Letters
A selection of Lord Lexden's letters to The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Spectator.
The Spectator
4/5/13 - Another club
Sir: Buck’s was not the only club of which Lady T was a member (Letters, 27 April). When she became Tory leader in 1975, the then all-male Carlton was delighted to find that there was no bar on her becoming an honorary member, as all her predecessors had. She accepted with alacrity and visited the club frequently over the years for lunches, dinners and receptions, which were always packed with her admirers. In 1979 Harold Macmillan, the first person to be elected president of the club, unveiled a fine bust of her by Oscar Nemon. Shuffling towards it in his carefully practised manner, he said in a stage whisper heard by everyone, ‘Now I must remember I am unveiling a bust of Margaret Thatcher, not Margaret Thatcher’s bust.’
She strengthened the affection in which she was held by rushing round to St James’s Street in July 1990 to inspect the damage and comfort the injured among staff and members alike following an IRA bomb attack. In 2009 she became the club’s second president.
Lord Lexden
Carlton Club Historian, London SW1
13/4/13 - Rock’s fall
Sir: Patrick Rock made a powerful contribution to his own defeat at the Portsmouth South by-election in 1984 (Politics, 30 March). In a radio discussion he managed to get the name of the constituency wrong and claimed credit for a hospital that had not been built. Rock is an extraordinary combination of the naive and the astute (as regards political tactics, not strategy). The last time I saw him he was wandering down Whitehall on the day of a civil service strike, his back covered in stickers proclaiming the merits of the strike. He is blessed with great redeeming charm.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
The Daily Telegraph
9/4/13 - Lord Lexden offers a personal Unionist perspective on Margaret Thatcher's Northern Ireland policy
SIR – Margaret Thatcher was a passionate Unionist, deeply committed to retaining Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. Yet in 1985 she signed an Anglo-Irish Agreement which gave Dublin a direct, guaranteed say in Ulster's affairs. Since then its role has grown significantly.
This was at odds with her convictions. She was brought to it by irritation, nearly despair, with Unionist politicians who throughout her premiership bickered among themselves so much that she was unable to establish an effective, practical relationship with these natural allies.
"Margaret will be a great Unionist Prime Minister," Airey Neave told me when I was his political adviser. That was shortly before his murder in 1979. It is tragic that events in Northern Ireland thwarted this prediction.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
19/3/13 - War stories retold
SIR – I am delighted that Airey Neave’s “long-forgotten” account of the wartime escape line run by Belgians is at last back in print (report, March 15). Little Cyclone was the second of five war books that he wrote, the last of which was published just four months before his murder by Irish terrorists in March 1979.
I cherish the copies of his books that he gave me when I worked as his political advisor during the last two years of his life.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
13/2/13 - The Thatcher statue
SIR – The museum manager in Grantham should have been congratulated, not censured, for her efforts to secure the statue of Margaret Thatcher (report, February 9). Our greatest post-war prime minister praised her native town lavishly in her memoirs: “Beyond home, church and school lay the community which was Grantham. We were immensely proud of our town; we knew its history and traditions; we were glad to be part of its life.” I shall get these words inscribed on a brass plaque, which would incorporate her coat of arms and the town’s. That should shame Grantham into commemorating her.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
10/1/13 - The Commonwealth
SIR – Hugo Swire (Comment, January 8) says that the United Kingdom is connected to all Commonwealth countries “through historical ties”. What ties do we have with Mozambique and Rwanda, which have joined the Commonwealth in recent years?
If ending male primogeniture for the succession to the throne is such a fine “symbol of a modernising institution”, why stop there? The same move should surely be made by all senior members of the Royal family. In the changed conditions to be created by the Succession to the Crown Bill, it will hardly be satisfactory if Lady Louise Windsor, the first-born child of the Earl of Wessex, is not given precedence over her younger brother, Viscount Severn. The same principle might also be applied to enable Princess Beatrice to become Duchess of York on her father’s death.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
19/12/12 - Equality for nobility
SIR – You report (December 17) on daughters of aristocrats demanding equal rules for inheriting titles.
However, there were no descendants of the great imperial hero, Lord Kitchener, who was unmarried. His title passed by special remainder to his brother and his male heirs. Julian Fellowes, who is married to Emma Kitchener, has no grounds for describing his wife’s inability to inherit as “outrageous”. All women were excluded under the terms of the special remainder.
But the question is now academic. There is no longer a “current” Earl. The last of the line died in 2011 and the title is extinct.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
1/12/12 - The Rotherham by-election
SIR – At another hotly contested by-election at Rotherham nearly 80 years ago, the seat, held briefly by the Tories, returned to Labour (report, November 30).
The news was brought to Stanley Baldwin, author of the phrase “one nation”, in the Commons. “Rotherham,” he said reminiscently, “I remember once changing trains at Rotherham. They had square seats in the station lavatories. Someone had scribbled up on the wall: 'If square seats don’t bother ’em / They’ve got rum bums in Rotherham’.” He kept on murmuring the words to himself. The election defeat was completely forgotten.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
1/11/12 - Edward Heath’s home
SIR – Justice would at last be done if Arundells, Edward Heath’s home during his latter years, were to be transferred under charitable auspices to the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury. It should never have left their possession in the first place. Having become their tenant, Heath then forced them to sell the house to him in the Nineties, exploiting without scruple new legislation passed by a Tory government, which he professed to regard with contempt. He loved boasting of his victory over the Cathedral. Heath took the property from the Cathedral against its will, without the resources to provide for its long-term future, as his trustees made clear to him before his death. It should be handed back.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
15/9/12 - Dizzy ambitions
SIR – Matt Hancock MP says he resembles Disraeli on account of his provincial background and education at his village school (report, September 13).
Disraeli, the son of a rich and distinguished man of letters, was brought up in Bloomsbury without any knowledge of provincial England: riding a horse was always a problem for him. He was sent to a private school at Higham Hall, near Walthamstow, but left when he was 15, having been badly bullied because of his Jewishness. Thereafter, like many other upper middle-class children, he was educated at home by a tutor, drawing heavily on his father’s vast library.
The only thing Mr Hancock has in common with Disraeli is a talent for exaggeration.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
21/8/12 - Yes and no, minister
SIR – Sue Cameron (Comment, August 16) writes that the Government wants “to give politicians more power over Civil Service appointments”.
There are no grounds for believing that it intends to import the American system under which each incoming administration replaces several thousand officials with its own nominees. Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister, seems to be trying to promote two important changes.
The first would enable ministers to ask their Permanent Secretaries to appoint a limited number of outsiders as senior officials for clearly defined purposes on short-term contracts to provide expertise that departments currently lack. That is eminently sensible, given the number of large, complex projects that have gone badly wrong and wasted billions of pounds in recent years because the Civil Service lacks people with the skills needed to carry them through successfully.
Secondly, and much more worryingly, Mr Maude is in discussion with the independent Civil Service Commission about giving ministers the power to appoint their Permanent Secretaries. The Commission is firmly defending the status quo: ministers have an informal right of veto (to ensure they do not get someone with whom they cannot work) but cannot pick the candidates that happen to suit them best.
The Commission is right. We must not depart from the fundamental principle laid down in the famous Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1853. “All public servants,” it declared, must be able “to look forward to promotion according to their deserts, and to expect the highest prizes in the service if they can qualify themselves for them.”
Lord Lexden
London SW1
11/7/12 - Lords Bill debate
SIR – Nick Clegg asserts that the creation of a directly elected Upper House would realise a principle for which Liberals have fought consistently since the 1911 Parliament Act.
The claim is totally bogus. The Liberals touched briefly on the Lords in their 1950 election manifesto, saying simply that “men and women of distinction” should replace hereditary peers. Otherwise they ignored the Upper House until 1979.
From that election the Liberals linked reform of the Lords with their devolution proposals. In 1987 they said that the upper chamber should include “members elected from the regions and nations of Britain”, to which they wanted to devolve more power.
The Liberals’ commitment to a directly elected senate is a recent phenomenon which they pretend has a long history.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
12/6/12 - Political diamonds
SIR – It was thanks to Winston Churchill that the great Cullinan diamond, which weighed a pound and a quarter before it was cut, came into the possession of the Royal family (Letters, June 11).
When the Transvaal government voted in 1907 to present it to Edward VII as a token of “loyalty and attachment”, the Liberal Cabinet of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, then prime minister, did not favour acceptance. Churchill, then colonial under-secretary, protested vigorously about its “very unimaginative view”, and the Cabinet changed its mind. As an expression of thanks, the Transvaal authorities gave him a model of the diamond, which he enjoyed showing to guests over lunch. His secretary recorded that once the butler approached the Duke of Marlborough’s sister with the model, “a shapeless lump on a salver, looking like a not-very-well-strained white jelly that had escaped from its mould. She eyed it with distaste, and said: 'No, thank you.’”
Lord Lexden
London SW1
11/5/12 - A bullet in the Lobby
SIR – Today is the bicentenary of the assassination of Spencer Perceval, the only British prime minister to have met a violent end. Apart from the manner of his death, aged 49, he has been largely forgotten. But in his day he was regarded as second only to the Younger Pitt as a debater. He campaigned alongside William Wilberforce for the abolition of slavery, and during his three years as prime minister he rallied the nation in support of the Duke of Wellington, rejecting the widespread criticism of the latter as the outcome of the Peninsular War hung in the balance.
He was shot at point-blank range in the lobby of the House of Commons by John Bellingham, who drew a revolver from a specially tailored pocket inside his coat. Perceval clutched “his hand to his heart and exclaimed 'Oh’ faintly, and fell forward on his face”, dead.
The assassin had no political motive. He was hanged seven days later after an unprecedentedly rapid trial.
Henry Bellingham, a junior Foreign Office minister, is a descendant of the assassin. Since retrospective historical apologies have become fashionable, perhaps he should offer an expression of remorse of behalf of his family.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
14/4/12 - How we lost Obama
SIR – The two Hawaiian princes who went surfing at Bridlington in 1890 (report, April 10) might well have enjoyed themselves even more if they had been part of the Empire on which the sun never set.
