G.M.W. Wemyss's Blog, page 2

Homage to a parliament….

This cannot be right.

Not on the merits; not as precedent; not as procedure.

On the eve of the centenary of the Great War, we are now living in the world of Larkin’s ‘Homage to a Government’: and this cannot be right.

I hold no brief for Mr Obama. I despise his politics, and I know him by his actions to be no friend to this country and to the Crown. That is not the point.

I admire Mr Hannan and Mr Carswell. I have always been very fond of Lord Tebbitt. But they are not infallible.

Lord Guthrie is...

Neptune’s Sword, Juno’s Gold: the blood and treasure spent

We remember this day especially, amongst all the Allies, the officers and ships’ companies and the officers and Other Ranks of:

HMSNelson

HMSRamillies

HMSRodney

HMSWarspite

HMS Frobisher

HMS Hawkins

HMS Argonaut

HMS Ajax

HMS Arethusa

HMS Belfast

HMS Bellona

HMS Black Prince

HMS Capetown

HMS Ceres

HMS Danae

HMS Diadem

HMS Emerald

HMS Enterprise

HMS Glasgow

HMS Mauritius

HMS Orion

HMS Scylla

HMCS Algonquin

HMS Bleasdale

HMS Boadicea

HMCS Cape Breton

HMS Cattistock

HMCS Chaudiere

HMS Cottesmore

HMS Eglinton

HMS Faulknor

HMS Fu...

Gay marriage? Not in my fabulously gay name, love

The Rt Revd Nicholas Holtam, bishop – God help us – of my ruddy diocese, has graciously condescended to anoint himself a ‘gay “ally”’ and explain to us what we are to think on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill which the Lords take up on Monday. Old Nick has taken to every luvvie media outlet he can find to proclaim his happy secular gospel, and his thoughts, if one can call them that, are these: times change and we change with them (it is too much to expect, nowadays, that a bishop has the...

Today’s news … in a world of Leveson Licences. (Act now, or this stitch-up is our future.)

And here is the news as it might be with ‘a dab of statute’:

Today’s news, under licence:

National Government stays steady course

The Chancellor, Dr Vince Cable, and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Ed Balls, announced today in advance of the Budget that the National Government were on target with recovery measures and public investment. Despite irresponsible foreign press reports, it is understood that the recovery is proceeding apace. Prime Minister Cameron and Ed Miliband, the Leader of t...

As yearly, We Shall Remember

Remembrance: Old Soldiers at the Cenotaph

The Bath chair or the Zimmer frame,

The agèd, gnarled, claw-like hand:

Was it to this that heroes came

In England’s green and pleasant land?

Do generations give just due

To those who faced the direst foe:

The Senior Service and the Few,

The BEF of long ago?

Burma – (Blenheim, Ramillies –),

The Mons Canal, El Alamein,

The ancient wars that won the peace

Are figured in their names again;

The trenches of the Kaiser’s war,

The aerodromes at grass in Kent,

The surge of s...

Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d

Eleven years ago, a gang of obscurantist barbarians murdered several thousand people.

The mass murder occurred largely in New York, and partly in Pennsylvania and in Washington DC. Most of the dead were Americans. But not all.

A former British Para born in Cornwall – by 11 September 2001 a naturalised American citizen and former United States Army officer – CR ‘Rick’ Rescorla, the World Trade Centre security chief, gave his life in rescuing others. Thousands of others.

On 11 September 2001, as t...

Ave, Augusta Mater Patriæ. Vivat Regina.

Ma’am:

You know better far than do we – better, indeed, than anyone, with the possible exceptions of HRH the duke of Edinburgh, the several heads of your Secret Intelligence Service, your Forces, and the first of your Prime Ministers – what stern travails, seen and – to us – unseen, these six decades have brought. Yet we, your subjects, joined, my business partner assures me, by the people if not the current government of our US ally, know enough to be very sensible of our obligation and debt of gratitude to Your Majesty, and to Divine Providence for having placed Your Majesty upon the Throne.

For six decades, you have defended your wicket against the trickiest bowling history could send … and hit it all ’round the pitch, not infrequently for six. And you remain Not Out.

You have been as staunch and reassuring as Salisbury Cathedral; as crisp as real cider; when meet, as sharp as farmhouse Cheddar; and as immemorial as henge and chalk horse, cursus and barrow.

You have brought modernity and common sense to institutions far more hidebound by old Spanish practices and unwritten rules than ever has been the Household; and you have provided a sense of permanence and continuity in times of kaleidoscopic change. And through it all, you have been as ageless as Bruce Forsyth and Cliff Richard between them.

