A selection of Lord Lexden's letters this year to The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The New Statesman, The Spectator and others. You can read letters from previous years in the menu to the left.
11/09/21 - 9/11 attack: Historical reflections in 2001 and 20 years on
Daily Telegraph
Original letter - 12 Sep 2001
SIR – Although Britain’s interventions in Afghanistan met with reverses (report Sept. 15), Sir Frederisk Roberts mounted a triumphant expedition in 1878 which culminated in his famous march from Kabul to Kandahar.
Some 10,000 troops covered 313 miles without significant loss in the heat of August, before crushing the entire Afghan army. Disraeli wrote that “the march was the march of Xenophon, and the victory that of Alexander”.
Queen Victoria argued strongly that the country should be kept under British control. Others maintained “the place might be made a real emprium of trade”, according to Gladstone’s private secretary. If Gladstone had not rejected that advice, would Afghanistan today be a relatively stable Commonwealth country?
Letter in response - 11 Sep 2021
Dear Sir – Was I foolish to have suggested twenty years ago that Afghanistan could have achieved stability and prosperity under firm British control after 1880 in accordance with Queen Victoria’s wishes, pointing the way to a settled future?
As it was, the country made considerable progress over the next forty years in close alliance with the British Raj, only briefly interrupted by the two-month third Afghan War of 1919.
Yet the infinitely more determined efforts to create a stable, reasonably well-governed state since 2001, which I did not foresee, have ended in total disaster.
Does that prove I was wrong to reject the conventional wisdom that other countries should always keep out of Afghan affairs? I would counter that the West’s humiliation is the result of failing to learn from British experience.
Victoria insisted that in the process of change “the best local customs and traditions must be accorded full and lasting honour”, and her ministers agreed. The United States chose to impose Western values quickly with well-intentioned arrogance, and then abandoned the task.
Those trusting Afghans, particularly women and girls, who supported America’s rushed and incomplete reforms, were doomed to pay the terrible price that has now come to pass. Queen Victoria would have been appalled by America’s failure to learn from the lessons of history.
10/09/21 - The Great Duke as Prime Minister
The New Statesman
Philip Collins (The Public Square, 27 August) states that Wellington “became prime minister in 1834”. Indeed he did — for just 23 days, as caretaker without a cabinet, pending the return of Robert Peel from Italy. He held the office in the full sense between 1828 and 1830, passing Catholic emancipation and resisting parliamentary reform. He had no vanity. One of his supporters, Lord Dudley, wrote: “he goes to work just as if he had his fortune and his reputation still to make, just as if there had been no India, no Spain, no Waterloo.”
Lord Lexden, Conservative Party historian
London SW1V
03/09/21 - Falsifying history: The BBC and the Nuremberg trials
Daily Telegraph
SIR - Charles Moore (Notebook, August 31) is right to castigate the playwright who has eliminated Sir Hartley Shawcross from the current BBC series on the Nuremberg trials, at which he was the chief British prosecutor.
His closing speech left a lasting impression on Airey Neave, then a 29- year-old war hero, who assisted the prosecution team, and to whom I was political adviser from 1977 to 1979.
In his last book, Nuremberg (1978), based on notes he made at the time, Neave recalled the “elegant scorn” of “the dark-haired and resplendent Shawcross” who “tore into the rotten defences of the Nazi politicians like an avenging fury”, speaking for the “ten million dead in Europe”.
It is wholly spurious to claim, as the BBC has done, that “a clearer dramatisation” is achieved by putting the famous speech into the mouth of Shawcross’s deputy. The switch diminishes the dramatic impact of the words, while falsifying history.