Nine years earlier the Hawaiian King Kalakaua was nearly coaxed by the future Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, into accepting British sovereignty. Throughout the London season of 1881 Kalakaua was treated with the greatest honour by the Prince. They drove together in state to a banquet at Mansion House. After a series of glittering parties at which the King was given precedence over the German Crown Prince (to the latter’s fury), he opened the dancing at the most important ball of the season with the Princess of Wales.
The prize was only narrowly lost. A British Hawaii would have enlivened Anglo-American relations.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
25/2/12 - Gladstone’s lost Whigs
SIR – Lord Sudeley’s grasp of late 19th-century political history seems decidedly shaky (Letter, February 23).
William Gladstone did not lose the Whig aristocracy while keeping his fellow Liberal MP Joe Chamberlain’s middle-class Radicals. He lost large parts of both.
Gladstone’s fiercest opponent was Chamberlain himself, who established a Unionist alliance with anti-Gladstone Whigs and the Tories in 1886 to stop Irish Home Rule, eventually fusing his Liberal Unionist Party with the Conservatives a century ago to create today’s Conservative and Unionist Party – which now has another Unionist battle on its hands.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
26/12/11 - Polite old stick
SIR – May I offer two curiously contrasting sociological observations based on my experiences as a (temporarily) disabled person?
On packed public transport in London the sight of a stick causes people of all ages and both sexes to leap to their feet and offer their seats.
But in the street they rush past the quavering stick, pushing through even small spaces. The season of goodwill makes no difference. The words “excuse me” seem to have vanished from the language.
Why does politeness flourish in one arena and surliness in another?
Lord Lexden
London SW1
5/12/11 - Cameron’s career
SIR – David Cameron did not get his first job at the Conservative Research Department as the result of “an intervention from someone based at Buckingham Palace” (Mandrake, December 2).
I took a telephone call from the Palace in June 1988, when David Cameron came for an interview. The voice on the line told me that the Conservative Party was very lucky that such an outstanding young man wanted to come and work for it.
My interlocutor seemed far from happy at the prospect. This was, of course, at a time in Margaret Thatcher’s premiership when she had outspoken critics in Royal circles.If the aim was to help the candidate, the call was counterproductive. He had to overcome the suspicion and hostility that this curious intervention created.
Only a singularly impressive performance in interview could remove them – and that he achieved.
Lord Lexden
Deputy Director, Conservative Research Department 1985-97
London SW1
18/11/11 - Why Lady Fellowes will never be Lady Kitchener
SIR – Thomas Woodcock, Garter King of Arms, provides a fuller account than I gave of the special remainder which kept the first Earl Kitchener of Khartoum’s title in existence after his death without an heir (Letters, November 7). In 1902, when Kitchener was made a viscount, a special remainder provided that the title should pass “in default of male issue to his daughters and their male issue”.
But in practice it was inconceivable that there would be even one Countess Kitchener in her own right. In 1902, the unmarried Kitchener was 52. Instead of taking a wife, he concentrated his attention on a favourite aide-de-camp, who, in the discreet words of his biographer, Sir Philip Magnus, “established himself so securely in the affections of his chief that Kitchener never looked elsewhere, and their intimate association was happy and fortunate”.
That meant that only the second part of the special remainder, which made provision for Kitchener’s brothers and their male heirs, had relevance or meaning.
The intriguing question in all this is why Kitchener secured rights of succession for daughters who would never exist. But what is not in any doubt is that his great-great niece, Lady Fellowes, is explicitly barred from becoming a countess.
Could not some version of this bizarre little story be woven into the next series of Downton Abbey?
Lord Lexden
London SW1
1/11/11 - Downton ghost
SIR - Lord Fellowes rails against the "outrageous" restriction of most hereditary peerages to men (despite proposals to change the law on royal succession) which will prevent his wife succeeding her uncle, the 3rd Earl Kitchener of Khartoum (report, October 21).
Even if women were to be given rights of succession, Lady Fellowes still ought not to benefit. The imperial hero on whom the earldom was conferred in 1914 had no time for women. When he died at sea as a result of enemy action in 1916, a favourite aide-de-camp was at his side. Without wife or heir, he was granted an entitlement to keep the title in existence after his death. It specified that only male heirs of his brothers would be eligible to inherit the earldom.
It was the wish of one of our most famous soldiers that there should never be a Countess Kitchener of Khartoum in her own right. That wish should be respected. The misogynist's angry ghost could cause trouble rattling his chains around Downton Abbey.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
19/10/11 - Liam Fox's future
SIR - Dr Liam Fox's talents are too valuable to be lost to British public life. He should lead a campaign to prevent the dissolution of the Union between his native Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. It was in Scotland that he began his political career, and it is there that it should be revived. A successful Unionist campaign would restore his reputation.
In 1988, four years before he entered Parliament, Dr Fox and I were co-authors of a pamphlet entitled: Making Unionism Positive. It called for action to "re-establish Conservatism on a sound Unionist foundation as a positive force in Scottish politics".
Nearly a quarter of a century later, the case for the Union desperately needs vigorous and effective championing. It is a role that Dr Fox is ideally fitted to undertake, alongside other leading pro-Union Scottish politicians, such as John Reid and Charles Kennedy.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
24/9/11 - Not suited to Downton
SIR - Lord Cowdray is auctioning many family heirlooms ("Chance to take away a taste of Downton's stately style", report, September 14).
Public works contracts, including the Blackwall tunnel, made the 1st Viscount Cowdray a multi-millionaire. Despite this wealth, Julian Fellowes might regard him as an unsuitable dinner guest at Downton Abbey, even though he built the Blue Nile dam, planned by Lord Kitchener, the much-cherished forebear of Lady Fellowes.
Cowdray held the House of Lords in ill-concealed contempt and insisted that hereditary peerages should not continue beyond the third generation. Would such radicalism be acceptable at Downton?
Lord Lexden
London SWI
17/8/11 - Victorian London
SIR – Daniel Johnson (Comment, August 12) contends that Victorian London was "a more law-abiding place than today", citing a huge demonstration in Hyde Park in 1866 when the only casualties were the railings.
It was a different story 20 years later when another mob took possession of Hyde Park, after rampaging through the streets from Trafalgar Square. The American journalist G W Smalley telegraphed details to an amazed New York on February 9, 1886. "As they went, they smashed windows, broke open and plundered shops and restored to themselves a portion of their rights in the shape of watches worn by such capitalists as happened to come their way.
"Once in Hyde Park they attacked carriages, broke them in pieces, beat the liveried menials, insulted ladies who were driving, and stripped men." They marched to Oxford Street "laden with plunder". The police failed to intervene, so for three days the West End was at the mercy of the mob.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
23/7/11 - Andy Coulson
SIR - "Will Andy Coulson be for David Cameron what Christine Keeler was for Harold Macmillan?" asks Andrew Gilligan (Comment, July 19). If so, Mr Cameron has little to worry about.
Macmillan's fortunes revived quickly in the aftermath of the Profumo scandal, with a sharp rise in the opinion polls. At the start of October 1963 he made clear to Cabinet colleagues that he was staying on.
As D R Thorpe put it in his recent, brilliant biography Supermac, "Macmillan was not brought down by Profumo; he was brought down by his prostate."
Lord Lexden
London SW1
5/7/11 - Palace restoration
SIR - For 230 years the British monarch has drawn on funds provided by Parliament through the Civil List. Now George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is to scrap it in favour of a "sovereign support grant", a hideous bureaucratic phrase.
This increases the need for the nation to show its affection for the Queen in a form that expresses our historic traditions. A large sum of money should be made available to Her Majesty in her Diamond Jubilee year for the restoration work that is urgently needed on her palaces and residences, including Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland.
The finest British architects should embellish them in memorable form. We can afford it. The Crown Estate, which George III surrendered in return for the Civil List, has an annual surplus of more than £200 million.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
3/6/11 - Carlton House
SIR – Carlton House, the horse which will be wearing the Queen’s colours in Saturday’s Derby, recalls a nearly forgotten royal residence created by George IV, when he was Prince of Wales in the 1780s.
The buildings and gardens, originally laid out by William Kent, occupied most of the southern side of Pall Mall, eclipsing Marlborough House. Horace Walpole called it “the most perfect palace in Europe” and marvelled at its prodigious cost, saying that “all the tin mines in Cornwall would not pay a quarter” of it.
Eventually the profligate monarch tired of it and ordered its demolition in the 1820s. The Tories built their Carlton Club on part of the site. Though bombed out of Pall Mall in 1940, the club retains the Prince of Wales’s feathers as its emblem.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
20/4/11 - Let’s launch Boris Water Buses on the Thames
SIR – Nigel Henson (Letters, April 13) would like to use the Thames to get to work. Just over a century ago, the newspaper editor, R D Blumenfeld, who had used the London County Council’s “beloved Thames steamers” to get from Chelsea to the Temple, bewailed the sudden withdrawal of this excellent service.
He wrote in his diary on February 11, 1908: “The Council has lost an average of £50,000 a year on them. I think the fares were too high for popularity, and there were not enough boats. They ought to run at five-minute headway, like omnibuses!”
Surely the ever resourceful Boris, hero of the bicyclists, could find a way to get commuters happily afloat too.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
19/3/11 - Bring back the Patrick
SIR – When the Queen visits the Republic of Ireland, it should be the Royal Standard with its glorious Irish harp, not some archaic substitute (Letters, March 9) that is broken over Dublin Castle for the first time in 100 years. Not even the most ardent Irish republicans have called for the harp’s removal from the Royal Standard.
This visit should be marked in a permanent fashion by reviving the Order of St Patrick, the national honour of the whole of Ireland for 140 years. The Queen remains Sovereign of the Order.
Since 1922 the revival of the order has been discussed fitfully in both countries. In 1946, George VI brought it up with the Attlee government but was discouraged because of “the possibility of the Eire government raising difficulties about the Patrick”. In 1963, however, the Irish government examined the possibility of recreating it to recognise the service of those who “had done honour to the state”.
