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Despite having just posted a blog (on the ups and downs of British imperialism), the experience of Labour’s extraordinary triumph in the recent general election has inspired me to reflect on past experiences of this kind in my own life and times. I had quite forgotten the feelings of euphoria, excitement, joy and hope that such events can generate. As part of my celebration of Labour’s landslide victory, I’ll reflect here on my personal and family memories of other British elections I have lived through during what we might call the ‘long twentieth century.’

1945

My very first political memory is of sharing, somewhat uncomprehendingly, in the popular response to Labour’s unexpected and (to many) shocking landslide victory in the postwar election in 1945. Just 7 years old, I sat on my father’s shoulders to watch chaotic scenes in a park near Wallsend-on-Tyne, originally my mother’s home. The daughter of a mineworker, she had lived as a child through the General Strike of 1926, as had the thousands of ‘Geordies’ now singing, shouting and dancing in the streets, giving full throat to a sort of wild joy, a sense of which I still carry deep inside me.

My father had already made his mark in the 1945 election, when he worked on a Bradford mill-owner’s estate not far from York, employed as a horseman. He was asked to be an assistant election agent for the Labour candidate, Bert Hazell, a farmworkers union organiser, in the constituency of Barkston Ash. The Conservative incumbent, a wealthy true-blue High Tory who had held the seat comfortably since 1931, was Colonel Sir Leonard Ropner, Harrow and Cambridge educated, whose money came from shipping. Dad’s boss, Sir Benjamin Dawson, knighted for services to the Conservative Party, was mortified to discover that one of his own farm labourers should show this degree of defiance. At well attended and passionate meetings, Bert and Dad repeatedly drew attention to the long working hours, low pay and poor living conditions of farm workers, a theme contemptuously ignored by the other side, employers to a man of overworked, badly paid, and poorly housed farm labour.

In Mum’s smiling account to me when I was older, the infuriated Sir Benjamin (Benny behind his back) came to a Labour meeting and from the front row sought to catch out his presumed inferiors with questions about gold reserves, and the future of Singapore. From the platform, Dad batted this back: “Never mind about Singapore,” he cried, “and it’s your gold reserves we are after, so that we can all share in the benefits of labour that lets your lot ride about in Rolls Royces!” Dad scored a palpable class hit here, for a Rolls Royce could cost £2,500, unimaginable riches for farm workers on about £250 a year at most, and ‘Benny’ had two of them, plus a yacht.

Amazingly, the posh Sir Leonard Ropner got an almighty shock, when Bert Hazell came within a hairsbreadth of success, the Tory majority a wafer thin 116 votes. And while Bert and Dad had lost this battle, they had won the war.

It’s fascinating to trace the history of this constituency, which as Selby and Ainsty would remain Conservative well into the twenty-first century. It produced a major shock when, in a 2023 by-election, ultimately triggered by Boris Johnson’s resignation, a very young Labour candidate called Keir (a pregnant political name, he might go far…) would defeat the Tories with a swing of 33%, one of the nails in Prime Minister Sunak’s political coffin. Keir Mather would for a year be the youngest MP in the House of Commons, the ‘Baby of the House’, and held the seat again in 2024. Baby of the Year position has now been taken over by a 22 year old, Sam Carling, in the North West Cambridgeshire seat. Dad and Bert would have been delighted by these outcomes. Bert himself would enter Parliament in 1964 for North Norfolk but his main lifetime interest was the condition of agricultural workers, and he was for 10 years President of the National Union of Agricultural Workers. Like Dad, he had left school at the age of 14 and both had as their first task chasing off crows. His farm work and political endeavours must have been good for him, for he lived to a ripe 101.

1955

As we constantly lived in those poorly maintained tied cottages, which led to many a confrontation between our feisty Mum and the farmers employing Dad, we made a peripatetic progress around bits of Yorkshire, and in 1953 ended up in the village of Roecliffe near Boroughbridge, settling there long enough to feel that we belonged. Needless to say, Dad had politicised his little flock of children, required at every election to be glued to the radio, filling in and counting up the red and blue dots on a vast constituency chart. In those days the whole process took at least three days before a final result could be announced. Happily there were no exit polls of any consequence to cloud our visions of glory, so it was exciting and fun. Even now I still think in terms of red dots and blue dots, no other parties seemed to exist in Mum and Dad’s political landscape. But the joy of the Labour transformation of the postwar world for poor families made more disappointing the defeats of Labour by the Conservatives in the 1951 and 1955 elections (and there would be another even worse one in 1959).

Bowed but not beaten, Dad decided that if he could not win these electoral battles at the national level, he’d pull out all the political stops at the local level, i.e. the upcoming elections to the village parish council. He knew that all the existing parish councillors purported to be ‘independent’, but that this label concealed a set of self satisfied Tory farmers and landowners. Moreover, he knew that there might be hidden political depths to be exploited in the local brickyard, the nearest local thing to an industry, and full of workers almost as badly paid as agricultural workers.

Dad announced that he would campaign on a National Platform and produced this in the form of a large poster attached to the tree on the village green which did duty as a village noticeboard; the stunned villagers awoke to the early morning summons VOTE LABOUR. Dad threw everything into his one man campaign, and received a visit from the Parish Council Chairman, Henry Cambage, a well to do farmer and a very decent man who got on well with Dad. He suggested that Dad should drop his campaign ‘for the good of the village’ which hitherto had been innocent of political conflicts. Dad was unbending: when had Henry and his lot ever cared about the good of the village? When had they ever had a contested election? He wanted to keep a socialist eye on them, his forebears had fought and died for the right to vote and it was high time the village remembered how to do it. Henry retired, pink faced and nonplussed.

Polling day turned out bitterly wet and cold. When Dad had fed the various pigs and hens who would have happily voted for him, he went along to the village school where voting would take place under the eye of a local council returning officer. To Dad’s surprise, he then encountered Horace, our next door neighbour, someone Dad regularly exchanged garden plants and gossip with. It seemed Horace, who was sitting next to the warm stove chatting to the returning official, had been enlisted by the farming lobby to collect voting intentions: clearly the resident councillor clique were running scared.

Dad registered his vote then, completely ignoring Horace, said to the startled official; “I’m off to fodder t’calves now and when I come back I don’t want to see that man in here, it’s against election regulations as you very well know. Otherwise you might have to have all the votes here declared invalid”. When Dad returned he found the unfortunate Horace shivering on the wet and windy school doorsteps. But Horace, if down, was not yet out and shared Dad’s Yorkshire stubbornness, producing a pencil and the list of names of those eligible to vote.

“Now then” he declared, confronting Dad “Can I have your name please?

“Never you mind what my name is.“ said Dad.

“Nay, Martin” began Horace, but Dad broke in

“Oh, so you already know my name, then?”

“Well dammit,” snorted Horace, “I know your name as well as you know mine! Don’t be so bloody daft.”

Dad was unmoved. “I don’t know you, not officially, and I’ll not tell you who I’m votin’ for because this is a secret ballot, and if you think the people in this village will tell you who they are really votin’ for, you don’t know them any more than you know me”. Horace gave up, shaking his head.

But Dad knew his electorate. The combination of brickyard workers and disaffected farm workers put the National Platform into office: they had voted for Dad, One of Us, and a poke in the eye for Them. Democracy had broken out in the village, to general satisfaction.

1964

This year marked another famous if short-lived victory for Labour, to bring to an end ‘thirteen years’ of Tory rule. There were some similarities to 2024 in that by 1964 a Tory government was again mired in scandal and sleaze (the Profumo affair etc.) though without the horrendous levels of corruption experienced in these last 14 years. By this time, I had myself become something of a rarity, the son of a farmworker and a miner’s daughter following an upward social and career path through Cambridge and into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I would find myself parachuted to the top of the system, at the heart of Whitehall, in Downing Street, working as a Private Secretary in the office of Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State, and on occasion in the office of the Minister of State, the Duke of Devonshire. The social distance I had travelled was mind-boggling.

Dad was not so sure about all that because I was now working directly for what he thought of as ‘the other lot’; how could I be working for the enemy? I had misgivings about this myself, but soon learned that as civil servants we worked within strong conventions of independence and impartiality (I know, I know, what happened to all that? Tell you later…)

Dad was happier in October 1964 when Labour won by a tiny majority, and I would now be working for ‘our lot’. Our lot took the shape of Arthur Bottomley, a seasoned trade unionist and party man, and close to Prime Minister Harold Wilson. But my abiding memory of that election is celebrating with a group of like-minded Labour friends in Trafalgar Square as the results rolled out on special screens. My generation, then in our late twenties, were longing for change as much as our counterparts now must do. We could not have anticipated the fraught years that Thatcherism would bring with its relentless assault on the welfare state, an assault we might hope now will finally be relegated to the scrap heap of defunct ideologies.

1968-9

This is a bit of a side step, into the inner workings of the Labour Party, as it was for me at the time. In 1965-6 I resigned from my career in government and began a new life as a Lecturer in Government and Politics at the University of Kent, then one of the ‘new’ universities. This was in the late sixties when dissent and rebellion were in the air, particularly in the Universities, and national politics too were in a fairly fractured state. Feeling that I should try my hand at doing instead of lecturing, I stood as a Labour candidate in the Canterbury local elections. At that time Canterbury City Council was pretty much stitched up by Conservatives and Liberals, and there was zero chance of me being elected. This was perhaps as well, as if I had been elected I would have found myself in opposition to the Liberal wife of my Professorial boss, never a good look.

I was then encouraged to put myself forward as the Parliamentary candidate for Canterbury, but during the key interview was told that I was too middle class, and would have no understanding of working class people and their problems. Besides how could I be a serious candidate when I had chosen to work for a Conservative government? I protested weakly, but it was apparent both to me and to them that I was not cut out for the rough and tumble of real grass roots politics.

So what you see here is the perfect poster boy for a would-be Labour politician, though I wisely resigned myself to teaching instead of doing. But I have never lost the wild joy of a Labour win over that life-long class enemy, the entitled Tory party and particularly over its most recent despicable incarnations. My electoral journey from 1945 to 2024, has been bookended by two wonderful and sensational moments. As a good friend commented to me, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’. The then-radical Wordsworth had revolutions in mind, but elections are now our contemporary version, out with ‘their lot’ and in with ‘our lot’, now bringing new hope for our children and grandchildren, who must now carry our political torch, and find their own ‘wild joy’ from time to time. For as Wordsworth continued: ‘But to be young was very heaven’.

Intro

In 2023, my blogposts concentrated on British political and constitutional issues and controversies.

The first six months of 2024 have seen Tory politicians (and their supporting ‘think tanks’ and donors) plumb such new depths of dishonesty, misinformation, and mindless self-harm that it has become almost impossible to treat them to serious analysis. The current Prime Minister (Sunak), his incredibly low-grade Cabinet, and his clutch of baby-faced ‘bottom of the class’ advisers, have lurched from one unconvincing position to another contradictory one, sometimes on the same day. In the face of adverse election results, and opinion polling that suggests imminent electoral disaster, Sunak and his acolytes kept producing ever more provocative policy proposals, flailing around in the desperate hope that they would by chance hit on something to resonate with a dismayed and increasingly restless electorate. This is a government that has left reason and logic far behind, and has fallen into an abyss of authoritarianism, incompetence, social brutality, and anarchic political infighting, a combination that bids fair to destroy the Conservative party as a serious player in our now bruised and battered political institutions. As Tacitus is said to have recorded of the Roman Empire some two thousand years ago, ‘they create a desert and call it peace..’

Since we seem to have reached a point where the looming general election (another utterly inept political decision by Sunak) has shaped and distorted all political discourse, I thought I would change my own discourse somewhat until things resolve and settle down again (this may take some time). Reading groups are extremely popular now, so I propose to write a short series of book reviews, based both in my own recent reading and on the links this reading has to events in my own life (recorded, as many of my readers will know, in a family memoir: Shifting Classes in Twentieth Century Britain: From Village Street to Downing Street (2020,YouCaxton Publications). I begin here with a particular story of British empire and decolonisation, and in a second part will locate this story within more recent general studies of British and other imperialisms.

Where Do You Come From? Where Are You Going?

Philippe Sands: The Last Colony, a Tale of Exile, Justice, and Britain’s Colonial Legacy

The particular story I have chosen is that of the decolonisation of Mauritius in the mid to late 1960s, and the subsequent development of that story, right up to the present day, into an international legal and political cause celebre. I choose this for three reasons. First, a gift from my family was ‘The Last Colony’, a recent study by Philippe Sands, a distinguished international lawyer, which examines the history of that decolonisation insofar as it involved, in 1965, the formal detachment from then British colonial Mauritius of Diego Garcia, one of the islands in the Chagos Archipelago, in the Indian Ocean. The British would rename these islands British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) and subsequently lease the largest island, Diego Garcia, to the United States to construct and maintain a strategic air base in the Indian Ocean. The most controversial aspect of this story is that it involved the expulsion from these islands of up to 1500 (the precise figures are somewhat uncertain) of the people who lived and worked there, many born there, their very presence initially (and deliberately) denied by the British authorities. In the intervening half century, most of these hapless victims have ended up living unstable, uncertain existences either in Mauritius, or the Seychelles, or in the UK, anywhere but in the place many regarded as their home.