You, Ma’am, have fulfilled the duties of a constitutional monarch with the strict regularity of poetic metre; and have, by attending to these quotidian quiddities and daily duties, made a poetry of them that Larkin and Betjeman had approved and applauded.

In good times and in bad, Your Majesty has been a fixed point, a stabiliser amidst the madding spin, earthed and solid amidst the flux: the tea, the Evensong, the Test Match Special of our civic life even at its most febrile. Your Majesty has been an institution, like Shakespeare and Milton, Bunyan, the Authorised Version, and Cranmer’s liturgy; Your Majesty has been a recurrent treat, like Eric and Ernie and Christmas panto and the Grand National; and, Ma’am, you have always been a person rather than an institution, and loved for your qualities even more than you have been respected for your position. You have been mater patriæ, and we are proud to be a part of that family, at home and throughout the Commonwealth, to whom you consecrated your life of service. And you have never let us down – which is more than we can say in return.

Land Army girls and ATS,

And in their midst Our Princess. Bless.

In war’s dark hour we saw her stand,

Amidst the rubble, hand in hand,

With those who would not yield or bow.

God saved her then.  God save her now.

Her father would not fail or flee,

Her mother graced the few and free

Who stayed through midnight’s dire alarms,

And chanced the worst of Hitler’s harms.

Our future Queen, herself in arms,

Not sent abroad or to the farms

That sheltered other children then,

Showed spirit fit for leading men.

And we – her soldiers, or the Few,

Her sailors – aye, her subjects, too –

Remember courage like a flame

In our then princess.  All her fame

Is well-deserved: for it was earned,

On lurid nights when London burned.

God bless and save and keep you, Ma’am, for many, many years more. Vivat!

What might have been … and why it isn’t

With the Windies at 73/4 just before lunch at Trent Bridge, I am very pleased today to feature a guest contribution – after all, I’m far too busy following the Test – from my American Texan publishing partner at Bapton Books. Markham Shaw Pyle is the author of “Fools, Drunks, and the United States”: August 12, 1941, a history of the day on which Congress, by one vote, four months prior to Pearl Harbor, kept the US military draft; my co-author in our history of the investigations into the loss of RMS Titanic, and the essays in The Bapton Books Sampler and The Transatlantic Disputations; and, of course, my co-editor and co-annotator in our annotated Kipling and annotated Wind in the Willows. He holds his undergraduate and law degrees from Washington & Lee University, in Virginia, and is a past or current member of, inter alia, the Organization of American Historians; the Society for Military History; the Southern Historical Association; the Southwestern Social Science Association; the Southwestern Historical Association; the Southwestern Political Science Association; the Virginia Historical Society; and the Texas State Historical Association.

Most of you who follow the news are likely to recall hearing, a week or so ago, that the Obama White House edited the biographies of former presidents, on the White House website, to link all of their achievements to President Obama’s talking-points. This was, to put it informally, lame. Lame as a three-legged dog. (Yes, it’s my day to be folksy and demotic. Gut it up.)

The President, and his acolytes, starry-eyed staffers, and lickspittles, would have come across as – frankly – less pitiable and pathetic if they’d at least showed a bit of wit in doing something so damn-fool as that. Why not – if you’re going to edit history, a la Stalin – at least embed an appropriate song on each earnestly middle-school biography? William Howard Taft, obviously, would get Little Feat’s “Fat Man in the Bathtub”; JFK, admit it, deserves – not something from Camelot: that would be hackneyed – but Ol’ Blue Eyes’ “Fly Me to the Moon.” There’d be an embarrassment of choice when it came to Dick Nixon: Randy Newman (“Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man”); Bowie’s “Young Americans” (and Woodrow Wilson, far as that goes, could have the B-side, “Suffragette City”); and, shoot, you can’t very well leave out Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” (“Now, Watergate does not bother me…”). Even Silent Cal Coolidge has possibilities: Newman’s “Louisiana 1927”, of course; given how everyone, even Cal, adored Mrs. Coolidge, there’s The Tymes’ Carolina beach music classic, “Ms Grace”; and what could be more apt than Philip Glass? “Silent Cal”, indeed. (W, obviously, would get some ZZ Top or some Bob Wills or some outlaws. Or more Skynyrd. Reagan, naturally, merits the more libertarian charts by Rush.)