Its re-establishment now, on an Anglo-Irish basis, to reward distinguished citizens of both countries, in particular those who were at the heart of the Northern Ireland peace process, would be a fine enduring memorial to the Queen’s forthcoming visit.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
22/2/11 - A stuttering end
SIR – At the end of The King’s Speech, a stutter is overcome (“Stuttering caused by genes and not childhood trauma”, report, February 21), but, despite Lionel Logue’s efforts, it was only a temporary cure.
On May 17, 1945, George VI addressed both Houses of Parliament to mark the end of the war. Harold Nicolson, then an MP, wrote in his diary: “We listened in silence to the King’s speech. ... He has a really beautiful voice and it is to be regretted that his stammer makes it almost intolerably painful to listen to him.”
Lord Lexden
London SW1
22/1/11 - Brideshead would have been an unsuitable royal home
SIR – The Lygon family might not have been overwhelmed with joy if Madresfield, their enchanting ancestral home in Worcestershire (which Evelyn Waugh was to immortalise as Brideshead), had been commandeered for royal use during the Second World War (report, January 18).
At the insistence of George V, the head of the family, the 7th Earl Beauchamp (Brideshead ’s Lord Marchmain), had been forced to live abroad in 1931 after his homosexuality came to the attention of a shocked monarch.
Beauchamp’s seven broad-minded children were infuriated. Though the exile felt able to return to his beloved Madresfield after the coronation of George VI in 1937, his health was broken and he died the following year. His home would not have made a suitable royal billet.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
4/1/11 - Coalition Cement
SIR – There is nothing remarkable about the willingness of Liberal Democrat ministers to make disparaging comments about their Conservative coalition colleagues. They are following the example of Lloyd George, the last Liberal prime minister.
During his coalition government of 1916-22 he ridiculed his foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, as “the scent on a pocket handkerchief”. He castigated his closest Tory colleague, Bonar Law, as “weak”, adding “B.L. ought to take to drink” to give himself courage.
Curzon was “insufferably pompous”; Salisbury, head of the great Tory house of Cecil, “would make a very respectable booking clerk”. Colleagues rushed to deliver the insults to their victims.
Lloyd George had the great merit of never minding what other people said about him. He paid heed to some wise words of Anthony Trollope. “It is a common practice for people to make disobliging observations about one another. Why do we profess such shock and surprise when we hear what is being said about us?”
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
26/11/10 - PMs always refuse to go
SIR – Charles Moore (report, November 22) is of course right that Margaret Thatcher would have left office on the highest possible note if she had retired on her 10th anniversary as prime minister.
But prime ministers, successful and unsuccessful, never retire if they are not compelled to do so. Of the 19 British premiers who left No 10 during the 20th century, six were defeated at the polls, four were forced out by cabinet or parliamentary coups, and the remaining nine departed (in Churchill’s case, very reluctantly) because of age or ill health.
Besides, as Mr Moore emphasises, Mrs Thatcher was a doer. Aged 65 in November 1990, and in perfect health, there was so much more that she wanted to do for our country.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
29/9/10 - Squiffy Asquith
SIR – The claim that Herbert Asquith added squiffy to our lexicon (Letters, September 27) would not seem to be well founded. Though it was widely used as a nickname for the bibulous prime minister, the Oxford English Dictionary gives 1874 as the date of its first appearance – the year in which Disraeli became the first Tory prime minister with a Commons majority for nearly 30 years.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
25/9/10 - Liberal Lexicon
SIR – The Gladstone bag, “a portmanteau for purveyors of pious platitudes” as Disraeli described it, was not quite the last gift to the English language from a Liberal leader (Parliamentary sketch, September 22). In 1909 came the “Lloyd George”, as the first old age pension was gratefully named by its recipients in tribute to their great benefactor.
As his reputation waned, so did the once widespread eponym.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
2/8/10 - Myth of Tonypandy
SIR – How very predictable that a Labour MP, Chris Bryant, should tell us, 100 years on, that “the people of Tonypandy remember Churchill in relation to the Tonypandy riots” (report, July 21).
Few myths have proved as tenacious as the totally unfounded Labour belief that Winston Churchill, as Home Secretary, used the Army to suppress riots in Tonypandy in November 1910. Troops were not even deployed. When 300 members of the Metropolitan Police sent by Churchill arrived in the Welsh mining village from London, “the rioters had already been beaten from the collieries without the aid of any reinforcement”, as Churchill informed King George V. Together, the local police and London bobbies then dealt with what he described as “the insensate action of the rioters in wrecking shops in the town of Tonypandy, against which they had not the slightest cause for animosity”.
Churchill certainly ought to be remembered in Tonypandy – with gratitude for restoring order swiftly using police alone and without a shot being fired.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
5/7/10 - A steer from Salisbury
SIR – It was indeed delightful, as Andrew Gimson noted (report, July 2), that William Hague should have quoted the great Lord Salisbury in his first major speech since taking office.
But he would have done better if he had quoted the words with which Salisbury brought his audience to its feet on November 9, 1896: “Our first duty is towards the people of this country, to maintain their interests and their rights; our second duty is to all humanity.” That is true Tory wisdom in foreign affairs.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
16/6/10 - Saville’s cover for Adams
SIR – Lord Bew (Comment, June 14) discloses that the Saville inquiry was set up as a result of supposedly clever political footwork in 1998 to give Gerry Adams “some useful cover when he was facing fierce criticism from within the republican movement”.
The destruction of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the early release of some 440 terrorist prisoners, the persistent flouting of ceasefires, the offer of an amnesty to terrorist suspects, the failure to enforce the decommissioning requirements of the Belfast Agreement and payments and offices for absent Sinn Fein MPs at Westminster were just the most prominent items on the long list of concessions given to the republican movement.
They should have provided more than enough cover for Mr Adams.
Alistair Cooke
Adviser to Airey Neave, 1977-9
London SW1
26/4/10 - The Speaker is traditionally unchallenged
SIR – It is widely believed that the Speaker is traditionally unchallenged at a general election. This is untrue.
John Bercow is the 10th serving Speaker to stand for re-election since the Second World War. All his predecessors were opposed. Those who had previously represented Labour (Horace King, George Thomas, Betty Boothroyd and Michael Martin) were opposed by independents and candidates of smaller parties.
Only one former Tory MP (William Morrison) got off so lightly. The others – Douglas Clifton-Brown, Harry Hylton-Foster, Selwyn Lloyd and Bernard Weatherill – all faced at least one of the main opposition parties. In June 1987, Labour polled more than 11,000 votes, and the SDP/Liberal Alliance over 8,000, in Speaker Weatherill's Croydon North East seat.
It is established tradition that is being followed at this election in Buckingham.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
28/12/09 - Britain in the Noughties
SIR – What on earth would William Gladstone (born 200 years ago tomorrow) have thought about Britain in the Noughties?
Simon Heffer (Comment, December 23) hailed Gladstone for giving us, among other things, the "best Civil Service in the world". He might have added that it was the smallest as well, for the G. O. M exercised iron control over the public finances, worrying endlessly as total spending by the state edged towards £100 million.
In our decade, quangos alone cost us £90 billion a year. The extraordinary expansion of the state has surely been the defining characteristic of the Noughties – and also the most depressing one, since Margaret Thatcher had succeeded in getting the state out of industry (for which she was saluted as the Gladstone of the late 20th-century).
There are now 565,000 more people on the public payroll than 10 years ago. No one has even overseen this malign process properly. Almost daily, another story of incompetence and inefficiency appears in the press. Vast pay rises have been distributed in a random fashion, and 323 people on the public payroll now earn more than the Prime Minister. Gladstone's salary of £5,000 per annum made him the best paid public servant – and quite right, too. Dignity, power and financial reward should go hand in hand.
Next February will mark the 60th anniversary of the election that brought Churchill back to within sight of power, after his crushing defeat at the end of the war. He promised to sweep away socialist controls and get the economy moving.
His election slogan was "Set the People Free". The Tories should use the slogan again in 2010, and give us a programme for slim, responsible government to show that they mean to reverse the miseries of the Noughties.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
The Times
24/4/13 - Suffragette's death
Sir, It is very unlikely that “the sacrifice” made by Emily Davison for the suffragette cause at the 1913 Derby was intentional (letter, Apr 22). She had a return ticket to London in her pocket. Gilbert White, the West Surrey coroner who conducted her inquest, concluded that “Miss Davison did not make specifically for the King’s horse, but her intention was merely to disturb and upset the race . . . Her object was not to take her own life,” he went on, “but it was an exceedingly sad thing for an educated lady to sacrifice herself in this way.”
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
15/4/13 - State funeral for Lady Thatcher
Sir, Wednesday’s funeral does indeed have precedents but not as many as your leading article (Apr 13) asserts. Charles James Fox’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, unlike Pitt’s six months earlier, was privately organised. The Morning Chronicle reported on Oct 11, 1806, “this was not a ceremony ordered by the State, and conducted according to the etiquette of the Herald’s College”, though the numbers who attended equalled those at the State funeral of his great political rival. Canning too “was buried, privately at his own request, in Westminster Abbey near the grave of Pitt”, in the words of his biographer, Charles Petrie.
The three 19th-century PMs who had state funerals — Pitt, Palmerston and Gladstone — did not have full military honours.When Gladstone died in May 1898 his family was asked “to choose between a pompous funeral a month later, with a procession through the streets of London and stands for spectators, or a simpler and immediate ceremony. It chose the latter,” as Philip Magnus puts it in his life of Gladstone.
Churchill’s funeral is the only close precedent for Thatcher’s, both as regards its character and venue. All other public funerals for statesmen and politicians (as well as several private ones too) have taken place in Westminster Abbey.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
2/4/13 - Not complaining
Sir, In rebuking me for suggesting that Disraeli would have opposed Lord Justice Leveson, Mr Kempster (letter, Mar 30) forgets one of Dizzy’s most celebrated comments: “I make it a point never to complain.”