My second reason for choosing this unflattering imperialist story is that I was personally involved in it, at least in a walk-on part. In 1965, I had just completed three years as a diplomat in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), working in the Private Offices of successive Secretaries of State, first Conservative Duncan Sandys, then after Labour’s victory in October 1964, Arthur Bottomley. This had given me considerable interest and practical involvement in Britain’s decolonisation programme, and in 1965 I was asked to help with the organisation of what became known as the Lancaster House Conference. I had participated in other decolonisation meetings, but few would become so mired in international controversy as the contested road to Mauritian independence and geopolitical integrity. To my faint surprise, I would find myself meeting the conference participants again in the 1970s when I spent two years in Mauritius helping to set up their new University.

I will come back to that 1965 Conference. But first let’s follow Sands as he traces (and is in its later stages a key legal player in) the many international legal inquiries, and legal judgements, centred on the Diego Garcia/Chagos dispute. International law is a complex and often opaque field of both theory and practice, and we are fortunate to have Sands’ expert guidance through it. But it is also, in this particular case, a tortuous, more than five decades long process.

The limits of international justice

One of the culprits in this story is the system of international law itself, which as Sands admits and demonstrates moves at a snail-like pace at the best of times. Characteristically, it may take several years to identify ‘colonial’ wrongs and clarify how and by whom these judgements may be translated into remedies and the relief of damages. Basically there are two routes to the international resolution of international territorial disputes. The most direct route is through diplomatic negotiations between contending countries or groups of people: good luck with that, as we see from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute right now. A second route is through the framework of international institutions, which normally will mean action through the United Nations and/or other international bodies. This international route is usually followed when direct negotiations between countries or groups have failed to produce solutions acceptable to both contending parties. Failure in the first route invariably leads to a lengthy and winding path along the second.

Sands explains how a significant part of the Diego Garcia story is the structure and membership of the courts or legal commissions reviewing claims and disputes about the Diego Garcia question. He shows that it can be a highly political process, often shaped by the preconceptions and prejudices of the judges and lawyers who are the main players, appointments often owing more to ‘Buggins turn’ than to merit or appropriateness. Judgements that may be favourable to the victims, turn out to have only ‘advisory’ effect, so can all too readily be ignored. Moreover, as his account demonstrates, there are severe limits on the political clout of key players in the international justice system, so that legal judgements and recommendations are frequently set aside by powerful national states.

Sands is well placed to guide us through this particular case, because later in the story he himself was one of the principal lawyers involved in presenting the Mauritian and Ilois cases. He has a long-standing interest in the development since 1945 of the leading institutions of international justice, and their relationship to, and impact upon, significant international conflicts. He is at pains to demonstrate the unresolved tensions within and between the major institutions: the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court, all with their own bureaucratic complexities and judicial imperfections. He highlights the divisive thread running through their deliberations: is their primary function to judge and punish crimes against individuals, what we would label as ‘war crimes’? Or should they be pursuing crimes against specific, clearly identifiable groups of people, targeted in such a way that we would describe these as as ‘genocide’? In an earlier study, East West Street: a Song of Good and Evil, Sands has given us a compelling account of how these threads were shaped by warfare and violent conflicts, largely between states, but also often enough by the violent and murderous treatment meted out by states to their own citizens or subjects. He focuses on the Nazi extermination of Jews and others to flesh out the development of the ideas of war crimes, and genocide, and the role of the Nuremburg trials in shaping legal responses to such practices, and to the creation of new international institutions.

In doing so he hits upon a most productive literary method, part biographical, part personal family memoir, using particular personal histories not only of lawyers but of those being judged and prosecuted by them. This story-telling approach gives life, vigour and intensity to what might otherwise be rather dry and legalistic conceptions; as Antony Beevor has commented ‘No novel could possibly match such an important work of truth’.

In The Last Colony Sands deploys this approach again, repeatedly concentrating on the specific case of one of the people evicted from one of the Chagos islands, Peros Banhos (though not from Diego Garcia itself). This woman, Liseby Elyse, was born and married there. Evicted forcibly by the British in 1973, along with other inhabitants, she and her family lived for 14 years in the most basic conditions in a refugee-camp-like settlement in Mauritius. Married with children, her family are now scattered between Mauritius, the UK and France. Her personal testimony of her deep feelings of loss and displacement strikes an emotional chord and gives a clear sense, many decades later, of the uncaring and brutal way in which the Ilois were treated in this period.

In his account of a crucial legal hearing some 30 years later, before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, in 2018, (you see how long this sort of thing takes), Sands gives a central place to Liseby’s personal witness statement, doubtless designed to persuade a set of generally unemotional jurists of the real personal damage occasioned to the Ilois, but also to wring the more tender heartstrings of his readers. (Though to my mind, the most telling effects in the book are achieved by the wonderfully dark and suggestive illustrations by the gifted Guardian cartoonist, Martin Rowson: an extensive ‘rogues gallery’ of Western political leaders during this whole period, from Lyndon Johnson to Boris Johnson, looms threateningly over the hapless but staunch little Liseby.) The British properly stand guilty as charged of shameful behaviour, and have more than once admitted as much.

But there is a persistent blank space in this account, involving either unawareness or misunderstanding of the place of Mauritian ethnic politics in this long story. (Perhaps I’m a bit unduly critical here: after all, lawyers want to win their cases, and authors to grab their readers, and Sands is pretty good in both respects.)

The communal politics of Mauritius

Back in the 1960s, Mauritius was a very diverse and divided society, with a large Hindu Indian majority of about two thirds, and minorities of Franco-Mauritians (white French in origin), Muslims, a substantial Creole (mixed race) group, and a small Chinese community. Elections to the colonial Legislative Council in 1963 produced a majority for the Hindu dominated Mauritius Labour Party (MLP), led by Sir Seewoosagar Ramgoolam. Smaller parties represented minority interests: the Parti Mauricien (PMSD) broadly represented the Franco-Mauritian interest and some elements of the Creole population, Muslims had the Committee for Muslim Action (CAM) and an interesting Indo-Mauritian Hindu splinter group, the Independent Forward Bloc, initially supported the ‘class’ interests of poor Indian labourers. Relations between the main communities were fractious and bitter, frequently spilling over into inter-communal riots and violence, which marred the formal moves to independence between 1965 and 1968.

There was a clear political dividing line in the 1965 Lancaster House Conference: the Indo-Mauritian-based political leaders were strongly set on independence, while most of the other parties, fearing a dominant Indo-Mauritian majority in an independent state, rejected independence in favour of a form of continued and dependent association with the UK. The British camp, anxious in these ‘wind of change’ days to divest itself of smaller colonial possessions, was ready to concede independence to a majority Indo-Mauritian leadership.

As with most decolonisation conferences in the 1960s, temperatures and tempers ran high; there were several walk-outs and much late night bargaining as we sought to reach an agreed conclusion within (as I recall) a three week deadline. Agreement seemed extremely elusive. Then suddenly and unexpectedly Anthony Greenwood, the Colonial Secretary, drew the Conference to a close with the declaration that independence would be granted in due course, after elections under a new electoral system framed to protect minority groups. Seeming almost an afterthought, the decision to detach Diego Garcia, and recategorise it as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) was also announced, with a £3m compensation payment.

Given subsequent and much disputed versions of this outcome, and taking into account what we now know of then confidential records, it is clear that the UK government got all it wanted, with none of the main political parties opposing this (while the opposition PMSD walked out, they did so because they could not accept the decision to move to independence). Sands claims here that Mauritian leaders were ‘frightened’ into acceptance, but the evidence for this is extremely scanty, while the stronger evidence is that the main Hindu leader Ramgoolam was determined to become the dominant force in an independent Mauritius, and was happy to be bought off by the British.

What had been kept under very close wraps was the British government’s intention from earlier in the 1960s to lease Diego Garcia to the US as an Indian Ocean strategic air base, an intention pursued by the Conservative administration under PM Douglas Home, and thereafter confirmed by the incoming Labour administration under Harold Wilson. We know the rest of the story from various iterations of it over all the years since then. After I had left the FCO (in 1966) and several years later, I was able to look at Cabinet documents (in the National Archives) that appeared to give reassurance that there were no inhabitants on Diego Garcia. We now know that this was false. The results for the Chagos islanders, the Ilois, were dire. Many years later, in the 1980s, I saw for myself, on a return visit to Mauritius, the slums in which they had been dumped, in return for another bribe by the British to the Mauritian government. A research report by a leading international human rights organisation, Human Rights Watch (Feb 2023), records that “agreements reached by the UK and Mauritius provided Chagossians with inadequate compensation. Mauritian authorities initially took several years to hand over the compensation to the Chagossians after demonstrations and hunger-strikes led by Chagossian women.”

Mauritian politics after independence: all for one and one for all

Ramgoolam’s strategy bore fruit in the pre-independence election of 1967 in which the three Indo-Mauritian parties formed a coalition that defeated the main opposition Creole party, the PMSD, by 43 seats to 27. (Note here that one of these parties was the Independent Forward Block, a leading member and Minister in the new coalition being one Anerood Jugnauth, who later will have a prominent place in Sands’ account.) There was indeed trouble on the streets, with Creole groups the principal source of disturbance, and as Ramgoolam expected as part of his bargain, British boots on the street in his support, at formal independence in 1968. A fairly chaotic period ensued, with high levels of unemployment, overpopulation, and outward migration (to which we owe one of our most anti-immigrant of Home Secretaries, Suella Braverman, whose Indo-Mauritian mother migrated to the UK under an NHS recruitment scheme, and met and married a Kenyan Asian migrant: irony is off the scale here). This period also saw the rise of a new radical party, the Mouvement Militant de Maurice (MMM), and significant labour strikes, to which Ramgoolam promptly responded by declaring a state of emergency, and postponing elections until 1976.

The rather unsavoury story thereafter would be one in which the interacting elites shared a musical chairs approach to political office, a process dominated and orchestrated by Anerood Jugnauth, who was Prime Minister six times, and occupied the Presidency of Mauritius when not in Prime Ministerial office. Several dubious deals ensure that political office is distributed at one time or another between all the political interests. The Indo-Mauritian class remain dominant. With one brief exception, over the whole half century stretching from 1967 to the present day, the position of Prime Minister belongs to only two Indo-Mauritian families: the Ramgoolam family and the Jugnauth family. Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam is succeeded by his son Navin Ramgoolam; later, Sir Anerood Jugnauth is succeeded by his son Pravind Jugnauth. At one point, the man who led the PMSD opposition to the 1965 Conference decisions, Gaetan Duval, becomes a coalition Foreign Secretary. We see over a very long period a cosy political oligarchy working together to maintain a hold on political office and its rewards.

Along this way, for many years, we see no real effort by Mauritian leaders to protest about the Diego Garcia detachment, and they freely cooperate in the removal of the Ilois from Chagos to Mauritius, using this primarily as a means to extract more compensation from the British, both at the time and later, eventually adding up to at least £40m not all of which ever reaches the Ilois, or does so only after those street protests by Ilois women. During the many regular elections in Mauritius, Diego Garcia was scarcely ever a significant issue. Sands’ account makes much of Jugnauth’s positive role in taking the Mauritian case forward to international justice forums, but this was not really demonstrated until well into the twentieth century. He appears to have had little interest in making such moves in his long period of Prime Ministerial power from 1983-1995. We cannot blame the author for any of this, especially as he was enlisted, late in the day, as a neutral and highly respected legal adviser to the Ilois cause by Prime Minister Jugnauth. But in apportioning blame and responsibility for the Diego Garcia scandal a more complete analysis must examine the role of Mauritian leaders too. The distinguished author VS Naipaul, after a visit to Mauritius, wrote an excoriating piece about the self-interested and self serving nature of the Mauritian political elites.

We might observe here a very common British imperial practice at work in UK relations with Mauritius: the conferment of British honours. Three leading members of the gathering at Lancaster House in 1965 received Knighthoods: Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, leader of the Mauritius Labour Party; Sir Gaetan Duval, leader of the PMSD and Foreign Secretary in the 1976 Ramgoolam coalition administration; finally, Sir Anerood Jugnauth. The British well knew how to flatter and influence those foreign politicians they wished to keep onside.

Winners and losers?

Clearly, Philippe Sands regards the final outcome as something of a success story. After all, as he shows in detail, there were several legal judgements, both by British courts and by international courts, which found the UK to have acted unlawfully. The International Court of Justice judgement in 2019 declared the UK’s continued administration of the Chagos Archipelago to be ‘a wrongful act’ which should be brought to an end as rapidly as possible. These findings were supported by an overwhelming majority in the UN General Assembly.

These various judgements, deservedly, have been extremely damaging to the UK’s international reputation. Its most senior political representatives have been forced to make apology after apology for ‘shameful behaviour’. The UK government have also been pushed to make concessions by increasing compensation and support for the Ilois, both in Mauritius and the UK; the latter includes granting citizenship, though it is unclear whether this will be rolled out to later generations in the Ilois ‘diaspora’. The latest response has been announcements in 2022 by both UK and Mauritian governments that they will look to enter into negotiations to resolve all of these issues.

But the British authorities and the US have already agreed and announced an extension to the occupation of the islands as a strategic base until 2036, which rather forecloses any resettlement issues for some considerable time. Moreover, Mauritian representatives have made statements about the possibility of accepting the continuation of an American base in Diego Garcia. Possible imminent changes of political leadership in both the UK and the US seem to cloud these prospects even further.