Okay: I have, really, a serious point to make. Politics – so far as I can see, on both sides of the Atlantic – have become puerile (and certainly bereft of wit). The rise of a class of professional politicians (pretty amateur, most of them, but professional in the sense that they’ve never done anything else in their miserable lives) has a lot to answer for. I’m about five or six hours younger than Wemyssie, and a few weeks older than another of our forthcoming Bapton Books authors (who’s Italian, so that’s the US, the UK, and the EU spoken for), and I can say this: if the generation that fought WWII and the Korean War was America’s “Greatest Generation”, we Boomers they engendered are the worst, most miserable, and most contemptible, as a generation. (I like to think there are exceptions, particularly in July of ’62. In fact, if you were born in July 1962 and have a manuscript, let us know: it was apparently a vintage month.) And we Boomers, judging by the ignorant, self-obsessed Gen-X and Millennials we produced, ought to have been forbidden to breed. Well, okay, no, I’m far too libertarian to really believe that, but you do look at the vaunted future and despair, honestly.

Now, one reason there’s all this childishness going around, is, wit and irony, like reasoned argument, require maturity, logic, and self-examination – which is why the hipsters and their claims to irony are as shallow, for all their pretenses, as the dregs of their damn lattes. Couple that with pretension and it’s Katy-bar-the-door. Let me tell you a story or two. Ages ago, when a man could make actual money from it, I did a right smart of book reviews at epinions-dot-com. Made a few bucks; made a right smart of friends, there in the books section (and music and whiskey: I know my strengths). Well, along came Facebook (I’m putting together a graphic for my Facebook page: “Of course I’m surrounded by idiots: I’m on Facebook”). I finally got round to joining the dang thing, and, sure enough, there were a lot of my old friends, from our website days, and a bunch of the guys from my university (undergraduate vintage: we didn’t succumb to coeducation until after I’d gotten my BA).

And a couple of things became right obvious, right fast.

Folks I’d known at the old website sent me friend requests, and I said, “Sure, why not.” I’d respected them, and their work. Some of them had become off-line friends. Now, I understand that most of them are artsy, literary types, from whom, let’s face it, it’s a bootless errand to expect much political sophistication. Y’all’d call ’em “lovies.” But that never stopped them, bless their pea-picking hearts, from sounding off with the Conventional Wisdom and the DNC Talking Points.

You can pretty much see where this is going. Far as I’m concerned, debate is an intellectual contact sport. If people are going to flap their gums about law and history, economics and public policy, they might ought to consider that there’s not going to be just a smuggery of Leftists in comments nodding and agreeing. You start a debate, you’ve thrown it open, seems to me. Well, I’ll be damned if they didn’t react like slugs to a salt-shaker. They’d be shrieking emotively, and if you presumed to point out a fallacy or put a logical refutation, it would be hell to pay and no pitch hot. All right; fair enough. But, come the heck on, people: if you defriend someone you friended in the first place because you want to stop the debate, you haven’t exactly won. You’ve just run away. Or if you have no more response to argument than, “Well, you can chop logic and bring up law and history all you like; I’m going to go on Being a Decent Person instead,” you really haven’t burnished any credentials bar Damn Fool of the Year.

And it even affects a goodly chunk of my old university friends. I’ve always been a conservative – in the modern sense: a classical liberal with libertarian leanings – out of conviction. I’m a Democrat (one of the last conservative rearguard) out of inertia and Southern upbringing, along with a healthy distrust of the Wall Street crony capitalists the Elephants can’t seem to shake (even when they know the SOBs are showering cash on the DNC as well. The only capitalists Lefty governments like are crony capitalists: they like being cronies). Now, between 1980 and 1984, damn near everyone I knew at W&L was a Republican.

And damned if they’re not all Lefty wet noodles now, or most of ’em, at least. (I still like them all well enough; I just feel disappointed.) No, it’s not that they’ve had a sudden access of maturity – not judging by their arguments, so far as they have arguments. It’s that fashions have changed, and they’ve changed to be fashionable. One old friend actually said to me – this, from a man who was somewhat to my right thirty years ago – “oh, I’ve learned compassion since then.” Well, what in the Sam Hill does that have to do with the price of tea in China? I’m not much for social conservatives – I keep telling them, Gerald Ford was right when he warned that a government big enough to give you all you want, is big enough to take all you have, and in just the same way, a government you empower to enforce your moral views, will start enforcing the other side’s at the next election, and you’ll be squalling like stuck pigs then – I’m not much for social conservatives, but when I hear people yapping about how terrible the religious right is, and asking what they ever did for others, I do tend to mention the abolition of slavery. Anybody who knows split beans from coffee knows that liberty, property rights, and free markets have freed more people and more minds than any other force in human history, with the arguable exception of Judaism and its heir, Christianity. (No, I’m no saint, and I’m damned sure no evangelical: 1928 Prayer Book Whiskeypalian, that’s me. But facts are facts.)