Lord Lexden
London SW1
28/3/13 - Disraeli's dictum
Sir, Disraeli was always rude about those who tried to suggest that beneath a superficial Toryism he was a “a respectable political liberal” (letter, Mar 21). Liberals existed, he said in 1872, “to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress”. Not a bad description of Lord Justice Leveson and those who support him.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
13/3/13 - Royal tattoos
Sir, The future Edward VII was very proud of the tattoo he acquired in Jerusalem in 1862 (“How party Prince woke up with a tattoo”, Mar 8). His taste was inherited by his son, the future George V, who visited Jerusalem 20 years later. He went to see “the same old man that tattooed Papa” and “acquired the same thing too, the 5 crosses”, telling his mother (who was apparently unaware of her husband’s adornment) to “ask Papa to show his arm”.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
18/2/13 - Protected species
Sir, The future Edward VII is unlikely to have felt any deep distress over the accusation in 1896 that he had broken the law by shooting a protected owl (“Shooting prince bang to rights”, Feb 15). He mocked conservation measures. One of his closest friends awoke from a drunken stupor at Sandringham to find a dead seagull in his bed after introducing a Bill in Parliament to protect the species.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
11/2/13 - Political patronage
Sir, Mr Coolican (letter, Feb 6) can have little confidence that Nick Clegg will kill the “deplorable proposal” to make senior civil service appointments subject to greater ministerial control.
On the day that his letter was published, the government informed the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, of which I am a member, that candidates for the top posts should be considered by an appointment panel whose composition would presumably be decided by ministers. The panel’s shortlist would then be vetted by the independent Civil Service Commission (which at the moment is in full charge of the whole process) after which ministers would make “a choice between those appointable candidates”.
This cumbersome, politically charged procedure has no merit. In a debate in the Lords on the accountability of civil servants on February 7, grave disquiet was expressed by me and other more distinguished peers. The leading expert on the issue, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, urged peers “to watch like hawks for signs of slippage back into the — for some — tempting restoration of political patronage at the top of the Civil Service”.
Mr Coolican rightly gives Gladstone credit for purging political patronage, though he was Chancellor of the Exchequer not Prime Minister when he received Sir Charles Trevelyan’s proposals in 1853. No one showed greater reforming zeal than Trevelyan. His suggestion that the highest posts might be decided by the First Lord of the Treasury was designed to mitigate the hostility that his attack on patronage was bound to provoke. As it was, the outcry against him was so ferocious that the implementation of his report, recommending open competitive examination for entry to public service, was delayed until 1870.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
18/1/13 - Lifespans
Sir, The lives of David Assersohn’s friend and his friend’s father span a period of 161 years (letter, Jan 16). Their achievement is narrowly beaten by the millionaire Sir Charles Tennant who was born in 1823 and his youngest daughter Kay, half-sister of Margot Asquith and the first woman life peer. She died in 1994. Father and daughter together spanned 171 years.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
14/1/13 - Kaiser’s ‘reunion’ with Victoria
Sir, In suggesting that the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore would be an appropriate resting place for the Kaiser’s remains, Professor J. W. Humberston (letter, Jan 8) conjures up the touching spectacle of a family reunion with the German Emperor finding himself “close to his maternal grand-parents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert”. Such proximity might well seem wholly unsuitable.
The Kaiser’s Germany was the complete opposite of the liberal democracy for which Albert constantly strove. As for Victoria, she regarded her country’s future enemy as “ that very foolish, undutiful and — I must add — unfeeling boy . . . I wish he could get a good ‘skelping’ as the Scotch say (flogging)”.
She refused to allow him to attend her Golden and Diamond jubilees. But he redeemed himself as she lay dying, supporting her with his one good arm for two-and-a-half hours. Perhaps he does deserve a place near her.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
27/12/12 - Word on the street
Sir, The letter of 1889 reprinted on December 26 demands action “to keep the sidewalk clear”. My grandfather’s Chambers Dictionary, published a few years later, defines sidewalk as a “foot walk beside a street or road”. But my father’s 1977 edition places (US) after it. How did this word become the monopoly of Americans?
Lord Lexden
London SW1
19/12/12 - Working coalitions
Sir, The Opinion article (Dec 14) by Philip Collins was not a cause for boundless joy (letter, Dec 17). He referred to a coalition between Liberals and Conservatives “just before the Great War”. Such a government was not formed until nine months after the war had started. Its performance did not disprove Disraeli’s celebrated dictum.
But if a coalition had come into existence in 1910 as the most dynamic politicians of the era wanted, it could well have provided a happy precedent for David Cameron. Churchill and Lloyd George would have joined forces with leading Tories to devise a devolution settlement for all parts of the United Kingdom, settle Lords reform, and introduce a far-reaching scheme of national insurance. After detailed discussions the leaders reluctantly abandoned the coalition plans which their supporters could not be persuaded to love.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
4/12/12 - Press and power
Sir, Canada not only gave us an underrated Prime Minister, Bonar Law (letter, Nov 29); it also provided his closest confidant (some said evil genius), Lord Beaverbrook, whose vast Canadian wealth subsequently enabled him to become the dominant press baron of his time. But he was famously beaten hands down by Stanley Baldwin when he attempted to use the power of Fleet Street to dictate Tory policy on Empire free trade in the years 1929-31.
Beaverbrook’s defeat showed that legislation was not needed to curb the pretensions of newspapers even when sales were at their height. A courageous elected politician quickly put them in their place, denouncing them in much quoted words for trying to exercise power without responsibility, “the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”. Lord Justice Leveson could have learnt some useful lessons from Baldwin’s courage.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
27/11/12 - Attlee’s war record
Sir, William Rees-Mogg lets Attlee off lightly for opposing rearmament at the 1935 election on the grounds that as Prime Minister “he would certainly have repudiated” that unpatriotic course (“Don’t underestimate Miliband. He’s like Attlee”, Nov 23).
As Leader of the Opposition before 1940 he could, at the very least, have shown benign neutrality towards Baldwin and Chamberlain as they built up Britain’s defences against the dictators. He declined to do so, even opposing his party’s modest change of policy in July 1937 when it decided to abstain, instead of voting against, the annual armaments estimates. Attlee stood unhelpfully on the sidelines as Neville Chamberlain “led every step towards rearmament and, more than any other man, laid the foundations for British fighting power during the Second World War”, in the words of A. J. P. Taylor.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
14/11/12 - Modern mores
Sir, Oliver Kamm notes that the legal ban on non-Anglicans holding public office was lifted in 1828 (“The Church will adapt to modern mores”, Nov 9). It was removed by a Tory government even though the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, favoured its nominal retention as a symbol of Anglican supremacy. In practice Protestant dissenters suffered no great inconvenience because Parliament passed annual indemnity Bills which released them from any penalties for failing to attend Anglican worship. But when, in the spring of 1828, petitions arrived at Westminster in unprecedented numbers demanding complete abolition, Wellington immediately gave way. “I am not one of those,” he said, “who consider that the best means of preserving the Constitution of this country is by rigidly adhering to measures which have been in existence for 200 years.” It was a conspicuous example of the pragmatism that is a marked feature of Toryism at its best. Another occurred in the following year when Catholics were admitted to the Commons and most public offices. But in 1830 Wellington’s pragmatism suddenly deserted him. He declared that the country’s medieval electoral system was perfect in every respect, presenting the next great issue — parliamentary reform — to the hitherto enfeebled Whigs, from whom Nick Clegg claims to have derived inspiration for his botched proposals of constitutional reform. The great Reform Act should have been another pragmatic Tory concession.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
7/11/12 - Faithful minister
Sir, The “marvellously named” Edward Pleydell-Bouverie, to whom Philip Collins accords all the credit for introducing limited liability into company law in 1855 (Opinion, Nov 2), knew very little about business life. The second son of the 3rd Earl of Radnor, he had a significant stake in the family estates of some 30,000 acres in Wiltshire where he carried out the traditional public duties of a virtuous country gentleman with diligence and skill.
His main interest in politics as MP for Kilmarnock for 30 years (with an electorate of some 3,000 in the late 1860s) was to make life as difficult as possible for his fellow Liberal, Gladstone, whom he declared in 1866 to be “neither honest, moderate or gentleman enough” to be a minister, let alone Prime Minister after his hero, Palmerston.
Even though Palmerston was over 70 in 1855, neither the Crimean War nor the sexual favours of a variety of society ladies exhausted his prodigious energies. He swiftly made himself an expert on the issue of limited liability to secure the firm support of investors. The faithful Pleydell-Bouverie, a junior minister (he never rose to the top rank), acted at his master’s behest.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
24/10/12 - Rhodes and Parnell
Sir, Matthew Parris claims that Cecil Rhodes, the arch imperialist, was a friend of the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell (Opinion, Oct 20). In fact they met only briefly to strike a remarkable political bargain in 1888.
Rhodes gave Parnell a cheque for £10,000 (equivalent to £1 million today), some of which, his party complained, went into his own pocket. In return Parnell persuaded Gladstone to alter his Irish Home Rule policy to permit Irish representation at Westminster after the establishment of a parliament in Dublin. Naively Rhodes believed that self-governing colonies would be able to follow the Irish example, so realising his vision of imperial federation, a project in which Parnell had no interest.
If Rhodes did offer the advice attributed to him by Parris — resign, marry, return — it fell on deaf ears and does not appear in any of the standard biographies of Parnell.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
22/10/12 - Royal interest
Sir, Prince Charles is the first Prince of Wales since the 18th century to take a serious and sustained interest in domestic political issues (letters, Oct 18, 19 and 20). Queen Victoria expressly forbade any “independent communication” between her heir, later Edward VII, and the government. The future George V devoted himself to shooting and stamp-collecting. Prince Charles’s unfortunate great-uncle Edward VIII diligently toured the Empire as Prince of Wales, charming all he met, but he was denied access to all important State papers, and discouraged from talking to politicians and civil servants. All three came to the throne insufficiently prepared for their duties.