So the outcome celebrated by Sands, of the emotional return to Peros Banhos (not Diego Garcia) by an official Mauritian group, including Lisbey Elyse and the author himself, may well be as good an outcome as anyone gets for quite some time. This was in itself a purely performative act of justice, with no Ilois return being planned or held out in any realistic sense. Most of the Ilois ‘diaspora’ in southern England, in France, in the Seychelles, in Mauritius itself have begun to form communities, lives, and livelihoods where they now are. Nothing whatever is being offered to them at this point in terms of secure jobs and existences. Realistically, there are no existing community or employment structures to which they could return. But the British and American governments, and indeed Mauritian governments, must be prepared to make proper reparations for the damage they have contrived between them to a quite small group of powerless human victims. If this can be done through a careful resettlement scheme, so be it, but if not (as I suspect is improbable) then they must have properly funded integration wherever they might prefer it, most probably in the UK or in Mauritius itself.

Sands has himself done them a service by setting out their story. I have argued that he has too readily accepted the role of Mauritius as a victim, and that there are more complex factors at work in this long-running ‘story of Empire’. He also misses the opportunity to analyse the relationship between law and political power in the system of international justice. Both British and American governments showed themselves in this case to insist on putting their own political imperatives above challenge, and the fact that they can get away with this in the existing system of international justice is a depressing precedent to consider in terms of the clearest possible war crimes that right now are being daily committed in Gaza by Israel, in the Ukraine by Russia, and against many thousands of people in the Sudan. Given Sands’ legal expertise and experience, and his clearly liberal and humane sympathies, it would have been good to hear his views on how to resolve the tension in the resolution of international disputes between the intended morality of law, and the rejection of that morality by powerful national actors.

Relevant references

Philippe Sands: The Last Colony: a Tale of Exile, Justice, and Britain’s Colonial Legacy (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2022).

V S Naipaul: The Overcrowded Barracoon(Penguin Books 1976)

Human Rights Watch “That’s when the nightmare started”: UK and US Forced Displacement of the Chagossians and Ongoing Colonial Crimes February 2023 (available at www.hrw.org)

While the British treatment of the Chagos Ilois was reprehensible, and did damage to many hundreds of innocent victims, there are many worse stories to be told about British imperialism, and damage to many thousands of innocent victims. I will turn to this wider picture by way of a review of recent books by Sathnam Sanghera:

Sathnam Sanghera Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain (Penguin Books 2021)

Sathnam Sanghera Empire world: How British Imperialism Has Shaped The Globe (Penguin Books 2024)

This past week we have seen played out that regular Parliamentary farce, known as the Queen’s or King’s Speech, in which a ridiculous cast includes a set of Beefeaters still looking for Guy Fawkes, Black Rod and Gold Stick, and a wooden-faced monarch who has not even written the lines. This time, Charles took on the expression of a man compelled by convention to say things he didn’t mean or agree with. But he will have to learn that this is the only role as a constitutional monarch that he can have.

In Part 1 of this blog post on the British monarchy, I briefly traced the tortuous path which led us to the current House of Windsor, the dysfunctional and fractious nature of the current royal family, and the various scandals surrounding its relationships, both fed on and promoted by a scurrilous tabloid press. I now move on, as promised, to obey the injunction, that if we want to understand issues of public interest and concern, to ‘follow the money’. Key questions about royal riches call for answers, or at least some sort of penetration of the walls of silence and secrecy which have been constructed quite deliberately to obfuscate such questions. In seeking answers, I follow George Orwell, who said that he wrote ‘because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I wish to draw attention’.

Key Question: How wealthy is the royal family?

This is a question the royal family have always been very anxious to avoid, for the obvious reason that being extremely wealthy, as they so manifestly are, in a country where large numbers of their subjects are often classified as extremely poor, is not a good look. The present monarch is likely to have inherited considerable assets from both of his parents, and also by virtue of his succession to the throne. These include large scale landed properties in England, Scotland and Wales, even in Northern Ireland, which have been handed down over the centuries. But the details of more than 30 of the Windsor inheritances are speculative, because they have been deliberately kept out of the public domain. This can lead to all kinds of unresolved matters. A good example is provided by Queen Elizabeth’s husband, the former Duke of Edinburgh. It’s thought that he was very well-heeled, but we don’t know exactly how well-heeled, or what exactly his range of possessions was; nor do we know what he left to his successors. The same will apply, unless I am mistaken, to the provisions of Elizabeth II’s will, though at least we have estimates of her net worth, reported by the Sunday Times Rich List in 2022 to be around £370 millions: not a lot, you might think, compared to the fortunes of the big capitalist beasts around the world, whose assets are counted in tens of billions, but very near the top of the ever-growing British upper-class money tree. Estimates of King Charles’ private wealth vary between £600m (Sunday Times Rich List, 2023) and £1.8bn (Guardian, September 2022).

However, a distinction is needed between the fundamental capital values of royal assets, their probable enhanced future value, and both the present and future cash values which they may generate. We also need to bear in mind the distinction between assets which in some sense are public, and open to inspection, and those which are private, and mostly kept from public view. A question seems to arise recently as to how to distinguish between public and private assets where gifts and other acquisitions are involved.

Public Profits

The main source of ready money for the monarchy is known as the Crown Estate. Feudal in origin, and dating from the Norman conquest in 1066, this comprises assets: land, property (palaces, buildings, including all of Regent Street and Ascot Racecourse) and crucially now, rights in all the UK’s offshore seabed. Any revenues from this Estate are independently managed and accrue in effect to the Treasury, in exchange for an annual ‘sovereign grant’. This is assessed as an agreed percentage of Estate profits, in order to meet the costs of the royal family’s official duties, travel, and the maintenance of royal palaces (e.g., Buckingham Palace). This grant is now negotiated by a select inside team of only three people, being the Prime Minister, The Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the royal household’s financial manager (who is he/she? You might well ask.)

This might seem in principle to be a reasonable arrangement, but it has prompted controversy. The portfolio of Crown Estate land and buildings was valued at more than £20 billions in 2022. Offshore wind projects brought in profits that increased the total Crown Estate profits in 2021-22 to £442.6m, an increase on the previous year of nearly £130m. But this year the government announced a new agreement, in which the monarchy’s share of profits would fall from 25% to 12%, presenting this as a public-spirited pay cut. However, substantial Crown profits from offshore development leases are forecast to rise from £442.6m this year to £1.4b in 2023-24. Commentators have been quick to point out that this potentially amounts not to a pay cut for the monarchy, but a substantial increase, from £86.3m this year to £124.8m in 2023-24, a hefty pay rise of 45%. The former Cabinet Secretary Lord Turnbull has accused the Treasury of ‘a deliberate attempt to obfuscate’. This scarcely accords with King Charles’ declared intention to slim down the monarchy. Again, it is not a good look at a point when it is reported by an impeccable research source (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, October 2023) that 3.8 million of the King’s subjects are now living officially in destitution, a figure that includes a million children (it’s doubtful if they will have enjoyed lavish Coronation street parties). Further millions of his subjects are enduring a painful cost of living crisis, and food banks are overwhelmed. Moreover, the royal family will enjoy their 45% bonus from a government that has been arguing militantly against pay increases for every other part of the public sector. 

In addition, the taxpayer underwrites many other costs: security (not known, best guesses being between £15m and £100m); policing, not made public; the costs of official events like funerals and coronations (Queen Elizabeth’s funeral £162m, King Charles’ coronation, estimated between £50m and £100m). Finally, the likely greatest loss to the taxpayer comes from the royal family’s exemption from inheritance tax, another unknown.

Private Perks

Estimates of the private wealth of the royal family vary widely, largely because of the secrecy surrounding this whole question. As indicated above, King Charles’ private wealth has been variously estimated to be between £600m and £1.8bn. The Duchy of Lancaster, a huge property portfolio, held in trust to provide the monarch with a private income, generated profits of £24m last year. The Duchy of Cornwall similarly provides a private income to the Prince of Wales, a benefit which previously was enjoyed for very many years by Charles, and is now transferred to the new Prince of Wales, his son William. In the year 2022 this particular ‘benefit’ amounted to just under £10m (£21m profits, but Charles voluntarily paid 45% income tax).

There are 22 royal residences, mostly part of the Crown Estate, and the running costs and maintenance of these are met out of the sovereign grant: for example, the new 2023 grant arrangement incorporates the substantial costs of the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace. We know relatively little about the domestic arrangements of the extended royal family, many of whom live in various bits of the various properties which make up the Estate. Charles as King is now their effective ‘landlord’ and is already at odds with brother Andrew who lives in Royal Lodge, Windsor with, rather oddly, his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson: rumour has it that he has been asked to leave. Harry and Megan have simply removed themselves, it seems permanently, to the United States. More evidence of the ‘model family’ coming apart. Linked to these highest ranking members is a whole network of family relations, ranging from Dukes to a variety of royal cousins. All are on the royal payroll to a greater or lesser degree, enjoying lucrative positions and benefits merely by accidents of birth.

Who Governs?

Balmoral and Sandringham are private palaces. An issue that arises here relates not so much to royal financial privileges, rather to the appropriate constitutional position of the Crown in relation to parliamentary legislation. Let’s recall that the long established rule in our elective democracy is that the monarch must not and should not interfere with the decisions of Parliament and is obliged to give formal assent to the laws and ordinances agreed by Parliament. At this moment in time the royal assent is a formal ritual. This was the essence of the ‘glorious revolution’ which as long as three and a half centuries ago swept aside monarchical rule in favour of the rule of law through Parliament. This took a couple of centuries to take shape and settle down, as both the Hanoverian kings and Queen Victoria at times attempted to influence what was going on in their ministerial cabinets and Parliament. But with the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century  development of universal suffrage and more tightly organised national political parties, kings and queens were pushed into a formalistic position where they could not intervene in essentially democratic political processes.                                                                                                           

Most contemporary politics textbooks outline this straightforward understanding. But just recently we have discovered from a Guardian investigation (29 June 2022) that our constitutional monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, along with her son Prince Charles, through a process known as ‘Queen’s consent’ had long been allowed to intervene in and amend more than 1,000 pieces of proposed legislation. For example, by this means they were allowed to amend regulatory provisions framed to apply to all landed properties in ways which meant they would not apply to the royal properties. Documents show that Charles has lobbied ministers on leasehold reform legislation, at least once applying pressure to ministers to ensure an exemption to prevent his tenants from having the right to buy their own homes. This ‘consent process’ has also been used often in Scotland and has now brought significant criticism. The worst aspect of this is the secretive way in which these interventions have been conducted, not to mention the inequity involved in ‘one law for them, another law for us’. The disingenuous defence made is that the changes requested are made before the legislation is introduced into the respective legislatures.   

A rather problematic aspect of ‘the powers of the monarchy’ is that around the time of Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953 large numbers of people thought the Queen was chosen by God, and that she could refuse to accept Parliament’s legislation. Until recently many also thought that she could decide who would be Prime Minister, and while this is a rather fuzzy area, whenever it has come up in recent times the political and bureaucratic system has managed to ensure that it is able to tell the monarch who to invite, rather than allow the monarch to choose. There has been inconclusive speculation about how such a decision may be reached in the event of a ‘hung Parliament’ but it’s clear in principle that a Prime Minister must be the person who commands the confidence of his/her own party, and who can further command the confidence of the House of Commons. Any attempt by a monarch to depart from these conventions would trigger a major constitutional crisis.

There is some concern about how Charles as King might approach any of these matters. When Prince of Wales, he had a track record in trying to interfere inappropriately in public policies and decisions, famously being given to writing long letters in spidery handwriting to ministers and officials: no one would have been surprised if they had been in green ink, but it was in fact black. His love-hate relationship with writing materials has been caught on film recently. More seriously, I note that he has already made direct statements on what might be controversial areas of public policy: he was quick to issue a statement on the Israel/Gaza dispute, and has taken a leading part in discussions about environmental problems. But neither of these policy areas is uncontroversial, and interventions on one or the other side could give offence to some of his subjects, or run counter to the views of some political representatives of his subjects. While we might see his policy opinions as potentially beneficial in themselves, they should not be too strongly paraded by a monarch who must be, and be seen to be, a constitutional figurehead, not a player in the fractious and competitive game of politics. This may not be a position Charles will find comfortable, but Alan Bennett described it perfectly when he imagined Queen Elizabeth reflecting on this very discomfort:

‘One is often said to have a fund of common sense, but that is another way of saying that one doesn’t have much else, and accordingly perhaps I have at the insistence of my various governments been forced to participate, if only passively, in decisions I consider ill-advised and often shameful. Sometimes one has felt like a scented candle, sent in to perfume or aerate a policy, monarchy these days just a government-issue deodorant’

Quoted in Alan Bennett’s Diary, London Review of Books January 2023, being an extract from his own book The Uncommon Reader (2008)

I rather fear that Charles III will not for long consent to be a government issued deodorant… and 17^th century poet the Earl of Rochester’s little couplet about Charles II may well have resonance for Charles III:    

We have a pritty witty king

And whose word no man relies on

He never said a foolish thing

And never did a wise one

Acceptable gifts…?