People don’t think, is the problem. They don’t reason. They feel. They emote. And Jesus Christ and General Jackson do they ever bitch, whine, and moan. But reasoned argument and logical debate? Could bite them in the ass and they wouldn’t know it. We do, God help us all, get the politics and the politicians we deserve: and if you take a good hard look at what we’ve got, if this is what we deserve, we ought to be damn well ashamed of ourselves.

The abandonment of logic and reason is, sure as shooting, the only plausible explanation for such things as Bernie Quigley’s copious effusion, in the pages of The Hill, explaining that Massachusetts US Senate aspirant Elizabeth Warren (D – Erewhon) is somehow ‘really’ Cherokee ‘in a mythic sense, so she wasn’t really gaming her origins, kind of, somehow, it’s complex, Will You Conservatives Stop Chopping Logic, Visualize World Stupefaction, Dude, Stop Harshing Our Fantasies’ (yes, it really is that intellectually dishonest and indeed squalidly abject a piece. Seriously. I mean, the man thinks Henry James was seeking to validate his American pioneer spirit by embracing his Fantasy Inner Penobscot Spirit Guide or some damn thing; which I suppose is why he moved to Rye, became a British subject, and ended up with the OM).

Part of it’s your fault, and the rest of NATO’s. American Lefties think socialism can work because they think you’ve made it work. You’ve been ladling out butter for years. Yep. That’s because – with significant contributions from the UK and not a damn thing from Europe – we’ve been providing the guns. The first duty of government – the national defense – has been furnished by us, leaving y’all to spend yourselves silly on the welfare state. Let me tell you something: if the American electorate ever really confronts this fact, it’s going to upset your whole applecart.

Convinced – with no reason to be and without using reason – of their own moral superiority (and presumed intellectual superiority), US Lefties love to misquote Mill and dismiss “conservatives” as “stupid” (they do this because they can’t argue the point worth a flip). Well, the facts of life are “conservative” (meaning what Hayek would have called “liberal” – which he was), so people whose smarts are street-smarts rather than book-smarts, and people who are too busy keeping society running to sit around nattering, are often instinctive rather than reasoned “conservatives.” But let me tell you something: it’s Leftism for which stupidity is a prerequisite. And that goes double for the superficially clever and credentialed ones. To be a Leftist – they can call themselves “liberals” till the cows come home, it doesn’t change the facts – is to believe (or, which is even more stupid, pretend to believe, in order to try, hopelessly, to fool all of the people all of the time and get some illegitimate power) a series of propositions about everything from human nature to macro-economics that are so damned idiotic that holding them would embarrass a pretty backward adolescent baboon. (Credit for part of that formulation to Cousin Wemyssie.)

Problem is, people who are convinced of their own righteousness tend to be beyond argument – and tend to believe that any means justify their ends, which, on account of being theirs, are necessarily, in their minds, eo ipso righteous. Look at Pentti Linkola. Look, far more, at law-faring, convicted perjurer, and convicted bomber* and, seems to me, vexatious litigant Brett Kimberlin, who deserves the utmost execration … and a right smart more than that, by a long damn chalk. (Kimberlin seems not to be political; he’s just working the Left for money and support, it seems, a la the Black Panthers and Mailer’s greatest mistake not involving bad prose, Gary Gilmore.) Look at Ted the Unabomber Kaczynski, Harvard ’62 and – shall we say – ‘direct action’ eco-loon.

Now, I’m not just whistling “Dixie” here. When a political philosophy unmoors itself from reason and logic, or asserts its superior logicality to reason itself (You Cannot Judge X by the Old Standards of Reason, Comrade, and the Idea of the Fallacy Is a Bourgeois Relict. Stand Against That Wall, Please, the One Already Pocked With Bullet Holes), it can become dangerous itself (Unabombs Away! Save the Planet Through Autogenocide!) or excuse and bankroll a clever petty crook who mouths the Approved Slogans (the Panthers – remember Betty van Patten’s murder? – and, it seems, this Kimberlin critter).

You have to give the average Leftist this, over Linkola – and God Almighty are they an average bunch – they’re at least smart enough to realize that if they did set out their actual arguments, they’d be tarred and feathered. But differences in degree are not differences in kind. The average Lefty, let’s be frank, would happily see the bulk of the population enslaved, or at least reduced to serfdom and deprived of any hopes of betterment, with the following provisos:

that the state and not some wicked person or corporation be the slaveholder (Leftists believe in Original Sin, but think bureaucrats are somehow immune to it. Not much on public choice economics, Leftists);
that they themselves be the free and well-paid overseers; and
that they get to choose who become freedmen, based on what boxes they tick.