Prince Charles’s admirable habit of discussing political matters privately with ministers should be emulated by his heirs. Their comments should be disclosed only after death.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
5/10/12 - Miliband and the 'one nation' party
Sir, As your correspondent rightly observes (letter, Oct 4), Disraeli never used the phrase “one nation”. But he famously deplored the existence of two nations, the rich and the poor, in his novel Sybil, published in 1845 (report, Oct 3). And 30 years later he introduced a few measures to improve the condition of the poor.
His great speech in Manchester 140 years ago, on which Ed Miliband lavished praise, was a brilliant defence of Britain’s historic constitution, cast in traditional Tory terms.
“The programme of the Conservative Party”, he declared, “is to maintain the constitution of the country”. He spoke at length and with deep feeling about the monarchy, the hereditary House of Lords (specifically ruling out the creation of life peers which some leading Tories then favoured) and the established Church. He twitted the Liberals for making “no provision for the representation of the working classes”, which he himself had introduced five years earlier. He devoted no more than nine sentences to social reform in a speech of 3½ hours delivered “without reference to a note”.
Stanley Baldwin was the first Conservative to employ the term “one nation”. In a speech on December 4, 1924, he declared that “we stand for the union of those two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago: union among our own people to make one nation of our own people at home which, if secured, nothing else matters in the world”. It was on that basis that Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain devised the first stages of a distinctively Tory welfare state in the interwar years.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
19/9/12 - Tory prophecy
Sir, Despite the deep anguish that it created in Rome, the annihilation of the army of P. Quinctilius Varus in AD9 certainly should not be invoked by Tories prophesying Labour’s rout at the next election (Opinion, Sept 17, and letter, Sept 18). Suetonius famously recorded how a distraught Emperor Augustus wandered through the halls of his palaces crying out “Vare, legiones redde”. He scrapped his plans to conquer Germany up to the River Elbe. But far from being a defeat from which the Roman Empire never truly recovered, as Tim Montgomerie contends, four and a half centuries of first steady expansion and then slow decline lay ahead. Tories surely expect to accomplish a decisive victory over Labour rather more rapidly than this.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
10/9/12 - Brown's job
Sir, The not very witty advice (letter, Sept 6) about the disrespectful treatment of in-trays supposedly given to George Brown on taking up a ministerial appointment reads suspiciously like an invention by a rather mediocre civil servant with a taste for split infinitives — a suspicion not diminished by the fact that Brown was never Home Secretary, the post which he is described as taking up when the advice was proffered.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
4/9/12 - The Tories and Ireland
Sir, J. R. G. Edwards (letter, Aug 31) is quite correct in stating that “fear of a rebellion in Ireland” existed in 1829 when the Tories under Wellington gave Roman Catholics the right to sit in Parliament. But they did not cravenly surrender to that fear. They took the opportunity to implement a carefully considered plan for Ireland, of which Catholic Emancipation formed just one part, devised by the Younger Pitt but blocked by George III, at the time of the Act of Union in 1801. O’Connell’s vexatious Catholic Association was suppressed, and the size of the Irish electorate cut from about 200,000 to 40,000 voters, the disenfranchised being overwhelmingly Catholic.
As the late Professor Peter Jupp, the leading authority on these events, put it, “the legislation giving Catholics almost equal rights with Protestants was therefore counter-balanced by that which took away most of the political power which had been used to achieve it”. The Tories had long been convinced that “a fresh balance had to be struck between Protestant and Catholic interests which preserved those of the Protestants but accommodated the increase of Catholics in the professions and trade”. In other words, they wanted to make a success of the union between Britain and Ireland which they had created.
As for Disraeli in 1867, he turned legislation brought forward by a Liberal government the previous year, which would have seriously damaged Tory interests into a wider measure of electoral reform which showed for the first time since the fall of Peel in 1846 that the Tories, in Robert Blake’s words, had become “a viable alternative to the still dominant Liberals”. Disraeli, much given to idle boasting, did not “dish the Whigs”; they won the ensuing election with a majority of 106 and Dizzy nearly lost the Tory leadership.
Lord Lexden
Author, A Party of Change: A Brief History of the Conservatives (2008)
House of Lords
14/8/12 - Zinoviev letter
Sir, It is not the case that the most notorious attempt to inflame feeling about a Soviet threat to Britain, the Zinoviev letter of 1924, “helped to bring about the fall of the Labour Government of Ramsay MacDonald”, as was suggested in the obituary of the interpreter Tony Bishop (Aug 10).
The forged letter was almost certainly leaked to the press and the Conservative Party at the instigation of the third-most senior MI5 officer, and was published in the last stages of the October 1924 election campaign. Labour nevertheless increased its total vote by a million. MacDonald fell because his ally, the Liberal Party, lost almost half its vote after fighting a poor campaign.
In the view of A. J. P. Taylor, “the Zinoviev letter had its effect on Labour only after the election had been lost. It then became a cover against accusations of a failure, and a bar against any attempt to face the problems of a future Labour government.”
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
8/8/12 - Pankhurst's grave
Sir, Conservatives should feel deep regret that Emmeline Pankhurst’s grave and monument in Brompton Cemetery have fallen into disrepair (letter, Aug 4). In old age she formed a close association with Stanley Baldwin, a great progressive Conservative and supporter of women’s suffrage, joining his party in 1926. When in the following year he introduced the legislation that gave women the vote on the same terms as men, she put herself forward successfully for the Tory nomination in one of the three Stepney constituencies where she “worked with great energy and dedication”. She would undoubtedly have put Labour under great pressure at the 1929 general election, but, weakened by periods of imprisonment, she did not live to contest it.
Baldwin was given the honour of unveiling her statue beside Parliament. At my instigation a room in the Conservative Party’s new campaign headquarters was named in her memory in 2005. The party should play a prominent part in raising funds to restore her place of burial.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
17/7/12 - Decentralisation
Sir, Vernon Bogdanor (letter, July 13) pinpoints the 1979 election as the first occasion on which the Liberal Party supported a “democratically elected” upper house. The plan then, however, was rather different from Mr Clegg’s today. It did not provide for direct elections. The Liberals’ concern in 1979 and subsequent elections was a “massive decentralisation of power from Westminster and Whitehall” through devolved parliaments in Edinburgh, Cardiff and the regions of England (Northern Ireland remaining under direct rule from London). In conjunction with this “federal solution” to constitutional issues, “a new, democratically chosen, second chamber” was to bring together “representatives of the nations and regions of the UK, and the UK members of the European Parliament”. It is only in the last few years that the Party has been firmly committed to full, direct elections for the upper house.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
10/7/12 - Upper house needs experience and expertise
Sir, It is immensely kind of David Yates (letter, July 5), who wants life peers to be known as plain Mr, to indicate that we should be given “a suitable suffix” to cheer us in our new lowly condition. Should we become LOPs (Lords of Parliament) or LPs (Life Peers), recalling a defunct gramophone record? Perhaps those who wish to abase us will be able to propose arresting alternatives.
Mr Alistair Lexden (suffix awaited)
House of Lords
29/6/12 - School reforms
Sir,
Michael Gove in particular should rejoice at the decision of Liverpool College, opened by Gladstone, to join the state sector (“Education’s Berlin Wall is falling at long last”, Andrew Adonis, June 26). Addressing the school in 1872, Gladstone charged it with a special responsibility to combat the “scepticism in the public mind, of old as well as of young, respecting the value of learning and culture, and a consequent slackness in seeking their attainment”. Iain Duncan Smith too can draw encouragement from Gladstone’s speech. He went on to denounce the “corroding pest of idleness — that special temptation to a wealthy country”.
Lord Lexden
General Secretary, Independent Schools Council, 1997-2004
House of Lords
19/6/12 - Don’t knock Enoch
Sir, Oliver Kamm (The Pedant, June 16) takes Enoch Powell to task, in the week of the centenary of his birth, for supporting the discredited theory that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the Earl of Oxford. In fact Powell believed that they were works by divers hands. “The plays,” he wrote, “were court productions, written in the first place at the court and for the court by courtiers.” In view of his delight in pedantic dispute, Powell’s views should surely be represented with scrupulous accuracy, even where they are wrong.
Lord Lexden
Co-author, Enoch at 100 House of Lords
11/6/12 - Victoria's upset
Sir, Queen Victoria’s marriage in 1840 was not “ruined” by a struggle to get the ring on her finger (leading article, June 7). She and her “dearest dearest dear Albert” practised beforehand to ensure that everything went well at the first royal wedding held during the day rather than at the traditional hour late in the evening. Her “happiest moment was when Albert put on the ring” in front of a congregation of 300 from which her political opponents, the Tories, had been excluded. “It is my marriage and I will only have those who can sympathise with me,” she said. Her one disappointment was the choir of the Chapel Royal which sang “shockingly”.
It was at her Coronation two years earlier, for which there was no rehearsal, that there was trouble with the ring. The aged Archbishop of Canterbury forced it on the wrong finger. She “nearly screamed with pain”. Proceedings were then held up for an hour while she bathed her hand in ice-cold water to get it off “which I did at last with great pain”.
It was to prevent a repetition of the Coronation disaster that royal pageantry was first organised in 1840 to the standard which we are now accustomed to expect.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
14/5/12 - Turbulent editor
Sir, With its solemn, upper-crust readership The Times could not possibly have had W. T. Stead as its editor in the 1880s (letter, May 12). A lifelong radical, he invented popular modern journalism, conducting highly partisan campaigns which turned the paper he did edit at that time, The Pall Mall Gazette, from “a sedate chronicle and review” into “the initiator of all kinds of new programmes and movements ... astonishing people by its dash and unconventionality”.
Politicians treated him with great consideration. Gladstone briefed him frequently, even after he had whipped up hysterical public support for General Gordon and caused a baseless scare about the shrinking size of the Navy which forced Gladstone to increase spending on it. The Tory leader, Lord Salisbury, cultivated him too, providing confidential information which ensured that when Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph, suddenly resigned from the Cabinet in December 1886 he had London’s most widely read paper against him.