There is one area where the boundary between public and private possessions is rather muddied, that is the treatment of gifts received by members of the royal family in the course of their public duties. The long reign of Elizabeth and husband Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, involved innumerable state visits overseas, most particularly to member countries of the Commonwealth, and to colonies that had not yet acquired that independent status. In return, Britain played host to State visits from the leaders of many other countries across all the continents, Europe, Asia, the Americas, the Middle East.

Unsurprisingly, gifts were given and received on most of these occasions, to add to the similar exchanges between other monarchs and national leaders over the past two centuries, or even earlier. This means that now the royal family has built up significant and extremely valuable collections. But do these belong to the state, or are they now private collections? Tricky, again because so often a veil of secrecy has been drawn over such questions.

Horses

Queen Elizabeth developed as a young girl a love of horses, first as a rider, later as a racegoer and owner of racehorses. Of course, thousands of young girls fall in love with horses, but few ever own dozens of them, or see their horses win prestigious races like the Derby. One reason is that few are wealthy enough. Nor do they mix effortlessly with extremely rich horse owners, some of them with extremely dubious reputations, like the autocratic Ruler of Dubai.  Inevitably, with friends like these, Elizabeth often received gifts of highly bred horses, amounting at her death to whole stablefuls of significant capital assets, reported as valued at £27m. So who do these stablefuls of money belong to, the King (now) or the state? Charles seems to know, because one of his earliest acts has been to sell off a stableful or two at a profit of £2.3m. Will this money be regarded as a part of the Crown Estate, so at least giving some return to we (mostly) non-horsey subjects? Or will it go into Charles’ capacious private pockets? I think we should be told…

Art

The Royal Collection is extensive (1m works of art) and extremely valuable (estimated at £10bn). A collection built up over centuries, it contains both ‘old masters’ and paintings by famous contemporary artists. Some of the latter were gifts from the artists themselves. Do these works of art belong to the state (as part of the Crown Estate) or are they owned privately by members of the royal family? The waters have been muddied here recently since the Duke of Edinburgh built up his own private collection which is thought to include gifts from contemporary artists and/or an unknown number ‘borrowed’ from the Royal Collection. Who has inherited these valuable assets? Is it open to Charles to sell them, as with the horses? We cannot know the answer until a) the Duke’s will is made public, which might well under current legal practice, never happen or b) a sale is openly made and accounted for in the formal royal finances.

Jewels

The Crown Jewels are possibly priceless and not open to sale; but much of the very extensive Royal Collection of jewellery is privately owned by the royals. Much of the Collection was personally created by Queen Mary (wife of George V, and Elizabeth’s grandmother), described as ‘mesmerised by jewellery’, and notorious for commandeering valuable objects from her hapless aristocratic subjects during one of her many royal progresses across the country. A valuation of the jewellery collection commissioned by the Guardian and reported in April 2023 came up with what was regarded as a conservative estimate of £533 m.

Investments

The same Guardian investigation into royal investments commented: ‘No aspect of the Windsor family’s wealth is more secret than its shares and investments… for decades royal investments were concealed by a shell company that, archives reveal, was created in order to shelter the queen’s “embarrassing” private wealth from public scrutiny’. A speculative estimate gives a present figure of investment wealth of £142m.

In relation to ‘secrecy’ it’s worth noting that in 1998 the then Auditor General, Sir John Bourn, responsible to Parliament for identifying waste and inefficiency in public spending, won a six year long battle to investigate the finances of the royal household finances, and was responsible for making his National Audit Office a feared institution in Whitehall. His scrutiny of royal finances then revealed scandalously ‘eye-watering’ expenditures on foreign travel, for example including a bill for £252,000 when Charles, then Prince of Wales, visited the Caribbean with a party of 48.

… or Imperial Loot?

What emerges from the discussion is the considerable lack of clarity between what rightly belongs to the state, and therefore in principle the taxpayer; and what is regarded as in the private possession of the royal family, and simply (and sometimes literally) their business. But in practice there appears to be a considerable grey area where rightful ownership of gifts is almost impossible to determine, given the deliberate secrecy in which the monarchy’s many financial affairs are shrouded.

But perhaps of more significance now when considering ‘ownership’ is where these possessions and assets came from. Here we need to consider the role of the monarchy in the wider framework of what became the ‘British Empire’. This has been a more actively commercial role than has been generally appreciated; kings and queens from the Stuarts through to the Hanoverians were often deeply financially involved in colonial and imperial projects. This also meant that they benefited from the transatlantic trade in slaves, and shared in the profits from trading activities dependent on slave labour plantations, connections now proven by recent research. A historian in this field (Dr Brooke Newman) has written that ‘there is no doubt that the centuries of investment in African slavery and the slave trade, contributed hugely to building the status, prestige and fortune of today’s royal family’.

So far King Charles has avoided any acknowledgement of, or apology for these connections, though he has spoken more generally of his ‘personal sorrow’ at the appalling suffering occasioned by slavery. He also followed this fudged line on a recent visit to Kenya, referring to the ‘painful’ episodes in Britain’s colonial relationship with Kenya, i.e., the extensive use by British colonial officials during the 1950s Mau Mau uprising of torture and brutal beatings, in some cases resulting in the deaths of detainees. Although these colonial crimes were admitted to by Foreign Secretary William Hague in 2012, and the British government have already paid substantial compensation after legal action by former Mau Mau detainees, Charles could not bring himself to openly acknowledge these crimes, still less to say sorry for them.

There has never, in any case, been more general royal acknowledgement that ’empire’ involved military conquests and often brutal oppression, exemplified best by the depredations of the British East India Company in India across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Enormous fortunes were made, bringing the word ‘nabob ‘ into the English language. These oppressions and exploitations inevitably triggered a backlash, centred on the Indian Mutiny of 1857. This led to the British state taking formal control and maintaining its influence less by military force than by working through one-sided partnerships with the Indian princes, especially the Muslim Mogul dynasty. The celebrated Victorian British Empire, with Queen Victoria holding formal sway over as much as a fifth of the world’s population, regarded India as its ‘Jewel in the Crown’.

Here we might look at the story of the real jewel in the Crown, a story told by Anita Anand, co-author with William Dalrymple of a history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the largest in the world. In 1849 the East India Company forced the 10 year old boy Maharajah of Lahore,  Duleep Singh, to sign over to the company effective control of his wealthy kingdom, and also compelled him to make a gift to Queen Victoria of the Koh-i-Noor diamond that he had inherited from his father Ranjit Singh. Much later, now a wiser adult, he called Queen Victoria Mrs Fagin after Charles Dickens’ fictional thief, and died, ‘broken and broke’, in a Paris hotel at the age of 55. Anand writes that ‘his story, for many, is an allegory of colonialism’.

The Koh-i-Noor now sits in a Crown made for the then Queen Mother in 1937. The rightful ownership has long been a matter of deep controversy, with repeated requests for its return both from India and Pakistan. But the royals, and indeed the British government, show little appetite for giving up their favourite baubles, a typically tin-eared response by British beneficiaries of the bitter fruits of empire. So yes, not so much acceptable gifts as imperial loot, a fine British tradition to which people prefer to turn a blind eye.

Let’s Be Charitable

Another bit of blind-eye-turning seems to have gone on in relation to large donations made to Charles’ well established charities while he was Prince of Wales. These are well known charities and do much good work, supporting hundreds of community and other projects. But the processes of donation were brought into the cold light of day in a couple of high profile cases. One case reported in 2022 involved substantial cash donations of up to £3m between 2011 and 2015, from a former Quatari Prime Minister. The cash gifts, reportedly (the Times) ‘stuffed in Fortnum and Mason shopping bags and a small suitcase ‘ were personally received by Prince Charles, doubtless with a somewhat bemused thank you smile on his face, before being passed on to his Charitable Fund. No illegality was involved in the transactions, though it was publicly condemned as ‘a grubby business’.

An earlier, more dubious, affair implicated a close aide of Prince Charles, Michael Fawcett, in the offer of a knighthood and British citizenship to a Saudi billionaire, in return for generous charitable donations to the Prince’s Foundation (another charity), described as being for ‘restoration projects of particular interest to Prince Charles’. Prince Charles very quickly declared his own innocence, and it was Fawcett, who had worked for Charles for 40 years, who bit the bullet and resigned his position as Chief Executive Officer of the charity. Neither knighthood nor citizenship was obtained. After significant public complaints the Metropolitan Police launched a ‘cash-for-honours’ investigation under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925, brought in after Lloyd George’s several abuses. When the Met, after an 18 month inquiry, declared the discontinuation of its investigation without any further action, former Lib Dem MP and Minister Norman Baker expressed astonishment in light of the known evidence: ‘the suspicion must be that no action is being taken because of the nature of the potential offender…[and] they have not even investigated the main suspect’.

Whither The Monarchy?

Would that this was a more serious question than it is in our present political system. No government has yet grasped the nettle of reform of the more preposterous elements. In a modern state and society there is surely no room for the offensiveness of a hereditary family at the head of affairs, even less when that actual family has now proven itself so dysfunctional, and so essentially self-interested. Their extreme wealth and privilege is obscured and too often deliberately concealed, as they preside over a society in which almost as many of their subjects live officially in ‘destitution’ as did under Queen Victoria. Morally, and politically, we can no longer afford them, or the archaic and extravagantly wasteful picture they present to the rest of the world.

But who will rid us of them? Of course, the whole constitutional system is crying out for reform, from a now defunct House of Lords, and its associated honours system that is no longer fit for purpose, to an electoral and parliamentary system that is long past its sell-by date. What is widely described as a broken polity badly needs to be reshaped, and our dangerous reliance on ‘conventions’ that are now rarely honoured must give way to a carefully thought-out and written constitution. Easier said than done, for such systemic change takes both time and strong political will, and the hope must be that a rising younger generation will want to take forward these challenges. One hope is that they will consign the monarchy to the dustbin of distant history to which all monarchies surely belong.

Could this lead to a British republic before too long? Judged by the almost hysterical response to the pressure group Republic’s attempted Coronation protest, it might be a rather gradual process.

[But please, please, not the fudge of a bicycling monarchy. I don’t think I could take the sight of Charles and Camilla, crowns askew, taking a tandem down The Mall!]

An Englishman’s Home Is His Castle

Just now I’m in the middle of a difficult moment in the housing market, which has made me reflect on the central place of homes (and therefore the broader framework of housing) in all our lives. Houses provide us with shelter; but homes help to shape our lived experiences. In my own lifetime I have shared in the experience of both the housing have-nots, and the housing haves: I know what it is like on both sides of the fence. And despite so many social improvements over the past century, it seems to me that the housing have-nots remain a disturbingly large group in our society.

The well-known saying above is of particular import to the near-medieval experiences of my own family. From the beginning of the 20^th century to the mid-1930s my Irish immigrant grandfather, Tom Minogue, worked for a peer of the realm, Lord Mowbray and Stourton. His home, naturally, was a castle, at Allerton Mauleverer (in Yorkshire, not far from York). It is considered now as a prime example of Victorian gothic, though it always seemed an ugly sort of pile to me. (See photo at the beginning of the post). My grandad, equally naturally, lived in a small, tied cottage (pictured below) just down the road from the castle. He and Granny brought up a family of 12 children in this cottage, without benefit of electricity or running water. At this time a ‘tied’ cottage was tied to the job: if you lost the job, you could be summarily evicted.

My father was born in this cottage and told that he and his brothers often had to sleep head to toe in one large bed. But this was, by his own later written account, a happy home life which he left behind at the age of 13.  Dad also records that he met and courted one of the maids at the castle, Josephine Simpson, a miner’s daughter from Wallsend-on-Tyne. This was an unlikely match bringing together both the urban and rural strands of the British working class, but it was a loving if somewhat tempestuous relationship, (all the tempestuousness on my mother’s side). And in 1937, now married, they welcomed me into it.

I was on the scene unexpectedly early, premature by some four weeks, and weighing 5 lbs. My first home was Halfway Houses (CLICK for rather grim Google map view) half way between the market town of  Knaresborough and a village called Goldsborough. We lived in one side of the semi-detached cottages. On the other side lived my Granny and Grandad Minogue, who after 28 years’ service on the Allerton estate had been sacked by the incoming 25^th Lord Mowbray. My Mum too had been dismissed, along with many other servants, but in her case, she was glad to escape the intrusive personal restrictions of domestic service. She was equally restive about the restrictions of farm life in tied cottages, causing us from this juncture to lead a peripatetic exploration of various parts of Yorkshire. We’ll come back to Allerton Park again later, as she and Dad did.

Mean bosses and mean houses

Nun Appleton

My own first memories of this agricultural life were on another estate, at Nun Appleton near York, held by Sir Benjamin Dawson, well-heeled scion of a Bradford textile mill-owner. Dad was a specialist Horseman: in 1939, heavy horses outnumbered tractors by 30 to1, and when we moved to our new home, we did so on a horse-drawn farm wagon with the few sticks of furniture Mum and Dad possessed. Our tiny cottage, (see picture), also  without running water or electricity, backed on to a smelly fold yard where cattle spent the winter: one of them escaped and trampled on my fairly new sister, Maureen; fortunately she escaped serious injury.