Airey Neave, who had no high regard for the integrity of the BBC, would not have been surprised.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
24/08/21 - Churchill defeats the historians
The Spectator
Sir: How much more effective Andrew Roberts would be (Books, 14 August) if he did not feel impelled to defend Churchill against almost every hint of criticism. He denies that Churchill had ‘fascist leanings in the 1920s’, a contention that is only true as regards Britain. Visiting fascist Italy in 1926, he declared that ‘your movement has rendered a service to the whole world’; as late as 1937 he spoke of ‘the enduring position in world history which Mussolini will hold’. His hatred of communism (suspended for a time after 1941) led him to welcome all allies in the struggle against it, apart from Nazi Germany which most of his fellow Tories were willing to tolerate before 1939 on that original Churchillian ground. Will biographers of Churchill ever break the habit of either lauding or denigrating him unduly? They shirk the historian’s central task, which is to weigh up this extraordinary man’s successes and failures calmly and dispassionately.
Alistair Lexden
London SW1
13/08/21 - Stop knocking independent schools
Daily Mail
It is absurd to round on independent schools for achieving particularly good A-level results.
There is no truth in the allegation that parents got teachers to award unduly high grades. Ofqual, the exams watchdog, has stressed its rigorous checks ‘did not find that any type of school or college was more likely to have provided grades that did not reflect the standard of their students’ work’. What could be clearer than that? It is also wrong to ignore the myriad ways in which independent school teachers and their state school colleagues are collaborating to their mutual benefit. Nearly 12,000 partnership schemes have now been formally registered, covering virtually every aspect of the academic curriculum, as well as sport, music and drama which so enrich young lives. And why should not more parents send their children of all levels of ability to independent schools if they want to? Thousands of places could be made available if the government would join us in introducing an open- access scheme. Stop knocking independent schools and start recognising the much fuller contribution they want to make to our country’s education system.
Alistair Lexden
President, Independent Schools Association
09/08/21 - Our first Olympic medal-winner
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - The Olympic medals have piled up (report, August 6). It was a very different story at the first Olympiad of the modern era in Athens in 1896.
Britain’s first two medals, out of a measly bag of seven, were won by John Pius Boland, then an Oxford undergraduate and later an Irish Nationalist MP. He went to Athens as a spectator, entering the lawn tennis tournament “on the spur of the moment” with “a tennis bat of sorts” bought at a local bazaar. He won the men’s singles, and then replaced an injured player in the doubles, winning that too. Fortunately, he wrote, the Games “were held about Easter, and it was possible to be back at Oxford in time for my last summer term.”
Someone should present a Boland trophy to Team GB in memory of this charming Irishman.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
16/07/21 - British victories in Afghanistan
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - It is constantly said that interventions in Afghanistan always end in disaster, with America’s recent experience proving the point again. Britain’s record in the 19th century disproves it.
Far too much prominence is given to the massacre of a portion of the British forces -- composed largely of Indian sepoys and civilian staff — during their retreat from Kabul in January 1842 after being assured safe passage. Few images have proved more haunting than that of the sole survivor, Dr William Brydon, immortalised in a painting by Lady Butler.
That vividly remembered incident was followed by a swift, brilliantly executed campaign -- now largely forgotten -- which turned the country’s ruler into a staunch ally.
In 1878, the British intervened once more in response to suspected Russian intrigues. There followed two years of British victories under a great commander, the beloved “Bobs” (later Earl) Roberts.
Against a lesser British general and with overwhelming numerical superiority, the Afghans gained their one and only victory in the field during the 19th century at Maiwand, near Kandahar in July 1880.
However, this was redeemed at once by Roberts’s famous great march of 318 miles in 23 days from Kabul to Kandahar with 10,000 men -- one of the classic military achievements of the century. He routed his opponents so convincingly that the British Raj had little further trouble from its northern neighbour.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
01/07/21 - The Government's absurd decision to silence choirs
The Daily Telegraph
The Government’s decision has been universally condemned. The House of Lords made its opposition clear in discussion of an oral question on the subject on 30 June. Everyone who spoke was highly critical of the Government.
