, but the Brits more than many, love to focus so much on the shortest of short terms that they lose track of the long-term advantage they’re giving up. Funnily enough, I’ve just been reading some more about one of the more obtuse instances of Britain behaving that way in the past.

Back in the eighteenth century, Britain fought a bunch of wars against those perpetual party-poopers from across the Channel, the French. Given the opposition, the Brits naturally won, but it cost a bit.

‘Blimey,’ they said, ‘who can we get to pay for this?’

So they took a look across the Atlantic and saw those enterprising colonists making money out in America. ‘I know,’ they said, ‘we’ll tax them.’

Sadly, the Colonists didn’t see things quite the same way. ‘Raise your own bloody money,’ they said, ‘we’re taking our ball away and won’t play any more.’

I read recently about John Adams of Massachusetts and Ben Franklin of Pennsylvania heading a delegation to visit the Lords Howe, one brother an Admiral, the other a General, in New York. Classic, isn’t it, that Britain was represented by two sprigs of the nobility, old Etonians, occupying their top positions thanks to their birth, because their talent certainly wouldn’t have got them there?

John Adams was worried about the likely behaviour of the Howes, but was astonished and delighted by the smooth courtesy and polished charm the two gentlemen displayed over dinner. Again, perfect isn’t it? Their descendants combine urbanity and incompetence in just the same measure.

Admiral Howe: not a lot of cop militarily, apparently
But he doesn't look a bundle of laughs either, to be honest

The discussions led nowhere and within days the Howes were in action against the colonists, winning crushing victories. However, each time they whipped the dastardly Yanks, the Howes went back to their charming dinners for another month or so, while their opponents slipped away and regrouped ready to attack again when the opportunity presented. And isn’t that appropriate too? Cameron wins his little skirmishes and then relaxes on his laurels while the war slips away from him.

Now Cameron isn’t an eighteenth-century general. Or even an admiral. And the EU isn’t a set of British possessions. But the North American colonies turned into the most powerful and prosperous nation on earth, and Britain’s short-term approach ensured that it would be no part of that. All for the sake of a little money they needed right then, and didn’t get anyway, and for want of a strategy properly elaborated and consistently applied, they turned their back on pretty cracking opportunity, the best they probably ever had.

Today, Cameron is looking at the possibility of working more closely with one of the world’s biggest economic blocs, one likely to grow still more powerful in the future. He has deliberately adopted an approach that will marginalise Britain from it. He’s done that for the sake of an uncertain short-term gain. 

That feels like exactly the kind of respect for tradition that we appreciate in Britain.

‘That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history’ said Aldous Huxley. He was British. He was well placed to know.

Soldiers to secure peace? Time to learn a lesson

‘From the nature of things, soldiers quartered in a populous town, will always occasion two mobs, where they prevent one. They are wretched conservators of the peace.’

Interesting observation. Soldiers may not be the best people to help make or keep the peace. Curious, actually, that we even need to be told that: after all, we train our soldiers to be as good as we can get them at waging war. So why should they be all that good at quelling disturbances? Their specialty is creating the biggest disturbances of all.

It’s not just mobs, of course, but the equation applies in other areas. Take ‘Improvised Explosive Devices’ (don’t they sound much less unpleasant than roadside bombs?): for every one an occupying army defuses, it usually provokes the planting of two more.

The Western Nations bringing peace to trouble communities

That would be a lesson we could do with learning, as we blunder around Iraq or Afghanistan or, who knows, perhaps Syria next. Britain and America, in particular, would do well to take heed, since they seem among the most inclined to wander in first and worry about how their military will be received afterwards.

To keep the lid on civilian trouble you need the police (and to be honest they’re not always as good at it as we might like), not the army.

It may amuse you to know that the words I quoted were spoken by a lawyer who was defending a group of soldiers who had fired into a disorderly crowd – in his terms, a mob – and killed five of them. The victims were the lawyer’s countrymen; the soldiers were part of a foreign occupying force.

You’ve got to admit it was a brief that took courage to accept.

And to general amazement, in front of a jury also made up of his countrymen, he got all the soldiers cleared of murder (two were found guilty of manslaughter and received relatively minor sentences). Lawyer and jury showed a commendable, not to say exceptional, preference for the rule of law and natural justice over their political inclinations.

A great story though, sadly, not a very recent one. The civilian deaths occurred in 1770, in what came to be known as the Boston Massacre. The soldiers were British. The lawyer for the defence was John Adams, later second president of the (independent) United States.

The British and the Americans. Them again. Sad, isn’t it? The British clearly never learned the lesson Adams tried to teach them. And though he had obviously got his mind around the idea, Adams’ countrymen seem to have forgotten it.

The consequences are tragic for the servicemen and women we send out to wage our wars. They’re even more tragic for the civilian populations on which we descend.

And yet we were warned nearly two and a half centuries ago...

The young John Adams. He knew a thing or two...