Politics put an end to this particular home. Dad acted as a local election agent in 1945 for Bert Hazell in the constituency of Barkston Ash. They spoke out in well-attended meetings about the bad practices of big farmers like Dad’s own Tory employer (who heckled from the front row at one Labour meeting chaired by Dad). Bert failed by only 116 votes to oust the Tory shipping magnate who had traditionally held the seat with a large majority.  An enraged Sir Benjamin sought a mean-minded revenge by putting Dad to breaking stones all alone in the estate park, instead of using his skilled horsemanship. Mum and Dad looked at each other: time to move on.

Wensleydale

They fetched up in Wensleydale, in a village called Thornton Steward. At the age of seven I was still a sickly child after my premature birth, and was not helped by living in a grim old, dark, leaky, stone cottage (see photo above). In winter I would lie in bed watching water run down the inside walls, though it didn’t run out of taps. When I ventured out to the local primary school I was beaten up by the local kids, disdained as an incomer. This was too much for Mum, so we were soon off again but back to the familiar Plain of York, to the hamlet of Ellenthorpe, near Boroughbridge, and close to the old Roman route to the North, later the Great North Road, and now the A1(M).

Ellenthorpe

Our cottage here in 1946, Ivy Nook, had a pleasant garden with plum trees, and from my bedroom I could look out to the Hambledon Hills, and the White Horse of Kilburn. But yet again, here was a house without electricity or gas, no running water or bathroom, a dark and forbidding outside lavatory in the backyard, water hand-pumped from a nearby spring. Lighting came from candles and paraffin lamps. These were conditions all too common for farm labourers in the middle of the twentieth century. In 1944, 30% of English rural dwellings had no mains water supply and in 1947 almost 50% had no bathroom (the photo above is a bit misleading because the now modernised cottage has had a whole new half added to it since we lived there.)

I recall at the age of ten helping my mother to squeeze dripping sheets, washed in a primitive boiler, through a mangle. Since my new younger sister Sally had been born in the snowdrifts of early 1947, washing and drying clothes for three children and two adults in these conditions must have been a nightmare. We were often freezing cold, and Mum used to warm our beds with bricks heated in the kitchen oven and wrapped in a piece of blanket.

I now had to cope with my fourth primary school in four years. I could be very sensitive when teased at school about the patches on my much-darned short trousers, but amazingly, I was a happy boy, banished first thing at weekends with a packet of jam sandwiches, and admonished not to return until teatime. I roamed the fields and riverbanks to my heart’s content, and learned from visits to my mother’s native Tyneside how much luckier I was than my urban cousins, living in a much grimmer environment. My memories of my Mum and Dad at this house are less happy, for they often had arguments about money, or of course the absence of it. As a small child I hated to lie in my bed listening to the quarrels of these much-loved parents. Yet I have just read in my father’s diary that they were very happy at that time, enjoying their family life and their garden. So it was possible to be poor but unhappy, and poor but happy, all at the same time.

Allerton Park Again, Same Mean Master Again

Our next move was a surprise, taking us back to the Allerton Park where Mum and Dad had first met. The erratic Lord Mowbray put Dad in charge of the estate’s Home Farm, with an increased income; and in 1951 we had our first ever home with running water, electricity, bathroom and indoor lavatory. We even had our first ever telephone: Mum was in transports of delight. Now at grammar school, as was my sister Maureen, I no longer felt worries about my patched bottom.

But the ‘mean master’ syndrome struck again. When livestock began to go missing from the fields, an angry Lord Mowbray blamed Dad. Dad could do angry too, and after a stand up row, His Lordship, the one who 15 years earlier had precipitately sacked my upright Grandfather, now precipitately sacked the upright son. This meant eviction from our tied house. Dad was known and respected throughout the district and soon found work (and a house) elsewhere, but on a much reduced income as an ordinary farm labourer again. Eventually, it transpired that the shady goings on were almost certainly down to Lord Mowbray’s Agent, who was quietly moved on. Lord Mowbray sent his son Charles to offer Dad his job back, but he refused, writing in his diary that “I should never have gone back there and I’m sorry that I did.” Mum mainly lamented the loss of her lovely white telephone. As for me I was glad to leave behind the farm barn-based vermin; one morning I awoke to find a mouse sitting on my chest!

Yorkshire Village Life

These ups and downs meant that I had so far been present and mostly correct at four primary schools and two grammar schools. Fortunately, I could now at least stay at the same school, King James’ Grammar School Knaresborough. Our latest house, called Vicarage Farm, was in the village of Roecliffe, a mile or so from the familiar Boroughbridge and its equally familiar Great North Road. This was the first time we lived for any length of time in a proper village with a proper community. Our house was large but extremely cold in winter, coal fires the only source of heating and cooking. I had the not unusual experience in those days of waking to see ice on the inside of my bedroom window. In later years, Roecliffe would be considerably gentrified, and our house would be bought up for more than a £1 million by a well-known Leeds United footballer. The photo shows an extremely handsome conversion, much to my mother’s disgust.

Well before then I had left ‘the Grammar’, having won a place to read History at Caius College Cambridge, but obliged to do National Service first, in the RAF. I’ll not bother to show the series of unprepossessing huts and barracks I inhabited for two years.

Rooms at the Top

In the Cambridge Village

My next home for three years (1959-62) was Cambridge’s Gonville and Caius College. At that time the College was a mix of public school and grammar school men, public school predominating, with their own divide between aristocratic offspring and merely upper middle class (no women, of course, until the 1980s). As Alan Bennett has commented: “we grammar school boys were the interlopers”. But most of my grammar school contemporaries were middle class: manual working class entrants to Cambridge at this time were less than one per cent of the total; while the representation of the children of farm labourers was too small to be recorded. I was all too aware of my still marked Yorkshire accent, and aware too that the upper crust members of the college treated people like me with a sort of frostily polite disdain. At an initial dinner it took me some while to realise that when they talked about ‘my people’ they were referring to their own families: I had a whole new language to learn. But I would also learn that not all public school men were of that ilk, some of them becoming lifelong friends.

I was fortunate to be able to live in the College for the whole three years, in a cosy set of 3 rooms (bedroom, sitting room, and tiny kitchen) though you still had to tramp down below to freezing cold cellars for the other mod cons.

The photo shows the Gate of Honour at Caius through which those graduating would pass on their way to the Senate House behind to receive their degrees. These were grand surroundings for a rural Yorkshire boy, and gave me a taste for more of the same… hopes that, astonishingly (to me) would be realised

In the Whitehall Village

1n 1962 I left Cambridge. Like most of my fellow students this meant graduating to the bright lights of London, many to jobs in the City and in Whitehall.  As a new recruit to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, opposite 10 Downing Street, I was soon transported into one of the best addresses in London. This came about when I was appointed to be Resident Clerk for the Commonwealth Relations Office, a sort of Duty Officer’s position. This position came with a capacious flat in the splendid Foreign Office building designed in the nineteenth century by Sir George Gilbert Scott. My front windows looked out over St James’s Park down to Buckingham Palace; the side window opened on to a large balcony from which we could watch the Trooping of the Colour, always the occasion for a party. And see above the wonderful staircase leading up to my flat. Mum climbed those stairs once and must have felt that the efforts she and Dad had made to push me up in the world had been vindicated; no outside lavatories here, though the plumbing was probably Victorian.

A year or so on I moved on from this post, and into a house share with a Cambridge friend in the wonderful mediaeval Gatehouse to St Bartholomew’s church (see picture below), next door to Bart’s Hospital and opposite the then Smithfield Market, thought to be the original starting place for my constant friend, the Great North Road: I seemed to have come full circle.

100 Years of housing and homelessness: two steps forward and one step back

This brief run-through of the housing experiences of one person and his family throws light on one of the great divides in British social policy: the haves and the have-nots. Unusually for the time, I lived on both sides of the divide, a divide created and shaped by other divides: in income, in health, in education, and in employment. All of these types of inequality tend to produce a social imbalance where the same lowest sector of the population are to be found at the bottom of each heap of inequality: the income heap, the property heap, the health heap, the education heap. The sea change wrought by the Labour Party’s 1945 electoral victory, its landmark creation of the welfare state and National Health Service, and its embrace of nationalised industries in which working people could protect their incomes through trade unions, reduced these inequalities for a time. But as the century wore on, the triumph of Thatcherite attitudes and politics spearheaded a relentless campaign to reduce the welfare state and weaken the labour unions associated with public services.

Thatcher and her cohorts marched firmly into social territory, principally through the destruction of public housing for low income people (council houses ), with the so called ‘right to buy’ policy. This would lead seamlessly to the ‘buy to let’ property speculators who now disfigure and profit from our boom and bust housing market. Little has been done to rein in and manage an over-heated rental sector. Taken together with a labour market that is increasingly characterised by casualised labour contracts and low pay, and a dysfunctional social benefits system, one inevitable result is a rise in poverty and homelessness.

Homelessness and Heartlessness

In the past, one of the leading markers of poverty and inequality was in poor and insecure housing. My own parents, as described earlier, were often at the mercy of heartless rural employers, because their home was dependent on their job. If for whatever reason they lost the job, they could in earlier times be evicted with only two weeks’ notice. A similar situation existed in urban settings, where families were extremely vulnerable if they were unable to pay their rents. These vulnerabilities were not new, as poignantly illustrated by the paintings by Hubert von Herkomer 1849-1914, above, and by L S Lowry, below.) Often housing in urban areas was desperately unhealthy, with high rates of infant mortality, as revealed by descriptions of Jarrow in the 1930s. And I recall my shock, discovering at the Peoples Museum in Edinburgh that in the early1960s half of the Edinburgh housing stock still had outside lavatories.

At least these people had homes, however mean and ill-resourced they might be, and there would also have been in the nineteenth and early twentieth century significant numbers of the homeless. We get glimpses of this in, for example, George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London; and destitution in London is comprehensively described in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (note: a Guardian leader on 1st March 2023 lamenting “destitution, a word with Victorian associations is increasingly common in Britain.”

But homelessness as a category in our present towns and cities seems altogether more demeaning. This is particularly so when we again see the return of substantial rough sleeping about which housing charities are expressing alarm. The government seems to have lost interest in the target set for reducing rough sleeping; as the charity Crisis commented “government does have a commitment to end rough sleeping but the kind of action needed … the political leadership isn’t happening … the target won’t be met without a huge shift in what the government are doing.” It may well be that in a time of relative general prosperity, the existence of homeless people produces a sense of social guilt. We may not wish to explore this as a moral issue, but neither are we comfortable about people lying in front of us in the street, insistently calling on us to notice their discomfort and deprivation. So we also expect our politicians to remove these blots on our landscape, and this presents them in turn with challenges they seem loth to face, or solutions they prefer not to pay for. The result in the last two decades has been ‘government by pledge’, a tactic done to death by the Cameron and Johnson administrations: pledges to build more homes, pledges to cut back immigration, pledges to build more hospitals and recruit more doctors and nurses. These pledges are scarcely ever met, are never supported by planned implementation, or resources of money or manpower: and hovering over all, the specious and meaningless promise to ‘take back control’.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in housing policy, which has worked out well for the middle classes, and has filled the boots of large building corporations and property speculators, but is dysfunctional for that lowest poor third of our population. This is no longer a question of the ‘property-owning democracy’ at a time when the average house costs nine times average earnings, when there are 1.2 m people on local waiting lists in England. Scarcely any social housing (the equivalent of the old council houses) is being built. Governments come and go, make pledges about how many houses they will build, then the pledges come and go, and nothing is done. Between the impossible heights reached by the private housing market and the now precipitous rises in the rental market (20% in a year in Manchester), huge cracks are appearing in the social fabric, through which increasing numbers of people are in danger of falling. For low-income people, this is exacerbated by the refusal of the government to end the three-year freeze on housing benefits, despite inflation. Homelessness and rough sleeping are again grimly rising. As John Harris presciently points out: ‘one of the most basic human needs -a secure home-is now way beyond the reach of millions of people, including many we might once have thought of as affluent’ (John Harris: House prices are crumbling. Our faith in home ownership is too. Guardian Journal 6 March 2023).

Harris looks to a Labour replacement of a series of dreadful Tory governments to have some hope of more effective housing policies, but really, we are all complicit in a moral failure here, for as a society we are quite unwilling to provide the resources needed to help and protect the very many people who need help and protection. In short, far too many of us are unwilling to pay our share of the taxes so much needed to provide those protections and sustain decent and effective public services. The wealthy classes are even worse, straining every financial and legal sinew to avoid or evade tax. That unwillingness, the worst and most pernicious legacy of Thatcherism, will constrain Labour governments too. Such heartlessness will lead to more homelessness in our time unless we can refashion a moral perspective in our politics, and in relation to the wider society to which we all unavoidably belong. We need to do something more than look away while we step over the bodies in our streets. 

Note  Some of the  earlier material in this blog is drawn from my memoir Shifting Classes in Twentieth Century Britain: From Village Street To Downing Street YouCaxton Publications 2020, also available through Amazon

“… a politician who measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile” Guardian leader on Prime Minister Sunak 4 January 2023

Prime Minister Sunak has been quiet of late, reluctant to make any comment or display any form of leadership on the various crises that are piling up in his in-tray, which seems destined never to be an out-tray. He probably took one look at the chaos generated by the public statements of the ill-fated Truss-Kwarteng team and decided to keep his head below the parapet.