Alistair Lexden referred to the disruption inflicted on a choir in Essex, which had been in touch with him. He said: “The Chelmsford Singers, a flourishing group not far from Lexden in Essex, would like to know why the current guidance with its totally unexpected restrictions, promised by the Government on 27 April ‘in advance of step 3’, was in fact published after step 3, causing them and so many choirs throughout the country to cancel their first rehearsals for over a year at short notice and, in some cases, with severe financial penalties.”
The Lords DCMS Minister replied: “I can only apologise to my noble friend and the choir in Chelmsford for the disruption to their plans.” She went on to say that the current guidance “will be updated in time for step 4. When it is updated, it will be clear, practical and simply set out.” That will be a relief to those accustomed to battling with poorly drafted and confusing Government regulations.
A Times columnist commenting on the Lords exchanges wrote: “Labour, Tories, crossbenchers, every MP I have heard on the matter, and even ministers in private: all think the restrictions daft.”
23/06/21 - Northern Ireland 100 years on
The Daily Telegraph
SIR – It is 100 years this week since King George V made his historic visit to Belfast to open the new Northern Ireland Parliament, designed as the partner of a devolved Parliament in Dublin with identical powers, linked to it by a Council of Council consisting of representatives of both legislatures.
“We really got a wonderful welcome & I never heard anything like the cheering”, the King recorded in his diary. In his speech he appealed memorably “to all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and forget, and to join in making for the land they love a new era of peace, contentment and goodwill.”
Inspired by this appeal, Lloyd George reached a settlement later in the year with some of the leaders of Sinn Fein, which brought them dominion status. In Ulster, where Unionists had given firm backing to a Council of Ireland, an IRA campaign of terror destroyed the prospects of an accord between North and South. It left 428 dead and 1,766 injured in Belfast by the end of 1922. The firm Unionist response to the IRA alienated the Catholic minority.
A hundred years later the task of trying to heal Ulster’s wounds continues. The partnership, envisaged by the King in 1921, requires above all unqualified respect for the right of Ulster’s Unionists to remain a full and equal part of our country. Nowhere today is that respect more important than in the European Union.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
02/06/21 - Widening access to independent schools
The Times
Sir, Many of the country’s leading 1,300 independent schools, half of which are non-selective, have long wanted to open up places to families of all kinds. That would become possible if the government permitted them to transfer to independent schools the money allocated for a child’s education in the state sector. School bursaries would be at the disposal of low-income families. Should not The Times Education Commission examine this issue?
Lord Lexden
President, Independent Schools Association
01/06/21 - Marriage and divorce at No 10
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - Boris Johnson is the fourth prime minister to marry while in office, not the third (report, May 25).
Shortly after the death of his first wife in 1737, Robert Walpole married his long-term mistress; she died three months later in childbirth. The little-known third Duke of Grafton, a man noted for his “idleness and pursuit of pleasure”, began a long and happy second marriage in 1769 during his two-year premiership. In 1822, the uxorious (but virtually friendless) Lord Liverpool filled the void in his life created by the death of his first wife by marrying her best friend.
Mr Johnson is only the second prime minister both to divorce and remarry while at No 10. When Grafton’s first wife was about to give birth to another man’s child in 1769, the marriage was dissolved by Act of Parliament, the only way divorce could at that time be obtained. Spurning the scandalous mistress with whom he had lived openly for years (they were alleged to have had sex in an opera box), Grafton persuaded the virtuous daughter of the Dean of Worcester to become his new wife. They had nine children.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
07/05/21 - Affordable fees at independent schools
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - Harry de Quetteville (Features, April 30) quotes a consultant as saying that “middle- class parents are being priced out of the costliest schools.”
There are plenty of others. 87 per cent of pupils in independent schools have day places. I doubt if any of the 550 schools in the Independent Schools Association, of which I am president, charge more than the average day school fee of just under £5,000 a term, and many charge less.