Stead would not have fared well at a public inquiry into the relations between politicians and journalists.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
9/4/12 - PM's houses
Sir, If Anthony Hollis should visit Downing Street and Chequers he would not find himself in “public buildings” (letter, Mar 29). No 10 was a gift from George II to Sir Robert Walpole who accepted it as “an official residence for himself and his successors” without any restrictions on its use. The whole house, not just the family flat, belongs to the Prime Minister of the day.
Chequers was given to the nation in 1920 by Lord and Lady Lee of Fareham “as a place of rest and recreation for her Prime Ministers for ever” accompanied by over half their wealth to pay for its upkeep.David Cameron is perfectly entitled to use both places for party political entertaining. Unlikely though it might seem, perhaps the company of party donors assists his rest and recreation.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
20/3/12 - Father of the House
Sir, In his tribute to the Queen (Parliamentary sketch, Mar 8) Sir Peter Tapsell recalled the most remarkable of all his predecessors as Father of the House, Charles Pelham Villiers, who held the position at the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Unlike Sir Peter, however, he disliked honours, turning down knighthoods and peerages several times.
Villiers represented Wolverhampton from 1835 until his death in 1898 at the age of 96. At his first election the two-member constituency had 1,700 voters. Sixty-three years later Wolverhampton, now divided into three seats, had a total electorate of nearly 30,000. Whenever there was a contested election Villiers topped the poll.
In 1840 Villiers, a Liberal, proposed the repeal of the Corn Laws, carried six years later by the Tory Robert Peel. Two political generations on he was a prominent opponent of Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bills in 1886 and 1893, siding with Joe Chamberlain’s Liberal Unionist Party.
In old age he impressed a leading political journalist, George Smalley, with his “elegance of speech and energy of statement”. Eddie Hamilton, Gladstone’s Private Secretary, was fascinated to hear him in 1885 “talking about the events of 50 years ago as if they had happened yesterday”. Lord Derby, however, complained at this time that he was “dirtier as to hands and linen than I ever saw anyone in a drawing room”.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
25/2/12 - Proverbial wisdom
Sir, In the Commons Simon Burns, the Health Minister, quoted inaccurately the well-known line that “a lie will go round the world while truth is putting its boots on” and attributed it to Jim Callaghan (Parliamentary Sketch, Feb 22). A dictionary of quotations would have shown him that it is an ancient proverb, popularised in the 19th century by the leading nonconformist preacher of his day, Charles Spurgeon. There could be no more vivid illustration of the need for improvement and reform in the Commons rather than the Lords (letters, Feb 21). During the year that I have been a member of the latter, I have listened carefully to the prose and poetry that have been quoted in speeches, noting only one slightly garbled sentence and no misattribution.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
14/2/12 - Housewife
Sir, The picture of Margaret Thatcher sitting demurely at her dressing table applying her make-up during the 1975 Conservative leadership campaign (Register, Feb 11) provides a powerful reminder of how, in small things as well large, she changed the rules. As Barbara Castle noted enviously in her diary, no senior politician had previously thought of advertising a daily round of homely toil. In the early weeks of 1975 the press was regaled with a mass of photographs showing Mrs Thatcher cooking, cleaning, washing up and painting, as well as beautifying herself.
The unprecedented barrage served an obvious political purpose. It proclaimed, rather spuriously, that Mrs Thatcher was a woman of the people inhabiting a different world from the Tory toffs who had failed the Conservative Party under Heath. The image stuck — to her immense benefit.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
7/2/12 - It’s a dog’s life with the Royals
Sir, The modern British monarchy has yet to produce a single cat lover (“A little pedigree chum for royal couple”, Feb 2 ). Dogs have been a firm part of royal life almost continuously since 1833 when the future Queen Victoria was presented with a King Charles spaniel which she dressed up in a scarlet jacket and blue trousers.
Edward VII was so deeply attached to his fox terrier Caesar that it was placed immediately behind the gun carriage at his funeral. George V was more interested in birds, slaughtering pheasants by the thousand but cosseting parrots. But his eldest son, briefly Edward VIII, more than made up for that period of canine neglect. He was always surrounded by cairn terriers, presenting their puppies to his mistresses. One was an early gift to Mrs Simpson.
Lord Lexden
London SWI
9/1/12 - The Iron Lady
Sir,
May I comment on two of the “nit-picking points” in Matthew Parris’s article on The Iron Lady (Times2, Jan 5)? He doubts whether she ever wore a hat in the Commons chamber. She sported one from time to time, particularly at State Openings of Parliament. As Education Secretary she appeared under the large box-shaped hats that she favoured at the time.
In referring to Airey Neave, Parris makes the common error of attributing his murder to the IRA. The atrocity was in fact committed by the so-called Irish National Liberation Army (INLA).
I once asked Mrs Thatcher whether she thought a film would be made about her. “Perhaps it will, dear”, she said after a pause, and then added: “You’re a historian. It is through books written after careful research that we get closest to the truth, don’t you think?”
Lord Lexden
(Political Adviser to Airey Neave, 1977-79)
House of Lords
21/12/11 - Abingdon MP
Sir, It is unlikely that the kind of speech which your correspondent (letter, Dec 17) attributes to his great-grandfather, whom he describes as Conservative MP for Abingdon elected in 1876, was ever made — by anyone. An MP at that time would hardly have told his constituents that he intended to neglect them for a mere five years. Before the 1911 Parliament Act, the law allowed seven years to elapse between elections.
Furthermore, no Conservative was in a position to make any such boast in Abingdon, one of some 60 corrupt constituencies that still disfigured the electoral system, at the general election held in 1874 (not 1876). The 795 electors returned a Liberal MP, John Creemer Clarke of the piquantly named Waste Court, Abingdon, with a majority of 106 over the Conservative candidate, the Hon Charles Lindsay. Clarke was re-elected six years later.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
5/12/11 - Fate of voyageurs
Sir, Robin Morgan (letter, Nov.30) takes me to task for failing to appreciate the fine qualities of the 386 Canadian boatmen, known as voyageurs, who “performed sterling service” in assisting the Gordon relief expedition of 1884-85, commanded by Lord Wolseley, on its journey down the Nile.
According to Adrian Preston, who edited Wolseley’s journal for publication in 1967, “the boatmen bore no resemblance to the original voyageurs (who had in fact died out) and were for the most part inexperienced lumbermen, lawyers and businessmen”. In his biography of Wolseley (1964), Joseph Lehmann writes that “some were worse than useless, capsizing and smashing boats on the rocks . . . Many of the names alone, such as “Patrick Murphy, Limerick”, somehow lacked the flavour of birchbark shooting rapids in the wilderness . . . [When they reached the Sudan] the voyageurs, though Wolseley wanted them to stay on, unanimously voted to go home. It was reported they were in a drunken state all the way across the Atlantic”.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
30/11/11 - Thomas Cook and Gordon’s demise
Sir, Thomas Cook was not “asked by the British Government to organise an expedition to rescue General Gordon” in 1884 (“The traveller’s friend,” Nov 23). A large flotilla of its steamboats, which took tourists down the Nile, was hired by the British Army at a cost of some £120,000 to transport the Gordon relief expedition as far as Wady Halfa, more than 600 miles from Khartoum. The entire Cook family travelled with the expeditionary force as guests of the commander-in-chief, Lord Wolseley.
Because of the incompetence of Sir Redvers Buller, the chief of staff, the steamers ran out of coal en route and a fortnight was lost — the first of a number of delays which cost Gordon his life. Problems increased after the force had been transferred to special boats capable of riding the perilous rapids beyond Wady. In place of the efficient Cook operation, Gordon’s rescuers found themselves at the mercy of crews composed largely of Canadian lumberjacks and businessmen commanded by a Toronto alderman. No imperial venture was doomed to more certain failure.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
15/11/11 - Silent majority
Sir, Battersea’s respectful observance of two minutes’ silence on Remembrance Day before the Second World War (letter, Nov 11) was not emulated everywhere. Cuthbert Headlam, the Tory MP for Barnard Castle in Co Durham, noted in his diary as early as November 11, 1924, that at his local ceremony “the silence was not maintained . . . [as a result of] an engine puffing away in the near distance and a cart moving almost into our little crowd. I wonder how long the custom of preserving silence will continue,” he asked himself. “Perhaps not even throughout our generation.”
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
1/11/11 - Inheriting peerages
Sir, Now that it has been decided to abolish male primogeniture in the monarchy (leading article, Oct 29), should the first-born also succeed to hereditary peerages?
When the question came up in the Lords recently, Lord Strathclyde said, "There is no simple read-across to succession to the hereditary peerage, which is infinitely more complicated and affects many more families."
Those who favour equality between the sexes are unlikely to be discouraged from pressing for change by the complex practical problems that change would cause, particularly if peerages held by members of the Royal Family are affected by the new arrangements for royal succession.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
25/10/11 - Wranglings and royal succession
Sir, The separation of the crown of Hanover from that of the United Kingdom on the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 (report, Oct 15, and letter, Oct 20) would not provide a happy precedent for any division of the monarch's realms today.
A bitter controversy over ownership of some of the finest jewels in the royal collection soured Anglo-Hanoverian relations for 20 years. After two lengthy commissions of inquiry Queen Victoria was forced to hand over some of her favourite pieces, leaving her "desperately annoyed". She was prohibited from buying the distinctive Hanoverian cream and black horses which had drawn the royal coaches on state occasions since 1714. Her uncle, the King of Hanover, who was extremely unpopular in England, infuriated her by demanding precedence over the Prince Consort. That led to unseemly scenes at a royal wedding when the Hanoverian king nearly fell over after "a slight push" from Prince Albert. He was caught and led away by force by the Lord Chamberlain "fuming with ire".
Could members of the Royal Family today avoid similar wrangling if the Queen's realms were split?