That’s what their economic policy means, and their social policy: y’all should remember that, after Tony Crosland did more to screw up social mobility in your country than any Romanov did to Russia or any Bourbon at Versailles did unto France. The Left are the enemies of liberty, always and everywhere. Bring on the gulags so long as they are nomenklatura, is their view. Scratch a Leftist and you find a Legree – or a Lenin, or a mad bomber from Speedway, Indiana, or his bankrollers: because their Utter Moral Certainty Justifies Any Means to Their Ends. Remember Robespierre?

Right now, one of the talking points being parroted by the American Left is that “Ronald Reagan couldn’t win a Republican primary nowadays.” Horse manure. I’ll tell you what is true, though. Sam Houston, Jim Hogg, Harry S Truman, Sam Rayburn, J. Lindsay Almond, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, and Scoop Jackson couldn’t find a place in the Democratic Party now. Or would wish to.

And I wouldn’t bet the farm on Jefferson or Andy Jackson, either. But Americans were men in those days, and rational. For far too much of my lifetime, the only response from American Leftists to argument has been either the emotional appeal … or the “revolutionarily just” bomb. The recent additions of frivolous lawsuits and psychiatric pronouncements aren’t what you’d call much of an improvement. It’s time they put up, or shut up. I see ’em, I raise ’em, and I call.

_________________________

* See, e.g., United States v. Kimberlin, 805 F.2d 210 (7th Cir.1986), cert. denied, 483 U.S. 1023, 107 S.Ct. 3270, 97 L.Ed.2d 768 (1987); United States v. Kimberlin, 781 F.2d 1247 (7th Cir.1985), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 938, 107 S.Ct. 419, 93 L.Ed.2d 370 (1986); United States v. Kimberlin, 692 F.2d 760 (7th Cir.1982) (table), cert. denied, 460 U.S. 1092, 103 S.Ct. 1792, 76 L.Ed.2d 359 (1983); United States v. Kimberlin, 673 F.2d 1335 (7th Cir.1981) (table), cert. denied, 456 U.S. 964, 102 S.Ct. 2044, 72 L.Ed.2d 489 (1982); and on subsequent collateral attack, United States v. Kimberlin, 898 F.2d 1262 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 498 U.S. 969, 111 S.Ct. 434, 112 L.Ed.2d 417 (1990). See further, United States v. Kimberlin, 776 F.2d 1344 (7th Cir.1985), cert. denied, 476 U.S. 1142, 106 S.Ct. 2251, 90 L.Ed.2d 697 (1986); United States v. Kimberlin, 675 F.2d 866 (7th Cir.1982).

A matter of principle

I’m awake at this hour because a well-known American flat race is going to be on the telly (although, really, after 138 years, you’d think the Yanks, bless ’em, should have learnt how to pronounce the word ‘Derby’ properly, wouldn’t you). (And has now been run. No, I had not picked the winner.) I had not intended and do not intend to indulge in a spot of general psephologising until after the Frogs have had their election; yet there are things that want saying even now.

The local election results – for what they are worth, which, historically, is not a great deal, in general election terms – and the contravening success of Boris’ re-election bid, have, as everyone foresaw, begun a new round of intestine war within the Conservative Party. Good. That is what ought to happen in a democracy. The tone, tenor, and tendency, however….

I am hardly an uncritical admirer of Nadine Dorries MP, although I find I have a soft spot for anyone who has the enemies she has, for they are generally mine own, and yours (whether you know it or not), and the enemies of liberty generally, whatever colour of convenience their rosettes may be. Nor do I consider her a Churchillian figure; nor yet a great parliamentary strategist. Howbloodyever.

Howbloodysoddingever.

Over the course of Saturday, 5 May, a chorus has lifted its unlovely voice against any who dares question the genius of our Beloved Leader – by which of course I mean the Prim, er, Prime Minister, the Right Hon. the Member for Witney. You recall him, I’m sure: the fresh-faced, content-free bloke from Central Casting who couldn’t manage a majority against the open goal represented by that gurning Scots idiot from (to my shame) my ancestral Fife.

I take my text from the Epistle of St Winston:

If [a prime minister or party leader] trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed.

And it is pre-eminently the role and the positive duty of the constituency associations, the back benches, and everyone who is not part of the payroll vote to assess from time to time whether the pole-axe must now descend. Such assessements are not a negation of loyalty, but the very task of loyalty: if I wished to be a member of a party or tendency devoted to absolute loyalty to one man, a sort of Führerprinzip, I should be a member of Respect, or quite possibly some wing of Labour, and not, as I am, an old-fashioned Liberal Unionist whose only possible home, since the death of Lord Rosebery (or possibly CB), is in the Conservative and Unionist Party. (The Liberal Democrats, alas, are neither, and I cannot possibly join that seedy crew.) This re-evaluation of the leadership, when an inability to win a majority in uniquely favourable circumstances is succeeded by drift, irresolution, and a succession of pratfalls, is as healthy as (Hayek will teach you) bankruptcy of a firm that deserves to go under. (The Loyalist Lickspittles seem to regard the Cameroonian Wetlands Project as ‘too big to be allowed to fail’.)