So it was with increasing disbelief and anger that I read his first considered public intervention for some time centred, not on the disintegrating health service, or the rail transport chaos, or the developing immigrant crisis, or the growing evidence of the serious economic damage caused by Brexit, or the poverty pandemic that is blighting so many lives: no, he wanted to tell us that his answer to all this is to ensure that every school child up to the age of 18 will study mathematics. He hastened to add that measures to provide this would not come until after the next election (how very convenient). This is par for the Tory public policy playbook, as designed by the Johnson/Truss school of Prime Ministerial governance: promise or pledge anything, but make no effort to fulfil these pledges and promises, or lay any sensible groundwork for implementation, much less provide the requisite financial resources. It’s all hot air, and designed to distract attention from the real multiple crises that are engulfing Westminster and Whitehall, and indeed the whole country.

Let’s have some data about maths teaching in our state schools, figures which Mr Sunak seems to have either overlooked or avoided. Although there were in 2021 almost 36,000 qualified maths teachers in this sector, an increase of 9% compared with 2012, the most recent annual report of the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER 2022) tells us that 45% of maths teaching in secondary schools is undertaken by teachers who have no specialised training in mathematics.  Moreover, the recruitment of specialist maths teachers has consistently fallen short in the past decade of the annual targets set by government for such recruitment. It is well understood that these key shortages are linked to a shortfall in teachers’ pay over the decade to 2021 of between 7 and 9%. These are figures we can all understand, and Sunak has absolutely nothing to say about how these shortages will be overcome, where all these missing teachers will come from, or what money will pay for them.

Perhaps no one told the Prime Minister that his own government had just recently cut back the quota for trainee maths teachers by almost 30 per cent, yet another of example of the lack of joined up thinking that has plagued policy-making under the ever-changing Tory administrations. Geoff Barton, general secretary of a principal headteachers union (Association of School and College Leaders ) says the plan is “unachievable” in the light of current teacher shortages. Perhaps Mr Sunak wished to avoid – or chose at least not to tell us – that Maths plus Further Maths is the most popular subject at A level taken by some 90,000 students. Hence the importance of getting enough well qualified teachers to teach them all, which is presumably what the Prime Minister wants. On the other hand, if maths teaching had to be extended to all A level students, we’d be looking at an additional 185,000 students to be taught. Have you any idea whether all these statistics add up, Prime Minister?

We might be reminded of the dictum sometimes attributed to a19^th century Tory Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, that there are ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’, with its implication that statistics may be misused and are inherently untrustworthy. We may see here a justification for the view that  the education of children and young adults should enable them to handle and understand the limitations of such slippery material, especially when presented by Prime Ministers or indeed by any set of politicians. But it is in large part the deliberate manipulation and misuse of statistics by politicians that creates the distrust that now permeates our political system. And in this instance Prime Minister Sunak is deliberately using a reasonable question (should education not provide all people with the ability to handle at least basic mathematical and statistical models and concepts?) to unreasonably avoid the question of how he intends, right now, to respond to the real and present crises in our economy and society.

For example:

• Why are there not enough nurses, doctors and other vital health staff in our national health service? We don’t need much of a maths education to know that a shortfall of at least 106,000 health service workers, (Nuffield Trust 2022) and 47,000 doctors (British Medical Association, 2022) is bad for our health. We can count how many essential staff are missing from our prized NHS, Mr Sunak; we can count, on our fingers, the ambulances queueing outside a great many of our A&E departments (we’d need three hands for some of them), and most of us personally know someone who has been caught up in the vast and growing backlog of elective treatment (7 million and counting)
• Where are the 40 new hospitals promised by the Tory government at the last election? Would a better maths education help us to understand how such figures can just vanish into thin air? We can at the least count to 40, Mr Sunak, and then realise that those promised hospitals are simply not there (however you choose to define them)
• You spoke recently, Mr Sunak, to a homeless man who was struggling to find employment and sufficient income for his needs, a laudable enough attempt to meet and understand your fellow citizen. But, do you really believe that this man is homeless and in difficulties because he failed to get a maths training by the age of 18? Might some deeper social and economic factors be involved here?
• When it comes to homelessness, over the past decade or so several Tory administrations have persistently failed to meet, or come even close to meeting, declared housebuilding targets. Is this because all those Ministers had not received any maths education when they were at school? Can they, and you, not count? Is this why the figures keep changing with every Tory administration? Or have the property magnates who dominate the house-building sector not yet given enough donations to your party? Presumably, you have no difficulty in adding these up.
• Many thousands of people are struggling in poverty, often despite also being in paid work. Right now, many such families are having to calculate whether to feed their children or the gas/electric meter. They can count their pennies, Mr Sunak, as recently advised to do by that well known authority on personal poverty, King Charles, but counting their pennies may not be enough. Is this because they did not do well enough in their maths lessons at school, and would such training have helped them in making such an impossible choice? This would be the case, according to the Sunak doctrine: but that doctrine does not explain why many people who work hard get so badly paid, or why our social benefits system is so deeply inadequate to established need, or why the better-off groups in our society are being so much better rewarded than the poorer groups (numerous respected sources, too many to reference). Or why the small percentage of our children who go to expensive private schools (around 7%) also go on to dominate the best paid occupations. Nothing to do with how much maths teaching they had, a lot to do with their social backgrounds and connections. Come to that, I can’t think of a single Prime Minister after 1945 who had anything approaching a maths degree, except possibly Liz Truss who studied Maths and Further Maths at A level – and look where that got the country.

Perhaps Sunak’s real argument should have been that as a society becoming ever more diversified and so badly in need of institutional reconstruction, we should be insisting that children and young adults need to have classes in politics, in sociology, in social policy, in moral philosophy, in cultural history. But no, all that is anathema to a ruling right wing coalition that will surely ignominiously collapse as they and their post-imperial delusions hit the unyielding buffers of economic and social reality, a deserved fate from which this group of ignorant and third-rate politicians will not be saved by all the maths training in the world. 

PS Don’t study maths if you want to become Prime Minister

Just for fun, I checked the educational qualifications of British Prime Ministers from 1945: this chart focusses largely on university degree studies as it was impractical to look at all post-16 qualifications.

THE POLITICS OF THE JUNGLE  – OR, WATCH OUT FOR THE SNAKES IN THE LONG GRASS

If you read my previous blog in this series on the British Constitution (Contracts, Chums and Charlatans, 31^st August 2022) you will see that I am changing metaphors somewhat, leaving behind Tory ferrets-in-a-sack in favour of what’s going on in a different part of the woods. This switch has been occasioned by the recent antics of some of those ferrets. Matt Hancock, lately but frequently disgraced Secretary of State for Health, has been at it in the real jungle, though one that seems totally unreal seen through the distorted and distorting lens of television reality shows. He should, of course, have been in Parliament and in his constituency, doing the job for which he is paid, and it is scandalous that this can happen. He is reported to be getting upwards of £400,000 pounds for having managed to look ignominious in the public gaze, a skill he perfected while in government. It is absurd that while he might have self-destructed his political career, he will, like his equally disgraced former boss Boris Johnson, be able to reap wholly undeserved financial rewards in the world of low-level celebrities. I have recently listened in to conversations where the following opinions were expressed: ‘seems like a good chap’; ‘I was surprised to see what a good sport he is’; ‘you have to admire his spirit, the way he coped with all that jungle stuff’; ‘he showed himself to be a survivor’.

‘NO! NO! NO!’ as his one time political heroine, Mrs Thatcher, might have cried. It really is depressing to hear this kind of thing being parroted. Hancock was indeed a good sport and a good chap where his friends were concerned, strewing in their path contracts later found by the High Court to be illegal. He may have survived the various indignities of a television ‘reality’ show, but numberless people afflicted by the all too chillingly real Covid19 pandemic did not. Their deaths are attributable in no small part to some of the manifest policy failures of Hancock and his well-rewarded political friends. Let’s not forget that he was involved in rather a lot of ‘jobs for the boys’, (e.g. Owen Paterson, Radox) or more notably ‘jobs for the girls’ (Baroness Dido Harding, see below), or his intimate Health Ministry friend, Gina Coladangelo. It’s an appalling thought that he might never be fully held to account for these at worst corrupt and at best disreputable behaviours. We might note here the mighty irony that at one point in Hancock’s early political career (2014-2015) he was a UK Anti-Corruption Champion. (Has anyone ever heard of one of these? What do you suppose they do? Whatever it is, they appear not to be having much success.)

Hancock’s time in the jungle was, of course, a carefully staged step in his construction of an alternative narrative. Another step came this week with the publication of a ‘memoir’, published in parts in that well known defender of public morality, the Daily Mail. I have long denied myself the pleasure of reading this toxic rag except through spread fingers. It is reported that a former Tory cabinet minister, Stephen Dorrell, has said that Hancock’s current version of the decision-making (when he was Health Secretary) was rewriting history, with provably untrue statements about the treatment of patients in care homes. Dorrell said that Hancock needed to remember that when he gives evidence to the Hallett Covid inquiry he will have to justify such statements “under oath”. In other words, Dorrell thinks Hancock is lying.

In another part of the Westminster jungle we have had another sighting of Baroness Michelle Mone. In the earlier blog referenced above I highlighted her lobbying for dubious transactions related to the infamous ‘VIP lane’ by which well-placed Tory parliamentarians and donors secured lucrative contracts for the supply of NHS equipment. I suggested that her denial of any involvement with the PPEMedpro company’s contracts for the delivery of health service equipment was undermined by the evidence available. So I was rather pleased when the Guardian (28 November 2022) splashed this evidence all over its front page, adding the crucial revelation that Baroness Mone and her children had actually benefited from this company to the tune of £29m, through a complex set of financial relationships between the company, her husband Andrew Barrowman, and offshore bank accounts that may well avoid tax on this benefit. Barrowman had received at least £65m in profits from PPEMedpro. Let’s not forget that Barrowman made a large part of his considerable wealth from the design and promotion of tax avoidance schemes linked to offshore tax havens. Let’s also not forget that the medical gowns that earned these profits for the Mone/Barrowman family were found to be unfit for use, but PPEMedpro refused to return any of the money

Government Ministers are under pressure to clarify these financial issues, and the somewhat opaque relationship between Baroness Mone and her favourite political contacts Lord Bethell and Michael Gove. Unsurprisingly, there have been calls for a specific public inquiry, not least since the VIP fast lane process was judged illegal in the High Court. We now learn from a leaked source in the Department of Health that Michelle Mone also lobbied hard on behalf of a firm called LFT Diagnostics to secure a contract relating to governmental lateral flow contracts. LFT Diagnostics is described as ‘a secret entity’ in the office that manages the wealth of her husband. Mone was described as “in a class of her own in terms of the sheer aggression of her advocacy”, and received a formal rebuke from Lord Bethell, then a junior minister involved in government procurement, who reminded her of “the need for propriety in dealings with officials”. It seems doubtful that she would understand the meaning of the word. She has never declared this potentially beneficial family interest in the appropriate House of Lords register of members’ interests, as she should have done.

We also learn that Baroness Mone has now taken ‘leave of absence ‘ from Parliament. As John Crace of The Guardian commented: ‘how would we tell the difference’, given that she has rarely appeared in the House of Lords and last spoke there more than a year ago. It is unlikely that she will miss the daily attendance allowance of £350, though most workers would be delighted to get such a sum just for turning up. But she might also have chosen this withdrawal because it allows her to avoid declaring any financial interests for the time being. In any case, she is still under investigation by the Lords’ commissioner for standards over potential breaches of the Lords’ code of conduct in relation to PPEMedpro, which is still the subject of a potential fraud investigation by the National Crime Agency.

But good news this very day (19 December 2022) as the DHSC (Department of Health and Social Care) finally bend to all this pressure and announce that they are bringing an action in the High Court to recover the £122m paid to PPEMedpro, and to recover the substantial cost of storing and disposing of the useless gowns delivered under the contract, and which the NHS have never been able to use. Perhaps a little bit of justice will finally, if more than a little grudgingly, be done

Do we call this kind of thing ‘corruption’? Or designate it by the much weaker and vaguer term ‘sleaze’? Or just think of it as ‘normal Tory business practice’? Whatever the nomenclature we choose, whatever the lax rules and secretive practises that enable these dubious financial gains by people linked politically to an existing government, we surely can make one judgement: the principal players here are rich, greedy, over-privileged people who stick to the body politic like the leeches they are. They create enormous and wilful damage to the public interest by failing even to show any competence in supplying the goods they have contracted to deliver. They add insult to this injury by salting away their ill-gotten gains in tax havens, and by refusing to admit any liability or responsibility for their own failures. The accompanying photograph shows how such people flaunt their wealth overseas, while showing utter contempt for the British state and its public services. Shame on our political system, and its leaders over our twenty-first century’s  ‘low, inglorious decade’ for enabling such contemptible people to manipulate it to their own benefit, while awarding them honours and privileges they cannot possibly have deserved.