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
7/10/11 - Kitchener’s world
Sir, Perhaps Lady Fellowes of West Stafford should strive to overcome her deep disappointment (Times2, Sept 27, and letters, Sept 30 and Oct 3) by accepting that it was the wish of her illustrious forebear that there should never be a Countess Kitchener of Khartoum in her own right.
Nominally the imperial hero’s remarkable special remainder allowed a daughter to inherit his title, but since he was a confirmed bachelor this was meaningless. The right of succession was effectively confined to his eldest brother plus his male heirs and, “in default of such issue”, to the male heirs of his youngest brother (a middle brother missed out completely).
Kitchener lived in a male world, surrounded by army chums whom he described as his “happy family of boys”. In his last years he settled down with a favourite ADC in an “intimate association (which) was happy and fortunate”, in the discreet words of his biographer, Sir Philip Magnus. Queen Victoria was pleasantly surprised when she met him. “They say he dislikes women, but I can only say he was very nice to me.” He did not extend such forbearance to female members of his family, and would almost certainly have treated the ladies of Downton Abbey brusquely.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
17/9/11 - Progressive Conservatives
Sir, Progressive Conservatives are not old Whigs reborn (letter, Sept 3). They have long had a distinct identity of their own.
The Tories, said Disraeli in 1867, must always remember that Britain is "a progressive country" in which "change was constant". There could be no question of seeking "to resist change which was inevitable". All manner of political and social reforms could be undertaken by the Conservative Party as long as they conformed to the (usefully) vague principle that they deferred to "the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions" of the people. Throughout his career Disraeli constantly denounced the Whigs on the grounds that they promoted the selfish interests of the commercial classes.
Disraeli's views were embedded deeply in the Tory tradition by the Primrose League, which instilled uncritical admiration of him in some two million, largely working-class Tories before the First World War. The League's handbook opened with the following words: "A democratic and progressive Conservatism is the best guarantee of the greatness and prosperity of our Empire." Stanley Baldwin, a product of the League, quickened the pace of social reform in the inter-war years in accordance with this axiom. Contemplating a massive election victory in 1959, Harold Macmillan, another leader steeped in Disraelian values, declared that "the important thing is to keep the Conservative Party on progressive lines." Philip Collins (Opinion, Sept 2) is very wide of the mark when he claims that Tory progress has occurred only "when conservatives have turned briefly into radicals".
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
5/9/11 - Cheap money
Sir, Your leading article ("The Gold Bug", Aug 20) blames the Great Depression of the 1930s on the "catastrophic policy" of raising interest rates in order to defend the gold standard. Britain left the gold standard in September 1931. Interest rates then stood at 6 per cent. They plummeted to 2 per cent in June 1932, their lowest level for 35 years, where they remained (with one brief interruption) until November 1951.
Neville Chamberlain, a brilliant Chancellor of the Exchequer, described cheap money as one of the "two main pillars" of his policy to restore economic prosperity, the reintroduction of tariffs being the other (infinitely more controversial) one. The independent Committee on Economic Information confirmed in October 1933 that cheap money was playing a key part in Britain's economic recovery, which was then well under way in some parts of the country.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
17/8/11 - The King's Council
Sir, The King's Council of the North - its full title - was not established to "give more power to the North" (report, Aug 15) but to take it from unruly feudal barons and vest it in the monarch, who ruled the region thereafter through a Lord President of the North, by whom summary justice was dispensed under the royal prerogative.
The most effective holder of that office, the Earl of Strafford under Charles I, tried to bring prosperity to the North by promoting drainage schemes. He was denounced for his high-handedness and ended up on the scaffold.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
9/8/11 - Tory Heartland
Sir, Roger Boyes asserts that "Liverpool never, of course, became a natural Tory heartland" ("One-nil to Liverpool: 'We have got a better class of poverty nowadays'," Aug 5). But that is exactly what it did become in the 19th century and what it remained until the Macmillan era.
A succession of powerful Tory party bosses ruled the city council with a rod of iron, backed by strident working-class Protestants and their Orange lodges. Their methods may have been distasteful by today's standards, but they were extremely effective. At the start of the First World War eight of the city's nine constituencies were represented by Conservatives (or Unionists, as they were known at the time), with an Irish Nationalist holding the remaining seat.
In 1939 the Tory tally was the same out of a total of 11 seats. As late as 1959 the Tories won two-thirds of the city's seats. The city was the greatest of all Tory urban heartlands, apart from Chamberlainite Birmingham.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
3/8/11 - Royal Garden Party
Sir, I wonder if Her Majesty The Queen saw the archive photograph of the 1937 royal garden party ("From the Times archive", Register, July 23). Then a girl of 11, she stands demurely between her parents, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. To their left other leading members of the royal family, including the unmistakable figure of Queen Mary, converse amiably in groups.
Behind them appear deferential members of their staffs, several discreetly obscured by the foliage of trees. Yet your caption beneath the picture transforms all of them into ordinary garden party guests.
What a terrible act of lèse-majesté!
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
26/7/11 - Crichel Downfall
Sir, Crichel Down would never have become "the textbook case" of how ministers once took responsibility for their departments' mistakes if Winston Churchill, Prime Minister at the time, had had his way (Philip Collins, Opinion, July 22).
A year before the crisis broke in 1954 he wanted to give the property back to its original owner. "The land was taken for military purposes in a national emergency," he said, "it is no longer needed and cannot be retained for some other purpose," particularly since "nationalisation of land is against Tory policy. It seems to me all wrong."
But the arrogant civil servants at the Ministry of Agriculture, who treated the previous owner so high-handedly, disregarded the aged and infirm premier with fatal consequences for their reputations.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
12/7/11 - Society’s hypocrisy over standards of behaviour
Sir, James Hickson (letter, July 9) doubts whether politicians should maintain contact with the employers of journalists.
No one has ever courted them more sedulously than Lloyd George. In August 1909 he met Lord Northcliffe, the greatest press baron of his age, for the first time. "Would Lord Northcliffe like to see the draft proposals which he was to submit to the House the next day?" his brother recorded. "N. replied that he supposed it to be quite out of order, as it most certainly was. But Ll. G. was after big game. He produced the draft from the drawer of his table, handed it to N. , and told him to make any use of it he pleased in the Daily Mail."
Most politicians have rather higher standards than Lloyd George, but in private dealings with media proprietors it has always been hard for them to keep to the paths of righteousness.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
3/6/11 - Liberal invitation
Sir, An invitation to Liberal Democrats to join a majority Conservative government after the next election would not be quite as extraordinary as Rachel Sylvester suggests (Opinion, May 31). Churchill made just such an offer to the Liberals on his return to power 60 years ago. It included the woolsack for Asquith’s son. Clement Davies, the Liberal leader, wanted to take up the invitation, but his colleagues would not let him without a guarantee of proportional representation. At least Nick Clegg ought not to face such an impediment after the AV fiasco.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
28/5/11 - Parliaments’ mum
Sir, President Obama did not come “at last to the Mother of Parliaments” when he arrived at Westminster (“Obama’s credo for Britain and America”, May 26). He reached it the moment he set foot in the country.
“England”, declared the great radical John Bright in 1865, “is the Mother of Parliaments”.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
14/5/11 - Dizzy Day
Sir, The restoration of the merry monarch, Charles II, in 1660 was commemorated on Oak Apple Day (letter, May 11). Only one other individual in modern British history, Benjamin Disraeli, has been honoured in a similar fashion. For more than 50 years the streets were filled with people adorned with primroses (generally regarded as his favourite flower) on Primrose Day, the anniversary of his death on April 19, 1881. Perhaps this extraordinary phenomenon should be recalled through a Bank Holiday, giving Dizzy a final victory over Mr Gladstone.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
5/5/11 - End of the line in Kensal Green
Sir, Although Westminster Abbey was used in 1904 for the funeral of the last Duke of Cambridge (letters, May 2 and May 4), commander in chief of the army for nearly 40 years, his marriage to an English commoner in 1840 took place well out of sight. Queen Victoria’s consent, required in law by members of the Royal Family, was not forthcoming for her cousin (and close friend). The Duke’s wife, a former actress known as Mrs Fitzgeorge who bore him three sons, lived quietly on her own in Mayfair. In death they were fully united in Kensal Green cemetery.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
19/4/11 - No coupon
Sir, There was no coalition couponed candidate in Asquith’s East Fife constituency (letters, April 14, 15 and 16). As Roy Jenkins makes clear in Asquith (1964), the constituency “had not even needed the spur of the coupon (Lloyd George and Bonar Law, with self-conscious generosity, had withheld it from the Conservative Sprott) to vote him out”.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
15/4/11 - Coalition spirit
Sir, Vernon Bogdanor (“Coalitions fail from the bottom, not the top”, April 12) rewrites history by turning Asquith into a supporter of the coalition between Lloyd George and the Conservatives, which ousted him as Prime Minister in 1916. Asquith was not defeated at the 1918 election “despite receiving the coupon” as a coalition candidate. It was as leader of an independent Liberal Party that he fought that election, losing the seat in East Fife, which he had held for 32 years, to a Conservative by 2,000 votes.
His opponent’s placards proclaimed: “Asquith nearly lost us the War. Are you going to let him spoil the Peace?” The spirit of coalition was conspicuously absent.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
18/3/11 - Queen Victoria and ‘the Munshi’ (£)
Abdul Karim was adored by the monarch, even when she was given some unexpected, and not pleasant, news
Sir, There can be little doubt that Queen Victoria adored her Indian servant, Abdul Karim (“Tantrums and tension at Court when Queen Victoria fell for ‘the Munshi’,” Mar 15). She was infuriated by the racism that he evoked among her courtiers. She poured out her highly charged feelings in long letters to her doctor, Sir James Reid, who at one point was asked to supply “a long list of drugs”, including many poisons to the highly favoured retainer.