These schools, which have 220 pupils on average, include some of the most advanced special educational needs and performing arts schools in the world. Small classes diminish bullying and abuse (reinforced by clear policies subject to regular inspection) and so help sustain their popularity with parents. Undue preoccupation with a handful of high-fee, high-profile schools distorts public and political perceptions, and does deep injustice to the independent sector as a whole.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
29/04/21 - Fit for Carrie
The Times
Sir, A larger role for the state in the maintenance of official buildings is long overdue (leading article, Apr 28). No controversy would have arisen today in relation to the prime minister’s official residence if a plan proposed by the Treasury in 1885 had been agreed. A new use was needed for Dover House, the grand mansion in Whitehall where Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, had once lived. The Treasury offered to refurbish it and keep it thereafter in a style worthy of all prime ministers in perpetuity. The cabinet as a whole approved, but Gladstone, in power at the time, refused to move because his wife could not be expected to entertain on the lavish scale that would be required. Mrs Gladstone was indeed a lamentable hostess, but Carrie Symonds would surely have been in her element in a large elegant house decorated to her specifications at the state’s expense.
Lord Lexden
Conservative Party historian
12/04/21 - Strengthening the United Kingdom
The Times
Sir, A single cabinet minister for the Union would ensure that “the voices of the smaller nations” are taken fully into account in Whitehall and Westminster. A Union office under a secretary of state would speak powerfully on behalf of them all, combining the roles of the three separate Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland Offices that today count for little at the cabinet table or in parliament. There would at last be a strong counterweight to English interests, and the size of the present bloated cabinet would be usefully reduced too. As the House of Lords Constitution Committee noted in a report in 2015, “a secretary of state for the Union could be supported by ministers of state for each devolved region, recognising the need for separate voices and departmental expertise relating to each region”.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
10/04/21 - Prince Philip and Parliament
The Daily Telegraph
SIR – Parliament did not always treat the Duke of Edinburgh with the courtesy he was entitled to expect.
On February 26 1952, shortly after the Queen’s accession, he listened to a Budget debate from the Peers’ Gallery of the Commons in order to help him “understand how our parliamentary affairs work,” as Churchill explained.
Enoch Powell, then a comparatively new backbencher, objected. “A new and unconstitutional means is created of acquainting the Sovereign with what passes in the lower chamber,” he claimed. Churchill put him firmly in his place, but the Duke never visited the Commons again.
Unsurprisingly, he did not always refer to it in glowing terms. On a visit to Ghana in 1959, he learnt that its parliament had 200 MPs. “That’s about right”, he said. “We have 650 and most of them are a complete waste of time.”
The House of Lords did not behave impeccably either. In 1952 its authorities ruled that only a queen consort was entitled to occupy the throne by the side of the Sovereign at the State Opening of Parliament. The Duke was relegated to a mere chair until 1967, when the ruling was found to be incorrect.
A warmer welcome might have encouraged him to contribute to proceedings from the cross benches during his 50-year membership of the House (ended by the Blair reforms of 1998), as royal dukes had in the past.
The House would have benefited from the wisdom he showed in his 1979 Rede Lecture at Cambridge on politics, philosophy and administration. A visitor to his apartment in Buckingham Palace found it “entirely covered by bookcases.”
Speech-writing gave him great enjoyment. Martin Charteris, a private secretary to the Queen, said: “I produce a draft which both the Queen and I think excellent. But Prince Philip will insist on rewriting it.”
Lord Lexden
London SW1
02/04/21 - A drubbing for Justin Welby
The Daily Telegraph
Sir – Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, states: “We can’t erase the past…We have to learn from it” (report, March 31).
He ought to have learnt from the recent past that when an error is made, correction and apology must follow. The processes by which the Church decided in 2015, with his approval, that Bishop George Bell had abused a young girl in the 1940s, were shown to be fatally flawed by Lord Carlile QC in his independent report of 2017, which said: “For Bishop Bell’s reputation to be catastrophically affected in the way that occurred was just wrong.”