Meanwhile the odious and self-serving Hancock is slinking off into the long grass, announcing that he will not expose himself to the verdict of the electorate in any forthcoming general election. Like many other Conservative MPs, he has read the runes and intends to jump before he is pushed. What odds Johnson will deny him the peerage he might have expected in more normal times? Quite high, I should say. Particularly as Johnson has a considerable number of favours to return to a motley crew of ex-Tory ministers, of whom there are now a worryingly large number, and to both genuine and more dubious donors to the Tory party. He has already elevated his brother Jo Johnson to the peerage (in 2020) and the same honours list reeked of what we now tend to label ‘cronyism’: I suppose it’s better to keep this sort of thing of thing in the family, or what used to be called ‘nepotism’. (Johnson is the first Prime Minister ever to give a peerage to his own brother.)

 Slow Horses

[I owe this subhead to the title of Mick Herron’s excellent spy novel in which ‘slow horses’ is the designation given by British intelligence chiefs to failed or unreliable spies who nevertheless are kept on as ‘useful idiots’: an entertaining read, John Le Carre for the 21^st century; pub. John Murray, Baskerville edition, 2022]

The past two decades have seen a steady and relentless deterioration in our public life, leaving our public services in disarray, our society deeply divided and scarred by ever increasing inequalities. Much of the damage to our social and economic lives in this period lies at the door of a political leadership characterised by one part of corruption to two parts of incompetence. This has proved to be a most deadly combination, and at this point could be described as an exercise in self-harming. Yet we seem quite unable right now to put a stop to this process of self-destruction. Some choose to close their eyes to what is playing out, much as most people now do in relation to the most serious problem that we all face, i.e. the relentless march of environmental collapse. But we could at least make a start here by calling out the dreadful set of politicians who have lead us into this mess, and make some attempt to replace them with less inept and less self-interested leaders who can reshape and restore our political institutions. We can best do that by examining what went so badly wrong in the recent past.

The concept of ‘slow horses’ turns out to be very apt, in terms of the inappropriateness of significant appointments to public office, linking forms of nepotism to basic failures of competence.

The history of British governance offers some insights here; there were good reasons, for example, why William Gladstone in 1870 introduced the notion of competitive public appointments according to merit rather than patronage. The rising business middle class was fretting at the ways in which aristocratic patron-client relations inhibited and damaged effective economic policies and practices. Amusingly, this reform was for a time undermined by the creation (on the Treasury payroll) of two very weak candidates against whom the desired candidate would always prevail. They became known as ‘the Treasury fools’, and looking at the recent political history of Treasury appointments we would seem to have come full circle.

I will illustrate the contemporary dynamic here by looking briefly at one aspect of the Covid19 crisis. The handling of this crisis throws a clear light on the failures of our political leadership, and their worrying tendency to ride roughshod over normal political and governmental conventions and practice. The thumbs up for this came all too clearly (and visibly) from Boris Johnson. But his fellow Ministers and political cronies were quick to get the message.

Not many peers are to be found in the jungle, but we retain a link to the unstoppable Matt Hancock. In May 2020, at the height of the Covid 19 crisis with thousands dying every week, he appointed Baroness “Dido” Harding to head the crucial NHS Test and Trace programme, established to track and limit the spread of the disease. You will notice that the vital part of such a programme, ‘Track’, does not appear in the title, aptly, because that bit never really happened.

This was an odd appointment because Harding was essentially a business consultant and executive with no practical experience in the health service. Her principal claim to fame as a business manager was that in 2015, as Chief Executive of the telecoms company TalkTalk, she presided over a hugely mismanaged business scandal which lost her company £60 million, and 95,000 customers, and a subsequent fine of £400,000 by the Information Commissioner, who blamed “a failure to implement the most basic cyber security measures.” A leading business journal ran the headline “TalkTalk boss Dido Harding’s utter ignorance is a lesson to us all”.

So how did she contrive to get such an important public service post with an already poor management record? This question is easily answered when we consider her political connections:

• Created a Tory life peer by Prime Minister David Cameron in September 2014.
• Friend of Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary who appointed her, through a common interest in horse racing, she a successful Cheltenham Gold Cup winner on her own horse Cool Dawn, and member of the Jockey Club; he also a sometime jockey. Newmarket is in Hancock’s constituency.
• Married to a close political friend of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, John Penrose, until recently Johnson’s Anti-Corruption ‘Tsar’. (I know, I know….)

We then find that the High Court, after a legal challenge to her appointment by the Runnymede Trust and the Good Law Project, ruled in February 2022 that Hancock had failed to comply with the 2010 Equality Act when appointing Harding, as he was also when appointing as director of testing in September 2020 one Mike Coupe. Coupe was a former colleague of Harding at Sainsbury’s, and was added to the short list of candidates at her instigation.

The trace lines of cronyism can be tracked throughout this whole operation, one which should have demanded the very highest recruitment standards. And the results, unsurprisingly, were demonstrably both ineffective and inefficient. A clear early failure was the maladministration of a highly touted and promoted new UK app which in a rapid U-turn was dropped in favour of a combined Apple-Google one to rescue Harding’s ‘late-running project’. The Test and Trace programme also received heavy criticism ,with claims (as yet unverified) that it had cost the taxpayer upwards of £20 bn for very little impact on the spread of the pandemic. Harding had to defend payments of £1000 a day to private consultants, when existing local authority practitioners could have provided a cheaper and more effective programme. Jolyon Maugham, Director of the Good Law Project bitingly commented: “For Ministers or special advisers to choose their friends or close associates for these key roles is to exclude those who are more able, or better value. And ultimately it is the public interest that suffers”.

Indeed. Finally, the penny dropped, and Harding too was quietly dropped late in 2021, when she failed in her bid for the position of Chief Executive of the newly created NHS England. Around the same time Hancock had been rather loudly dropped, after his own bit of personal sleaze. We might conclude that Hancock could run fast in the jungle, and Harding could ride a fast horse on the racecourse, but both are perfect examples of Mick Herron’s ‘slow horses’ and even ‘useful idiots’ might be too generous.

It’s The Political System, Stupid!

Consider this quotation from a highly respected contemporary journalist:

“It made me wonder when roguery stopped being roguery and became sleaze…? When is a politician ‘colourful’ and when is he a national scandal …? We were so ambivalent about our politicians that we took our cue from the way they were being presented. If certain incidents in their career are presented as funny, warm, delightfully roguish, then that is what they are. [There is a danger of] giving permission for a culture of fixes and favours and drinking and debauchery, to be understood as colourful rather than dark”.

You could be forgiven for thinking this is a piece about former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for it reflects his pattern of political and personal behaviour exactly. It is in fact drawn from a recent book by Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (Head of Zeus 2021), in part analysing, with chapter and verse, the extremely corrupt transactions and abuses of office by Charles Haughey, Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), and his Deputy Brian Lenihan, in the early 1990s and earlier.  O’Toole recalls Richard Nixon’s press secretary explaining events connected to the Watergate scandal: “this is an operative statement, the others were inoperative”. That also seems to fit exactly the many recent reversals of position by the Johnson and Truss governments here in the UK. The newly minted Sunak administration threatens to be a collection of reversals of reversals, a consigning to the Conservative political dustbin of recently operative statements now casually dismissed as no longer operative, in the attempt to undo the damage of the reckless Truss / Kwarteng demolition ball.

I’ll come back to the corruption bit, but we are also talking extreme incompetence here. As Prime Ministers, Chancellors of the Exchequer, and Cabinet Ministers come and go with dizzying speed and regularity, even well informed political commentators are left clutching their heads, scarcely knowing what to make of it all. One such, Simon Jenkins , points out that in the past decade, Britain has seen five Prime Ministers, seven Chancellors, six Home Secretaries, and ten Education Secretaries: “it has been government as a joke” (Guardian, 8 Nov 2022). Let’s imagine for a moment what this must be like for the staff of a major department of state like the Home Office, at all levels, constantly pulled from policy pillar to administrative post as they struggle to respond to ever wilder and more unrealistic directives from the top. And what must it be like for the country’s thousands of teachers, constantly asked to do the impossible with dwindling resources, as an ever-changing cast of  ministers seek to impose their – often experience-free – personal prejudices on state schools. This did not go too well with Gavin Williamson, did it? Or Michael Gove? And to find an Education Secretary who had actually taught in a comprehensive school, you have to go back to Estelle Morris, in 2001, under Labour PM Tony Blair. Here are the last 6 Education Secretaries, covering the Johnson-Truss-Sunak premierships:

 Be Careful What You Wish For

The latest stage in the ferrets-in-a-sack upheavals that constitute the Tory party red in tooth and claw, is already giving rise to deluded claims of a new dawn of competent, sleaze-free governance. Two cautionary judgements here:

Firstly, the new PM, Sunak, is remarkably inexperienced. An MP only since 2015, only in government for a total of 7 years before his electorate-free coronation, he held a very junior ministerial post for six months in 2018-19, before elevation to the Treasury, first as Chief Secretary under Theresa May, then Chancellor under Boris Johnson. His main claim to fame while a rookie Chancellor was support for business schemes related to the Covid-19 pandemic. These are still being presented (and often accepted) as a success; but the total loss to the taxpayer through crime and administrative error in relation to these schemes was an enormous £5.4bn (HMRC Annual Report 2021-2022). One such scheme was Sunak’s much vaunted and personally publicised ‘Eat Out To Help Out’ scheme. A London School of Economics assessment in February 2021 judged that this cost the taxpayer £70m through fraud and error, while ‘any economic gains from the scheme may have come at the cost of more infections’.  We must hope that the former Chancellor’s elevation to Prime Minister induces him to be a bit less careless with the country’s money. His wealthy background (the richest member of a Cabinet full of wealthy members) has produced several tin-eared gaffes, not least his public boast that he had used a government financial support scheme to channel funds away from deprived urban areas to prosperous constituencies that just happened to be held by Tory MPs. Seemingly blind to any notions of poverty and inequality, it seems likely that he will spearhead another austerity drive set to match the disastrous Cameron/Osborne one. It also seems certain that he will ditch many of the pledges he made while campaigning against Truss for the party leadership. He has made yet another U-turn on the environment: now he would not go to the international Climate Change Conference in Egypt, being not really interested in climate change; but oh no, now he would be there, because Boris Johnson had announced his intention to go and was thought likely to upstage Sunak (he did). More obsessional ferrets-in-the-sack stuff when the country is crying out for stable policy and decision-making, not to mention a more focussed grip on environmental issues.

Secondly, while Sunak has promised a new dawn characterised by competence and integrity, he would seem to have fallen at the first hurdle here, with his attempts (surely doomed) to rescue the flawed Suella Braverman, returning her to the Home Office from which she had been compelled to make an ignominious resignation over what have been described by senior Tories as ‘serious breaches’ of the Ministerial Code of Ethics. Back at her desk again, presumably hastily cleared of the effects of Grant Shapps (have several personas, will be anybody for a week), she now stands accused of a punitive approach, entirely lacking in either morality or compassion, to the housing and welfare of asylum seekers. So much for a new dawn of public integrity. As for competence, it’s clear from Braverman’s ministerial record as Attorney General under Johnson, where she defended UK international law-breaking in relation to the Brexit agreement, and her aggressive stances during both her incarnations as Home Secretary, that she is permanently a political accident waiting to happen.

Meanwhile the accident-waiting-to-happen that is Gavin Williamson has duly happened, for the third time. This time he jumped but was very probably pushed. The evidence of his vicious tendencies has come mainly from senior Tories, as well as some hapless official in the Ministry of Defence who was advised to ‘slit your throat’. This is a reminder of another such bit of nastiness when Pritti Patel was Home Secretary, bullying Home Office staff and her own Permanent Secretary, who resigned, the Government agreeing a substantial pay-off rather than see the dispute go to an embarrassing public tribunal: more taxpayers’ money down the Tory drain.

What is it currently with British Prime Ministers? You wait for one for five years, then suddenly three or four turn up at the same time. All seem significantly lacking in good judgement, morality, or social awareness. The jury must as yet be out on the judgement, morality and compassion of the latest version.  In striving to attach sticking plasters to the deeply divided and wounded Conservative Party, Sunak seems already to have taken unwise hostages to fortune; meanwhile many of the Tory ferrets are out of the sack. They’ll soon be lunging at each other in Parliament again, as they were reported to have done physically a short time ago.

Lest We Forget

Given the mid-summer madness that has characterised the Prime Ministerial game of Musical Chairs, and the feelings of anger, depression, and outright disbelief that now pervade the UK political system, it’s not easy to retain a grasp of what we might call ‘the long view’ of our governance system. The idea that ‘a week is a long time in politics ‘ has lately given way to ’24 hours is a long time in politics’. Each daily bout of chopping and changing, both of people and policies preoccupies both the media (all too often part of the ferret-fight) and a bewildered and increasingly fearful national audience inclined to lose trust in the whole system.

Clearly, we need to return, if we can, to a more stable political and administrative universe. But the Tory party now has so many skeletons in the political cupboard that they will be most reluctant to let them see the light of day. A real concern here is that the root causes of all that instability will be neglected and side-lined as the traumatised Tory party seeks to draw a veil over the contribution of their own fractiousness and internecine disagreements to Britain’s existing crises, i.e. Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, and public ethics.  Proper scrutiny and accountability will be avoided. No lessons will be learned, for the language of ‘learning lessons’ implies admissions of failure.