Yet mark the rage, whether directed at Conservative Home, the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire, or – now – at me. Actually, bugger the last; let’s look only at the others.

The stale, Heath-like maunderings of the nominal Conservative answer to Sally Bercow, the former MP Jerry Hayes (late Member for the more sodden bits of Harlow), are, perhaps, only to be expected. Like many nominal members of the parties of the centre-right, he has long been given the press adulation that is reserved for those who consistently and buffoonishly rebel against the party and the constituency that has granted such a person his sole title to notice. The invective in which he has chosen to indulge: ‘the cult of Boris’, ‘embittered, passed over, swivel[-]eyed, green[-]inker, True Tory, Brussels obsessed loon[s] that inhabit the backbenchers [sic] by day and the blogosphere at night. … [T]he … Bones, the Hollobones, the Jacksons, the Priti Patels, the Pritchards and the Nadine Dorrieses of the political lower pond life’: is most charitably attributable to déformation professionnelle: Mr Hayes, a barrister, is very much the sort of person one’s grandmother should have had in the book ‘for garden parties only’, really. And it must amuse anyone familiar with that … gentleman’s … history to consider how incredibly it ill-behoves him of all people to speak of party loyalty – or indeed Conservatism.

I’m sorry: was that a ‘classist’ comment? Precisely my point. Let’s look, shall we, at some of the other slings and arrows being slung and loosed. It grieves me to see this from the Daily Referendum bloke, tweets and approving retweets alike, but there it is: ‘Make @NadineDorriesMP happy – get her trending on twitter – the attention fix might keep her quiet for a while’; ‘Party traitor #NadineDorriesMustGo’; ‘Oh, Just one more thing: SACK @NadineDorriesMP for attacking the Party Leadership on Eve of Local Elections – Unforgivable’; ‘It’s funny but, @NadineDorriesMP didn’t have much of a problem with Cameron until he didn’t back HER Abortion Bill. A bit bitter?’; approving retweets of such comments as @toryjim’s ‘If Dorries is actively operating against Cameron’s leadership she should be expelled from the party. I have no time for such rank disloyalty’, Jason Cowan’s ‘Nadine Dorries speaks for Nadine Dorries and nobody else’, Paul Burgin’s ‘Nadine Dorries is angry woman with no seat available for next election, no peerage offered and that makes her unpredictable and loose cannon’ … and culminating in the Daily Referendum tweet, ‘Now I understand why the Speaker is cracking down on drinking in Westminster – A certain Lady is clearly very pissed tonight…..’ and ‘BREAKING: A 54 y/o woman has been arrested at Downing Street Gates. Police say the woman was shouting “I’ll f*cking have ya, ya posh tw*t!”’.

You see, it’s impossible, to the mind – if they have minds, which one begs leave to doubt – of a Loyal Lickspittle that any dissent – which, by its nature, CANNOT BE TOLERATED. HEADS VILL ROLL – can proceed, save only from wicked motives, or a ‘sense of injur’d merit’ (I leave to the psychologically minded the consideration of to what extent projection is involved here). It’s rather a totalitarian mindset, really, and a full survey of the Twitter and blog pack (trencher-fed and poorly bred) in full cry after ConHome and Ms Dorries will reveal even to the most casual of observers an element of misogyny and classism that it is wholly unsurprising to find amidst the Wets and the Left. (It’s also rather amusing, in a mournful sort of fashion, as I cannot say they strike me as being in any position to speak de haute en bas. Middle-class poons and oiks, the most of ’em. Garden Parties Only.)