He added that Bishop Bell “should be declared by the Church to be innocent of the allegations made against him.” If the Archbishop wishes to learn from the past, how can he stand by his unfounded statement that Bishop Bell remains under “a significant cloud”? What will posterity say about an Archbishop who lacked the basic Christian precept of repentance? His moral failure will cast a significant cloud over his reputation forever.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
10/03/21 - Archie Mountbatten-Windsor
The Times
Sir, How wise George V was when he took action in 1917 to prevent the unending accumulation of princes in Britain by setting firm limits to the descent of this great dignity. He ensured that the House of Windsor which he created was free from the sprawling and baffling range of highnesses on which continental monarchies had imposed no restraints. “No profusion of petty princelings here”, he told his approving prime minister, Lloyd George. It is such a pity that no one apparently thought to give a simple lesson on this and other aspects of our constitutional arrangements to the Duchess of Sussex when she joined the royal family.
Lord Lexden
Conservative Party historian
06/03/21 - BLM's anti-Churchill rant
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - Could there be a more glaring example of the pernicious effects of the overindulged Black Lives Matter movement than the recent conference at which Churchill was denounced at the very Cambridge college established as a lasting tribute to him?
This anti-Churchill rant - bursting with ludicrous errors, as Charles Moore has shown (Notebook, March 2) - would have been inconceivable only two or three years ago.
Now, the dons in charge at an important academic institution appear quite untroubled, even when it is shown by leading academic experts on Churchill’s career that manifest falsehoods have been propounded on their premises.
Dame Athene Donald, the distinguished physicist who is Master of Churchill College, would presumably be appalled by uninformed denunciation of her own work, but remains silent when Churchill’s work is traduced without any serious supporting evidence.
The offence is made even worse by the presence in the college of a vast collection of Churchill’s personal papers, which any reputable scholar would consult before reaching conclusions about the great man’s attitudes to race, empire and other controversial issues.
Only warped judgements created by BLM can explain it.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
21/02/21 - A Minister for the Union
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - I hope Vernon Bogdanor is right in saying that the Dunlop report on strengthening the Union, completed in 2019, is about to be published at long last (“Can anyone fix the fatal flaws in devolution?”, 18 Feb).
I was assured again and again in the Lords that it would appear before the end of 2020. Some of its recommendations, I was told, were being put into effect.
Why then the continuing secrecy on the part of a government that it is supposed to be firmly committed to the Union? We have been cursed for too long by the policy of “devolve and forget”, as Professor Bogdanor says.
It is erroneous, however, to say that in the past “devolve and forget” in Northern Ireland “legitimised discrimination by a majority-ruled Stormont against the minority Catholic population”. Discrimination was practised, above all in housing, by both Unionist and nationalist local councils. [In 1972 Stormont took over all the major local government functions. Brian Faulkner, the last Stormont Prime Minister, invited the main opposition party to join power-sharing Stormont committees; it refused in accordance with a long nationalist tradition of boycotting serious public responsibility in Ulster under a system it wanted to overthrow.]
Lord Dunlop is one of the few people in public life today who understands the politics of both Scotland and Northern Ireland. He should be appointed Minister for the Union, replacing the three territorial UK departments, as a report by the Lords Constitution Committee suggested a few years ago.
Lord Lexden (Con)
London SW1
[The passage in square brackets below was not included in the published version.]
13/02/21 - Churchill and the abuse of history
The Times
Sir, Winston Churchill’s collection of papers, one of our country’s archival glories, is housed within yards of the venue of the recent conference where he was denounced (“Churchill versus Churchill in racism wrangle”, report, Feb 12). All aspects of his career are richly documented. How many of those who spoke at the conference had studied this massive archive? Assertions unsupported by research are worthless. Where a very great man is concerned, they are contemptible.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
05/02/21 - Bishop Bell: Lessons unlearnt by Welby
The Daily Telegraph
SIR – My friends Lord Carey of Clifton (Comment, January 30) and Rev Jonathan Aitken (Letters, February 1) will be widely supported in their calls for an end to the “culture of fear and secrecy” created by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s failure to establish open, accountable arrangements with proper legal safeguards for the investigation of allegations of sexual abuse brought against members of the clergy.
