Arising from my blog on the biography of Winston Churchill by Roy Jenkins (March 19), it occurred to me that a good book might be written on the strange lives of liberal Britons to rival the excellent STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND by George Dangerfield. I’m not the person to do it. But I could furnish a few ideas to anyone equal to that task.
It’s over sixty years since I read that William Gladstone’s family coat of arms featured the severed head of a black man. It was in a book by a fellow-traveller of mine, indeed a fellow Dalcassian* on the Hill of Howth tram, a scholar with an impeccable liberal record named Donal Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Gladstone had long been a Tory before converting to Liberalism. And Conor Cruise O’Brien, a liberal scourge of imperialism, colonialism, police brutality and censorship was in his fifties before he jettisoned his long-held principles, winning the plaudits of the CIA and the hero-worship of Michael Gove.
British Liberalism was long in thrall to a prim, puritan and smug Non-Conformism. Gladstone, whose father was a murderous slave-owner, and who had, as Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, supported the Confederate Slave-holders of the American Civil War could not, as a Liberal leader, in conscience deal with an Irish party whose leader was living in a faithful and fruitful relationship with a woman deserted by her husband.
THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN (founded 1821) was long the conscience of Liberal England during its prim and puritan prime, and C.P. Scott, its editor from 1872 to 1929, a Liberal MP from 1895 to 1906 looked and posed as an Old Testament prophet. In its more secular guise, renamed THE GUARDIAN, it has advocated causes its forebears would have damned as Libertine, with the zeal that those forebears brought to their campaigns.
The old Manchester Guardian did not cover horseracing so that it could not be seen to encourage betting. But what it lost on the swings it recouped on the roundabouts as THE MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS. which covered racing, was a better earner than its high-minded and prim stablemate.
The political diaries of C.P. reveal discussions with Lloyd George covering many topics. When Ireland resisted conscription Lloyd George fully intended to use on unarmed men the barbarities inflicted by Marshal MacMahon on the Paris Commune in 1871. Scott sought to restrain Lloyd George, He was pro-Home Rule, then pro-Dominion Home Rule, but when the Irish set up a Republic following the General Election mandate of 1918 and sustained it with the support of local governments – Municipal, County Council, down to District Councils in 1920 and a further General Election in 1921, Scott remained an imperialist opponent of national self-determination. Lloyd George explained to Scott exactly how he tricked Arthur Griffith into signing the Articles of Agreement, miscalled a “Treaty” to Scott’s admiration. As described by Frank Pakenham (the later Lord Longford) in “PEACE BY ORDEAL” Lloyd George, Birkenhead and Churchill played politics as Big Julie shot Crap in Guys ‘n’ Dolls.. The Irish delegates were given an offer they couldn’t refuse – “Sign now, or it’s immediate and terrible war.”
Whatever merits Scott had he was never a democrat.
After the STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND, largely the work of Lloyd George, many former members of the party, their sons and daughters gravitated to the Labour Party. For a great many of them Oliver Cromwell was their greatest hero and John Milton their most inspirational writer and they took them as their guides to Irish matters.
I don’t know if Roy Jenkins had a Liberal party legacy, but he struck me as long ago as the early 1960s as a very old-fashioned Whig with ducal manner.
As Home Secretary he was responsible for the so-called Prevention of Terrorism Act. Even without Cromwellian sentiments, Home Secretaries all come to resemble Ministers of the Interior in the most repressive states.
But Roy Jenkins is remembered by Guardian-esque commentators as a liberal Home Secretary (high case or low case as you like)
He decriminalised buggery and relaxed the criteria for legal abortions. Whatever your views on these provisions it would be nice to believe that Jenkins behaved in an altruistic, disinterested manner.
But he was not entirely unselfish.
For Roy Jenkins, the son of a Welsh coalminer who had been a Union Leader and Labour MP, belonged to a gilded circle of swingers who swapped wives shamelessly . Wikipedia lists some of them from very prominent political families. Some, including Jenkins, swung both ways. In his youth he had been the lover of Anthony Crosland, who later served in Cabinet with him as Foreign Secretary.
His “liberal” measures were doing favours for himself and his chums.
Perhaps the very model for a modern British Liberal?
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