And yet there is a very important principle here. To these gentry and others of their kidney, anyone who believes what the Conservative Party has always professed is a ‘swivel-eyed loon’ suffering from silly Europhobia and darkly-motivated opposition to ‘gay marriage’ (‘CONSERVATIVE LEADERSHIP: Do not u-turn on Gay Marriage – it is a trap – push it through fast and move on to more urgent stuff.’). And to think that the Daily Referendum’s masthead reads, ‘Conservative Supporter, EU Sceptic, Climate Change Sceptic – And not at all keen on Nadine Dorries’: evidently, the last shall be first. For who are the ‘swivel-eyed loons’ suffering from silly Europhobia and darkly-motivated opposition to ‘gay marriage’? Well, amongst the gayers, I for one am ineradicably opposed to ‘gay marriage’, and I note that Milo Yiannopoulos, late of this parish, tweeted, ‘WIN. RT @SkyNews: SUNDAY TIMES FRONTPAGE: Cameron in retreat over gay marriage’. As for ‘Europhobia’ and an extreme dissatisfaction with the Coalition’s ‘green agenda’ – in part because if Mr Cameron had done his job, we’d not be stuck in a sodding coalition at all – well, I should much rather stand with such ‘swivel-eyed loons’ as Lord Tebbit and Mr Delingpole and Mr Hannan, than with Mr Hayes and the rotting corpse of Ted Heath.

Which brings us to the principle, at last. Practically, as matter of what may be called prudential principle, the purpose of a political party is to win elections; and much may be endured towards that end, and some things sacrificed or deferred. Yet only some: for the question of primary principle is, To what end does a party seek to win elections? If the winning of elections, the gaining of power, is the end in itself, the party is so unutterably squalid as to deserve endless defeat. The end, to which the winning of elections is the means, is to put into practice one’s principles (these are commonly to be found in one’s manifesto, which is a contract with the electors: if you vote for us, this is what we intend). The Labour Party have one set of principles. The Liberal Democrats … well, they’ve another set, more or less, rather … er … that is to say … (this is why they’ve not been in government in the memory of most of those now living, even in coalition, until now). And the Conservative Party has two sets: those of the grocers, and those of the grandees, as I have explained. As I noted,

By ‘grandees’ and ‘grocers’, I am not referring to social class or any of that; nor do I refer to the Worshipful Company of Grocers, all cloves and camels. I refer rather to two fundamental positions within the Conservative Party, regardless of one’s antecedents. SuperMac, to be sure, was a grandee; as were Douglas-Home, Eden, and so on. So is Dave Cameron. But so also was Ted Heath; so also had been Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, and, though he at least was never PM, thank God, Joe Chamberlain. Margaret Thatcher was a grocer; so was Salisbury. So was Peel. So was Winston. So was Dizzy, and so – perhaps because he was the master of logistics and of the Materielschlacht – was the duke of Wellington, bullock-train and all.

… A grandee Conservative sees the country as a village: a village of which he and his party, when in government, act the Squire. As the Squire, the grandee moves jovially amongst his tenants in their tied cottages, dispensing largesse and reproof…. There are two problems with this model. The first is that HMG is not the Squire and the subjects of the Crown are not the smocked tenantry of the government of the day. The second is that these principles – or instincts, as one can hardly call them principles – however different they may be to the fiercely held maxims of Labour old and new, lead in the end to the same statist solutions as those the Left proposes, and to accepting and ‘managing’ statism when a Conservative government succeeds a Labour one. It is the grocers who will always and rightly attempt to roll back the State and its reach in favour of liberty.

An insistence upon putting into action the principles professed in attaining place and power is not disloyalty, damn it all: it is both a duty and principle. (I note that even the Daily Referendum lot cannot but admit that ‘gay marriage’ is not ‘urgent stuff’.) And the shrieks of the self-anointed Loyal Legion are the clamour of that tendency within the party that has a different set of principles to the rest of us – and different to those on which we fought the last general election, frankly, and on which we as a party were elected. And they have an echo, which I, as a not wholly negligible historian of the days of appeasement and the war years, hear all too loudly. ‘Sack the disloyal’, comes the cry: the cry of Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and their toadying creatures, the Horace Wilsons and the Geoffrey Dawsons, urging that Macmillan and Boothby, Keyes and Amery and Bower, Cartland and Eden and Winston, be purged. Well, for all their manifold and manifest faults, Baldwin and Neville did not sack Churchill and the Covenanters and the Glamour Boys; Mrs T, as she was then, didn’t even sack that sorry old bugger, Heath – or the egregious Mr Hayes.

And if SB and Neville, let alone Mrs T, didn’t sack their dissenting Members, who the hell are Jerry Hayes and the Twitterati to insist on a Cameroonian Yezhovshchina? Sod the lot of them. With Winston’s metaphorical pole-axe.

When that great ship went down:

For a goodish few months, ending in a few harried hours on 13 / 14 April, my co-author and I were, as I put it, ‘spending much of our time in the April North Atlantic – of 1912’. What I meant, of course, was that we – along with, it appears, much of the Western world – were writing a book for the centenary of the loss of RMS Titanic.

