I’ve heard it said that the only good Tory is a dead one, and declined to support it, on the ground that there might be a good one somewhere, probably in hiding.
But one dead Tory, Samuel Johnson, in my view a very good man, gave as his opinion that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel.
My late father reckoned Dr Johnson mistaken and maintained that religion was the last refuge of a scoundrel.
My father was not irreligious in the least; quite the opposite in fact.
Thinking about the subject I concluded that for over 100 years, through Churchill, Mussolini, J.Edgar Hoover, Eoin O’Duffy, Hitler, Franco and Joe McCarthy , anti-communism was the FIRST REFUGE OF A SCOUNDREL.
Samuel Johnson noted that the Americans he met in London were wont to pose as champions of Liberty and to own black slaves. Two hundred and fifty years on, American spokespersons are prating about liberty while black citizens can be murdered with impunity and many white workers have been reduced to semi-slavery by billionaire employers.
The original Tories were dispossessed Irishmen, Catholic gentlemen some of them, together with rascals, who preyed on those who dispossessed them following the Whig “Glorious Revolution” and the (broken) Treaty of Limerick. Those English who didn’t adhere to William of Orange were nicknamed Tories or TORAIDH by the Whigs, which in today’s England and would equate with Provos or Shinners.
Anyhow the other dead Tory who was a very good man, if occasionally half-crazy, was Jonathan Swift, an Englishman who virtually reckoned as the godfather of Irish separatism from the days of Wolfe Tone. He advocated the burning of all English produce except coal. At the time England was strangling Irish trade and industry.
A good Tory may be a difficult concept for many to grasp; one called Johnson impossible.
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