(i) Brexit issues

Since Cameron’s petulant abandonment of responsibility for the shock result of the Brexit referendum, the Tory party, indeed all the principal Brexiteers, have been in outright denial about the detrimental consequences of this national act of self-harm. Johnson’s administration twisted and turned themselves inside out to avoid any such admission, first by constantly putting off and delaying agreed implementation dates. Johnson then escalated the crisis by breaking agreements that he had himself signed off, particularly in relation to the Northern Ireland protocol (a shameful breach of international law that was also signed up to by the then Attorney General, one Suella Braverman, supposedly a lawyer). This alone trashed the UK’s international reputation, while also earning a strong rebuke from US President Joe Biden, so wrecking any hope for Johnson’s much-paraded expectation of a favourable trade deal with America. It has also brought gridlock to the governance of Northern Ireland, mirroring the paralysis and incompetence in Westminster and Whitehall.

While the economic damage that can be attributed to Brexit lacks clarity, given the difficulty of disentangling this from the economic effects of Covid-19, and of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is no doubting the increased costs for businesses trading with the EU; or of the chaotic situation that now prevails in the fisheries and farming sectors over the supposed replacement of former EU support costs by the UK government; or of the undermining of major UK science collaborations with EU partners. None of this has been helped by the constantly revolving merry-go-round of Ministers responsible for these policy areas. This confusion has been heightened by the conflicts within the Tory government over the issue of scrapping an enormous range of existing EU regulations (yet another manifesto pledge now likely to be abandoned). But small mercies: at least PM Sunak has jettisoned Rees-Mogg’s absurd intention to cut around 90,000 civil servants; otherwise, there would have been no-one left to implement any pledges of any kind. It would be unwise to assume that any of the 2019 Tory election manifesto pledges, or those so freely thrown around during the Truss-Sunak contest, will survive. Therein, of course, rests the case for a general election, for this may be the only way of bursting the poisonous boil inflicting the body politic.

(ii) Covid-19 issues

In an earlier post I examined examples of dilatoriness, ineptness and corruption in the handling by Ministers, and many of their advisers, of Covid-19 decisions and their implementation. These flawed processes may have resulted in many thousands of unnecessary deaths, and considerable losses, in billions of pounds, to the taxpayers who must ultimately pick up the tab for such losses. These considerations make essential a well-structured and speedy process of accountability. There is a danger this process will inevitably become a political football. Those who are well aware of the mistakes they made, especially Prime Minister Johnson, his Cabinet colleagues, and many of their political advisers in Downing Street, have already done all they can to kick this football down the road. Johnson delayed for as long as possible the institution of an independent inquiry. In December 2021 he finally gave way to increasing pressure, not least from the bereaved families of thousands of dead victims, appointing as Chair Baroness Heather Hallett, a cross-bench (i.e. non-party) peer in the House Of Lords. Johnson issued agreed Terms of Reference only in June 2022. The Inquiry has announced that the first witnesses will be called as late as Spring 2023. Ambitious in scope, both in content and in relation to regional bodies the process of research, investigation, hearings, findings, and reporting may well take several years, by which time many people may well have lost sight of the original errors and failings.

(iii) Kicking it down the road

A worrying exemplar is to hand here, in the form of the Grenfell Tower disaster, when 72 people died in a major fire in a residential London tower block on the night of 14^th June 2017. That Inquiry launched in September 2017 has only now, in late 2022, concluded all its hearings, but still awaits the Chairman’s report, expected in 2023. Criminal prosecutions, if any, cannot be expected before 2024: a total of some 6-7 years. Robert Booth comments in the Guardian on 7 November 2022:

    “ a torrent of truth about failings that preceded the deaths of 72 people flowed before the bereaved: how ministers failed to tighten fire regulations; how the wealthy council landlord [Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea] cut costs with a switch to combustible cladding; and how materials suppliers cheated fire tests…. barristers cross-examined ministers about David Cameron’s ‘bonfire of red tape’ that allowed deregulation of fire safety in a way that contributed to the disaster. The cross-examinations were far shorter than those faced by firefighters”. It seems all too likely that highly culpable individuals and organisations will avoid prosecution in a case where almost everyone is found culpable, so that no-one can be blamed.

Doubtless this is the sort of outcome of the Hallett Inquiry into Covid-19 that people like Johnson and Hancock, and many others involved, will hope for: a detailed and complex inquiry in which ‘the system’ is found to blame, and individual politicians and officials ‘with one bound leap free’, so that only the families of more than 200,000 who died are punished. We can be reasonably sure that very many of those deaths were avoidable, when we look back to the many errors of judgement that bedevilled the political and bureaucratic response to the pandemic. In this case, the bereaved may have even longer to wait for social justice than those bereaved by the Grenfell Tower failures. Even worse, many of the principal players may well by be long gone from the political scene. Leading actors like Johnson and Hancock, guilty of multiple failures, both of public and private morality, and perhaps most vulnerable to critical findings, may not even be in politics anymore. Both are sufficiently self-absorbed and shameless not to care.

Let’s think of the future

People who would not normally mention politics to me are expressing anger and alarm at what they see. Some of these are older relations and friends who almost never comment on such matters. Meanwhile, young people such as my 16-year-old granddaughter convey derision and contempt if you mention Boris Johnson or Suella Braverman – but remain anxious about what their future holds. Surely, and if only for them, we can do better than this?

My main focus in this piece has been on government incompetence and ineptitude rather than corrupt practices, though the two threads often intertwine, along with issues of privilege and inequity. That will be the theme of my next blog, reflecting on the murky interactions of public contracts, public appointments, political donations, privilege, and the honours system and how we need to change these relationships.

My recent posts seek to address what I consider to be serious weaknesses in the current British constitutional and political system. As readers will be aware, over the last decade, and particularly in the last year or so, this system has sustained serious and often wilful damage. Attempting in my writing to maintain a long term view of the faults in the system and what is needed to put them right, I was constantly thrown off course by short term events and crises. As I write this, we are all experiencing the most chaotic introduction of a new Prime Minister and Cabinet that I can remember in a fairly long lifetime.  We have of course also struggled for almost the past three years with the privations and terrors of the Covid pandemic.  This state of almost permanent flux and instability was, at least briefly, arrested by the death of Queen Elizabeth II. All of this somewhat torpedoed my intentions to take a long view, so here I’ll pause briefly before resuming that analysis later.

We know that the ten days of private and public grief and mourning which concluded with the royal funeral resonated with many people who had lost older parents and relatives during the pandemic. Personally, it sent me back to the funeral of my own father (also named Martin), in 1996. There could not be a greater contrast with the royal funeral, for he was a farm labourer and gardener during a life which covered most of the twentieth century. For much of this time he and my mother Josephine (always Josie) lived a life characterised by low paid work, poor and insecure housing, and constant financial struggle. This might seem to make them unremarkable, but it has always seemed to their children that they lived quite remarkable lives. Mum came from her Geordie miner’s home at the age of 16 to work as a maid on the aristocratic Mowbray and Stourton estate at Allerton Park in Yorkshire. My Irish immigrant grandfather was a labourer on this estate and my father was born in their tied cottage along with eleven other children (though another died prematurely). Both Mum and Dad had left school at the age of thirteen. They married in 1937 and thereafter enjoyed, if that is the right word, something of a peripatetic progress around the vales and dales of Yorkshire, often changing jobs and houses for as little as five shillings more on the weekly wage, or because my mother, not one to mince her words, had yet again made plain to some uncaring farmer how inadequate his mean tied cottage was. Dad would sigh, “Nay, Josie,” but clamber on to his bike and cycle off in search of a better place to bring up their three growing children, including me. I might record at this point that I reached the age of 13 before we found ourselves (in 1951) in a house with running water, a bathroom, and an inside lavatory. Since my Dad loved his outside work, and his ability to deploy the real farming skills he had learned, he had never wanted to seek better paid urban employment, so inevitably they struggled for all of their working lives on pay which was never better than two thirds of the average labouring wage.  With all three children at Grammar School, both were forced to take on extra work just to pay for our school uniforms and other school costs. For Mum, this meant long hours in a hot hotel kitchen, at a time when she was not herself in good health; for Dad, it meant long extra hours of overtime. Both would often return around ten o’clock at night, exhausted. 

This might seem like a rather doleful and gloomy story, but it was anything but that. My parents rose above their unpromising conditions to live full and happy family lives. It became clear at my father’s funeral what a very extraordinary person he was, recognised as such by an overflowing church. He had very little formal education, and knew no real opportunity to get any more, yet it was he who chose the Mozart Requiem for his service, and a poem by Christina Rossetti. We children knew that he had a phenomenal memory, and he delighted in his seventies and eighties in leaping up at family parties to recite long extracts from Shakespeare’s plays, taking all the parts, and leaving his well-educated children far behind. Perhaps it was his Irish background which gave him a strong love of both music and poetry and gave him a tremendous gaiety and sense of fun. He liked nothing so much, especially at Christmas, as a gathering of family and friends, a telling of tall stories, a sing-song, a dance; and if the younger ones wouldn’t get up, he’d get up by himself, dancing around the room. His grandson Nick captured this quality in the photograph of him wearing a straw hat and twirling a cane whilst singing ‘I’m the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo’.

You might be thinking: all this Irish stuff is all very well, but what about the Yorkshire bit? Dad was in many ways a complete contradiction, both a typical Irishman and a typical Yorkshireman, blunt, plain-speaking and uncompromising. He was a rarity in rural Yorkshire for his interest in politics, and along with my mother he was lifelong Labour supporter. Both grew up at a time when for most men the right to vote was still quite recent, and mostly women didn’t have that right at all. He had a strong sense that this hard-won right should always be used, and indeed he himself became a local Parish Councillor,  bizarrely standing on a Labour platform,  forcing (and winning) an election for a normally uncontested seat. Even more important in his mind was the duty to call to account the politicians and bureaucrats who run things. He used every channel open to him; Whitehall was bombarded with letters, several of which were addressed to the Prime Minster. So was his local Conservative MP, who became a respectful friend. He aired his views frequently on local radio, and someone once asked my sister Sally, deep in Kent, “Are you related to that Martin Minogue who’s always talking on Radio Leeds?” In his last year, in failing health, he wrote a long letter to the Harrogate Advertiser protesting at the proposed sale of the local cricket ground for property development. When the letter didn’t appear, he telephoned the editor to demand an explanation; it was printed the following week. This was somehow characteristic of his commitment and tenacity. One of Dad’s favourite quotes was from Gray’s Elegy: “full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air”. The thought of Dad being content to blush unseen always made us smile, and we thought more apt the line “some village Hampden that with dauntless breast, the little tyrant of his fields withstood” This, incidentally, was another poem he could recite from beginning to end.

Reflecting on my Dad and his life, he was a man of complete personal integrity and honesty, and a most lively personality, with great good humour and charm, and a father who may have possessed little in the way of material resources, but who together with our equally remarkable mother, left his children and his grandchildren a truly rich inheritance.

Queen Elizabeth II was the only monarch the great majority of British people have known during their lifetimes. My Irish grandfather, resident in England for sixty years or more, lived under six monarchs: Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI, and Elizabeth II. My parents lived under the last four of these, and I myself under the last two. In a diary he kept, Dad wrote about the funeral of George VI, complaining that for several days all he could listen to on his much prized radio was ‘gloomy and serious music’.  Resolutely republican anyway, he was not impressed

These reflections on my father’s funeral and my parents’ lives were sparked by the Queen’s funeral and life. There is a huge difference both in the lives and the funerals, but who could really say that one life was any better than the other?  I dare say that the Queen never had to fret over where the next pennies would come from to feed her children, presumably never had to carry pails of water from a yard pump to fill a tin bath to wash her children and their clothes; let’s not even mention the outside privy. We can rightly pay due respect to a long-lived and dutiful monarch, but is that respect earned by or owed to the many other taxpayer-funded hangers-on? And why so many imperial and militaristic trappings? As one of my friends observed: is a gun carriage really an appropriate resting place for a coffin?

One of the problems surely in our society is that we never give, and have never given, proper respect and recognition to the hard working and dutiful lives of millions of ordinary and unsung people like my parents. My family chose a non-militaristic requiem poem by Ernest Rhys to conclude Dad’s funeral service:

He had the ploughman's strength
in the grasp of his hand;
he could see a crow
three miles away,
and the trout beneath the stone.
He could hear the green oats growing,
and the south-west wind making rain.
He could hear the wheel upon the hill
when it left the level road.
He could make a gate, and dig a pit,
and plough as straight as stone can fall.
And he is dead.

But happily, Dad and Mum live on in our family memories, not always chronicled, but never forgotten. We get constant reminders of them in our daily lives. One example is the continued propagation from seeds collected from delphiniums originally grown in their garden, and which bloom for me in our garden in Wales, for my sister Sally in her garden in Canterbury, for my son Ben and his family in Manchester, and another grandson Michael in Harrogate.

And just today, my wife Sarah asked me to forage with her for mushrooms in a nearby farmer’s field, and this brought back the strongest recollection of doing exactly that with my Dad in a Yorkshire farm field when I was fourteen years old, accompanying him at the end of his day’s work. We would take them back to Mum who would produce an instant mushroom fry for me and my sisters Maureen and Sally. And that is exactly what we will do with the mushrooms shown here.

A more detailed account of our family life can be found in my memoir, Shifting Classes (click link for Amazon) or from the publishers, Caxton Press if you prefer to purchase elsewhere.