At “a very excited interview” in April 1897 Reid told her that “people in high places” were saying that “Your Majesty is not sane”. Yet her devotion survived the sternest test: later that year Reid informed her that her Munshi was badly infected with gonorrhoea. Though “greatly taken aback”, she remained in thrall to him. Lord Salisbury, then Prime Minister, concluded that “she really likes the emotional excitement” that Karim aroused.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
11/3/11 - History teaches us to vote ‘No to AV’ (£)
Sir, Our nation’s history is deeply rooted in our parliamentary democracy, a democracy in which, over centuries, men and women have fought for the right to vote. That long fight for suffrage established the principle of one man or woman, one vote. The principle that each person’s vote is equal, regardless of wealth, gender, race or creed, is a principle to which generations of reformers have dedicated their lives. It is a principle upon which reform of our parliamentary democracy still stands.
The referendum on May 5 that threatens to introduce a system of “Alternative Voting” — a voting system that will allow MPs to be elected to Parliament even if they do not win the majority of constituents’ first preference votes — also threatens to break this principle.
For the first time since 1928 and the granting of universal suffrage, we face the possibility that one person’s casting ballot will be given greater weight than another. For the first time in centuries, we face the unfair idea that one citizen’s vote might be worth six times that of another. It will be a tragic consequence if those votes belong to supporters of extremist and non-serious parties.
Twice in our past the nation has rejected any threat to the principle of one citizen, one vote. The last time, in 1931, Winston Churchill stood against the introduction of an alternative vote (AV) system. As he argued, AV would mean that elections would be determined by “the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates”. He understood that it was simply too great a risk to take.
The cause of reform, so long fought for, cannot afford to have the fundamentally fair and historic principle of majority voting cast aside; nor should we sacrifice the principle that generations of men and women have sought: that each being equal, every member of our society should cast an equal vote.
For these reasons, we urge the British people to vote “No” on May 5.
Professor David Abulafia, Dr John Adamson, Professor Antony Beevor, Professor Jeremy Black, Professor Michael Burleigh, Professor John Charmley, Professor Jonathan Clark, Dr Robert Crowcroft, Professor Richard J. Evans, David Faber, David Starkey, Professor Niall Ferguson, Dr Amanda Foreman, Dr John Guy, Robert Lacey, Dr Sheila Lawlor, Lord Lexden, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Dr Richard Rex, Dr Andrew Roberts, Professor Richard Shannon, Chris Skidmore, MP, D. R. Thorpe, Alison Weir, Philip Ziegler, Professor Lord Norton
14/12/10 - Liberal rebellions (£)
Sir, The largest and most damaging Liberal rebellion of the 20th century (”Rebels with few previous causes”, Dec 9) was inspired by a widespread belief that Lloyd George had misled the Commons by overstating the strength of the Armed Forces. John Davidson, Private Secretary to Lloyd George’s coalition partner, the Conservative leader Bonar Law, recorded that the Prime Minister’s figures “were undoubtedly exaggerated, if not actually untrue, and the impression which he conveyed to the House in its optimism and spirit implied that everything in the garden was lovely, which was not true”. In this insouciant manner Lloyd George brought about the deep split in the Liberal Party which, in Davidson’s words, proved “a fatal blow to its corporate existence”.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
25/4/10 - How Heath’s coalition with Thorpe fell apart (£)
Sir, Lord Steel of Aikwood states that electoral reform was not the determining factor in scuppering Ted Heath’s efforts to create a coalition with the Liberals after the February 1974 election (letter, April 21). Robert Armstrong, then Heath’s private secretary, kept a detailed and highly confidential account of the negotiations between Heath and the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, which was made public last year under the Freedom of Information Act.
The decisive meeting took place in No 10 on Sunday, March 3, 1974. Armstrong recorded that Thorpe asked for a firm undertaking on electoral reform, which he had raised in previous discussions. Thorpe reminded Heath that he had “drawn attention to the fact that his party had polled nearly six million votes in the election but had won only 14 seats, and asked what were the Government’s views on the subject of electoral reform. In his telephone conversation earlier in the day Mr Thorpe had adumbrated a proposal under which there would be a Speaker’s conference, with the Conservative and Liberal parties committed in advance to what their spokesmen would recommend to it, and pledge to implement the result within six months. The Prime Minister explained to Mr Thorpe that he and his colleagues could not honourably undertake to deliver anything like this.”
Thorpe replied that without it “there was no possibility of the Liberal Party agreeing to participating in the Government at this stage, though that prospect might change if and when a measure of electoral reform were passed ... [and] if there were to be any prospect of an arrangement between the two parties [short of coalition], it would be necessary for the Prime Minister and his colleagues to give more indication than the Prime Minister had so far given that they recognised the injustice of the present system and were in favour of changing it to a system of representation which was fairer to the minority groups”.
Since no such indication was forthcoming, the discussions collapsed.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
8/4/10 - Don’t just sell your policies, inspire us with vision and values (£)
Sir, May 6 is “a day made infamous by disaster” in Ireland as well as elsewhere (“Triumph, disaster or a birthday present for Blair?”, April 6). It is the date on which, in 1882, the Irish chief secretary and under-secretary were murdered in broad daylight in Phoenix Park, Dublin.
Lord Spencer, viceroy at the time, remarked that the murders were “planned by men of education and some of them men of refinement”. They have many successors among terrorists today.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
17/3/10 - Crimean War vote (£)
Sir, Professor Hew Strachan asserts that “in 1855 the Government fell, judged by the electorate, not the Supreme Court” (Commentary, Mar 15). It could not have been judged by the latter, which had not come into being. Nor was it judged by the electorate.
The Government resigned after the Commons voted to set up an inquiry into the Crimean War. Palmerston took over, even though he had been part of the discredited ministry. “The aged charlatan has at length attained the great object of his unscrupulous ambition,” said John Bright, the radical firebrand. The war dragged on without any improvement in Army conditions, despite the efforts of The Times’s war correspondent W. H. Russell.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
2/2/10 - Why the silence? (£)
Sir, Mark Shere (letter, Jan 26) writes that “since 1940 every prime minister that went to university was at Oxford except three (Churchill, Callaghan and Major)”. Is there now no one left in Edinburgh prepared to correct this error because it means owning up to educating Gordon Brown?
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
18/1/10 - Oxford underwear (£)
Sir, H. A. L. Fisher, Warden of New College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1940, was not the kind of man who would have wanted his underwear to end up on a dead young tramp to help to deceive the Germans (letter , Jan 16).
He followed his godfather, the Prince Consort, in reserving his approval for “anything that he found exalted”. He had no time for life’s failures. As Lloyd George’s Minister for Education his one objective was to help “young ambition starving for knowledge and stinted in opportunities”.
Nor would the destruction of Germany have appealed to him. His last published article, which appeared in February 1940, expressed the hope that “a modus vivendi with the Germans” would be found. A contribution to Operation Mincemeat should have been sought from the clothes closet of Oxford’s most zealous supporter of the war, A. L. Rowse, of All Souls.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
26/5/09 - Primrose Path (£)
Sir, Disraeli was much more familiar with political corruption “outside the Palace of Westminster” (letter, May 21) than Leofranc Holford-Strevens allows (letter, May 22). Disraeli was first elected as a Conservative in 1837, five years after the Great Reform Act, at Maidstone (where he was greeted with cries of “Shylock” and “Old Clothes”) after a contest that cost £40,000, equivalent to nearly £3 million today. With a total electorate of a million and a whole host of small two-member borough seats, corrruption flourished in the 35 years up to Disraeli’s Second Reform Act of 1867. It was only after the passage of the Corrupt Practices Act in 1883, two years after Disraeli’s death, that spending at elections was brought under effective control.
The Conservative Party promptly invented the Primrose League, which enlisted nearly two million volunteers, inspired by Disraeli’s memory, to work unpaid in the totally changed conditions.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
20/5/08 - Leadership blues (£)
Sir, Dr Marshall (letter, May 15) points out that long-serving prime ministers have almost invariably been followed by short-lived or troubled successors when the party remains in power. In fact, almost all have been both; the trouble being the cause of the short life.
Rosebery’s and Balfour’s Governments were both racked with internal divisions (indeed, the latter was totally split over tariff reform). Chamberlain and Eden both lost party confidence over the conduct of war. Callaghan had to face down the Left in his Cabinet and saw his small Commons majority disappear. Douglas-Home alone led a short-lived, harmonious Government (and only lost power by a whisker in 1964). Major led the one Government that was both troubled and, at nearly seven years, quite long-lived. For once the ruthless Conservative Party failed to deal with failure by making his tenure short.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
5/5/07 - Private schools stay out of reach (£)
Sir, There may indeed be record numbers at independent schools (report, May 4) but, as you also note, they still amount to no more than 7 per cent of all pupils, a proportion that has remained unchanged for decades.
Opinion polls consistently show that more than half of all families would send their children to independent schools if they could afford the fees. But independent schools have shown no interest in exploring ways of making their high standards available much more widely; for instance, by going out to win substantial business sponsorship so that places could be offered on a wide scale at affordable fees.
They have merely tinkered with scholarships and bursaries in response to pressure over their charitable status.
All in all the Blair years have been a time of missed opportunity for independent schools. There should be far more of them, and they should by now have created the close partnership with maintained schools, which Tony Blair said in 1997 was one of his chief ambitions.
Alistair Cooke,
General Secretary Independent Schools Council, 1997-2004
London SW1
18/4/06 - Honours lists (£)
Sir, Your report (“Cash for honours”, April 14) states that the notorious Maundy Gregory, the only person convicted so far under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925, did even better after that law had been passed, until it finally caught up with him in 1933 because he was able to keep “the whole of the price he had extracted” instead of putting most of it in the coffers of political parties”.
It was not quite as simple as that. Gregory had to divide his spoils with a corrupt Conservative official, Sir Leigh Maclachlan, and the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s private secretary, Sir Ronald Waterhouse,through whom he was able to get names into honours lists.What was left after they had had their cuts seems to have found its way into Tory funds.After serving his brief sentence in Wormwood Scrubs, Gregory was collected by a Central Office car before he could be rearrested on a murder charge and whisked off to a life of exile in France made more tolerable by a £30,000 payment authorised by Baldwin.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