It is intolerable that, after a secret process, Lord Carey was found “on a balance of probabilities” to have known of one person’s record of abuse.
It was clear that something was seriously amiss six years ago when the Church’s press office suddenly announced that compensation had been paid on the uncorroborated word of a complainant who said she had been sexually abused by Bishop George Bell more than half a century earlier.
Lord Carlile QC tore the Church’s conduct of the case to shreds in an independent report at the end of 2017. Astonishingly, Archbishop Welby simply said that a “significant cloud” remained over this internationally renowned bishop.
After another secret process judged a copycat allegation to be groundless in 2019, the archbishop made a general apology to those involved, but there was no withdrawal of his charge against Bishop Bell. It is still awaited.
The public campaign in defence of Bishop Bell involved only two senior Church of England clerics, Lord Carey and the Dean of Christ Church. It is striking that they too have suffered as a result of the Church’s refusal to devise procedures that treat complainants and defendants even-handedly.
Lord Carey is still owed an apology, which, judging by what happened in the case of Bishop Bell, is unlikely to be forthcoming.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
23/01/21 - Stanley Baldwin's gay, left-wing son
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - Whatever their difficulties, Downing Street offspring (“The outrageous fortunes of the children of No 10”, Features, January 21) have rarely repudiated their family’s politics.
Only one of them, Oliver Baldwin, a Labour MP between 1929 and 1931, has faced his father across the Commons chamber. “I nearly died when I saw Oliver on the benches opposite”, Stanley Baldwin told one of his daughters. Even so, the prime minister continued to write affectionately to his “ dearest son”.
Later, having heard of Oliver’s financial difficulties, he sent a generous cheque to his son’s male partner in Oxfordshire where the two men lived openly together. Baldwin, one of the wisest Tory leaders, never criticised either his son’s homosexuality or his Left-wing politics.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
23/01/21 - Saving the Union
The Times
Sir, James Forsyth’s call to make “the structures of government fit for purpose” (Comment, Jan 22) should be heeded in Northern Ireland as well as Scotland. More than 20 years on, the Belfast agreement needs urgent review. Victims of terrorism are dying without the compensation that is their due because the ramshackle coalition of incompatible parties at Stormont cannot agree who should pay for it, with Sinn Fein holding the purse strings. It demands that Westminster should foot the bill. It is wrong to say that this does not matter because Ulster is heading for the exit as a result of Boris Johnson’s shameful Northern Ireland Protocol, which gives the EU a large role in the province’s affairs. Parties opposed to the Union got just over a third of the vote at the 2019 election. A new constitutional deal for Ulster within the Union should be a key objective this year, which marks the centenary of Northern Ireland’s creation.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
11/01/21 - Rules for referendums and Boris Johnson's Scottish failures
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - Nicola Sturgeon is unlikely to be impressed by Charles Moore’s assertion (Notebook, January 5) that “ we should hold the next referendum on Scottish independence in 2055.”
Since referendums can be held whenever Parliament is persuaded to authorise them, she has every incentive to keep up the pressure.
Firm constitutional rules are needed to end the current state of affairs in which referendums take place “on an ad hoc basis, frequently as a tactical device rather than on the basis of constitutional principle”, as a report by the all-party House of Lords select committee on the constitution pointed out in 2010.
Its recommendations, ignored by successive governments, would be invaluable in devising a clear set of conditions for referendums. They include “an independent body to provide information and run the public education process.”
In the immediate future Mrs Sturgeon’s campaign can only be countered by forceful exposition of the Unionist case.
A report for the Government by Lord Dunlop in 2019 on strengthening the Union, due for belated publication by the end of last year, has still not appeared. Nor has the government’s own review to improve working relationships with Scotland.
Just four months remain until the Scottish elections. Is Boris Johnson, self-styled Minister for the Union, totally committed to preserving it?
Lord Lexden
London SW1