James Delingpole and Anne-Elisabeth Moutet of these pages were kind enough to furnish a dollop each of advance praise for the jacket; and what I wish to explore just now is something that emerged in our work. Our concern was not with the drama of the shipwreck, but rather with the drama of the US and UK wreck enquiries, the litigation that ensued in the US (which led to a very important Supreme Court judgement by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr), and the diplomatic response: the International Convention for the Saving of Life at Sea. Mlle Moutet very kindly observed that When That Great Ship Went Down: the Legal and Political Repercussions of the Loss of RMS Titanic was a ‘parliamentary procedural’ – on the model of a ‘police procedural’ detective story – with ‘damning parallels’ to the current situation; and Mr Delingpole was good enough to say that ‘politicians and regulators in 1912 were just as bad as the current lot: they had a progressive political narrative to push, and their own secrets to hide. Sounds familiar’: which is my text today. There are many worthy histories of Titanic and her loss; but what had struck us was how often it seemed that she had sailed, as it were, in a vacuum.

She had not.

She sailed – a Belfast-built ship, owned by an Anglo-American ‘Trust’, with a considerable number of Catholic Irish emigrants aboard – in a US Presidential election year, and even as she left Cobh / Queenstown, Asquith was moving the Home Rule Bill.

And our interest was in the impact that politics had on the enquiries and the lawsuits that followed her loss, and the impact that the enquiries and lawsuits had upon US and UK politics. Rather alarmingly, what we found was eerily familiar. The two primary modes of governmental response were the witch-hunt and the cover-up.

Because the White Star Line was owned, ultimately, by JP Morgan and his Trust, the Progressives in the United States Senate – the political group that was shortly to follow Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Convention and, by splitting the Republican vote, allow Woodrow Wilson to defeat Taft – were infinitely more interested in blaming Morgan and the Trusts, Wall Street and the One Per Cent, for the disaster and the death toll (and wholly uninterested in the part played by US immigration regulations that segregated steerage passengers).

Although the Marconi Companies controlled the radio-telegraphers aboard all the ships involved in the disaster and the rescue, and gave priority, for profit motives, to passenger messages over such things as ice warnings, they were swiftly hailed as heroes and saviours. That the subsequent enquiries did not engage that issue was attributable to Mr Marconi’s capturing the Senate subcommittee (they treated him as their own expert witness, not as a target, and were so much in awe of him that when they first called upon his testimony, they neglected even to put the oath to him), and, in Britain, to the sedulously hidden fact that the Attorney-General, Rufus Isaacs; the Liberal Chief Whip, the Master of Elibank; and the Chancellor, Lloyd George, had been engaged in inside trading in Marconi shares. Moreover, the Marconi entities had a proposal before the House to erect an Imperial Wireless Chain.

In short, the Americans had evolved an Agreed Narrative for political purposes in a Presidential election year, and one which absolved US legislators and regulators of any role in the disaster through the unintended consequences of regulation. The Asquith government had a majority in the House only by sufferance of Labour and, most of all, the Irish Nationalists under John Redmond; and Home Rule – even had there been no Cabinet sleaze in Marconis – was The Project by which they stood or fell, and nothing whatever was to be allowed to interfere with or jeopardise it. (Certainly the Belfast shipbuilders, Harland & Wolff, were politically untouchable in the Titanic enquiries: Lord Pirrie, the chairman, was a peer, a Protestant, and a Liberal, Protestant, Irish peer who supported Home Rule and Asquith’s ministry: he and his company could therefore bear no blame, for political reasons, in the death of fifteen hundred souls.)

It is remarkable that Mr Justice Holmes in America and Lord Mersey here were able, unaware of these pressures as they were (and Isaacs shamefully used the Board of Trade enquiry under Lord Mersey to protect his own secret holdings in Marconis rather than to put the Crown’s case), to afford those affected with as much justice as they were to do. And one must feel empathy also for the diplomatic delegations (the British and Imperial delegation being led by Lord Mersey) who, in London, spent much of 1913 crafting the Great Powers’ convention for maritime safety. They signed it in January 1914. Within eight months, they were most of them at war with one another, and Lord Mersey’s next major assignment was to be the Wreck Enquiry into the loss of Lusitania.

It really is a startlingly familiar tale: a minority government forced to compromise even the honour and traditions of the House to stay in power, and assuaging its conscience by a blind belief in The Project (Mr Hannan warned us…), Cabinet sleaze, political witch-hunts tempered by respect to large donors….

We like to think it makes for a good book; but in its ‘damning parallels’ to our time, I must tell you frankly, it left me intensely depressed and despairing, and I co-wrote the damned thing. Surely we, if not Michael Heseltine and the Cameroon Wets, have learnt something in a century’s experience? And if not, what then?