Tag: history

OUR MUCH REGRETTED MONARCHY Part 1

Published by Martin on October 13, 2023

Nostalgia is an outstandingly bad political counsellor Anthony Howard 1960s

I once worked for a couple of delightful years in Mauritius, a former British colony wrested from the French, and thereafter obliged to offer allegiance to the British crown. This had been celebrated by the erection in the capital, Port Louis, of a statue of Queen Victoria, boldly announcing a dedication to OUR BELOVED AND MUCH REGRETTED QUEEN VICTORIA. I happily follow in these unintentionally ambiguous footsteps, as you see from my title.

I started to write this note some time ago, after enduring 48 hours of King Charles III’s Coronation, a process of being assaulted from all parts of the media by what I can only describe as the nostalgic delusions associated with Ruritania, and the more aged members of the Conservative Party. This classic display of false consciousness is writ large in the Coronation flummery (fancy dress, pompous rituals, all-but-stolen jewellery) derived in large part from Britain’s imperial past. The whole is ostentatiously underpinned, as are all our royal occasions, whether marriages, deaths, or coronations, by the militaristic appurtenances of a long lost era: gun carriages, regimental bands and insignia, senior members riding on fashionable but impractical horseback and wielding archaic swords, perhaps echoing more than we should like the significant decline in our status as a world power. Moreover, many of the rituals we now see on these occasions do not, as official accounts would have us believe, go back to time immemorial in the long history of British (or English) kingship, but are what the historian David Cannadine has labelled ‘invented traditions’. Much of our proudly embraced nostalgia goes back no further than Edward VII and George V, both of whom loved dressing up and wearing lots of ill-deserved medals.

Home truths about The Monarchy

Trooping of the Colour 2019; The late Queen Elizabeth II shown with her 3 children all in military dress

It’s hard to know where to begin. A major myth is that royalty is simply an ordinary family, a model for the rest of us, and that this is a communal strength for the whole nation. But when we look, as we so often must, at the traditional wave-fest on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, what’s hard to avoid (again) is the militaristic get up of the men, most of them wearing highly coloured uniforms of uncertain rank but garnished with unfeasible numbers of decorations. Can they really have earned these ranks and these decorations? Well, we know that some of them saw active military service, let’s tip the hat to that, even if it largely helped Prince Andrew to construct an unconvincing refutation to critiques of his sexual campaigns. But is the male branch of the royal family dedicated only to armed service? Are there no other aspects of their royal service to the nation that could be highlighted? Just how much of their working lives do they spend in uniform? Why exactly does the royal family choose to adopt this as its primary visual message?

Even the female branch do not entirely avoid this connection. Queen Elizabeth would annually be seen on horseback, ‘trooping the colour’: and Princess Anne, a noted equestrian, contrived to leave Charles’ coronation on horseback. The former Queen grew up with horses, was mad about racehorses, and owned many, which could lead her into some dodgy relationships, e.g. with the Ruler of Dubai, reputedly the wealthiest man in the world, though by some distance not the nicest. The photo below shows them socialising at Ascot (note the presence of her favourite son Andrew). Some years later, she would be obliged to break ties with the Ruler of Dubai after a court ruling that he kidnapped and detained his two daughters. This is another trope that breaks the link with ‘ordinary’ families, for it is a reminder that royalty sits at the top of an aristocratic, landowning class whose long-standing sporting pursuits – hunting doomed foxes, shooting helpless birds, owning high class racehorses – separate them from most of the rest of us. I’ll come back to the ‘wealth and class’ issue in a second post.

Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai, rides with Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Phillip and Prince Andrew as they enter the Ascot race course in 2009. (source Gulf News)

British Monarchs: A Horrible History (They Come Over Here, Take Our Thrones…)

Many people seem to labour under the delusion that British kings and queens come from a long, unbroken line of descent which vaguely began with the Normans, morphed into the Tudors-and-Stuarts, and entrenched a glorious Elizabethan age that ran, via the ‘much regretted’ Queen Victoria, until the death of our late dear Queen Elizabeth II. Along the way, most maps of the world were suffused with the red of a British Empire on which the sun never set, while plucky little Britain not only won two world wars, but graciously transformed its empire into a series of newly independent nations with written constitutions that were close copies of the British constitution; clever, that, seeing that we have never had a written constitution.

This version of our ‘island story’ soon falls apart when exposed to the historical record, and is rooted in deep levels of ignorance. This has its amusing side: once, when talking with a set of British politics students about the roots of the British constitution, I asked what they understood by the term ‘the Glorious Revolution’. ‘Why yes’, responded a young chap eagerly, ‘you mean Tony Blair in 1997’. Perhaps it’s not surprising then, that there are still so many misconceptions about the place and significance of the monarchy in our constitutional and political system.

Another form of ignorance embraces a wilful denial of the troubling and divisive consequences of Britain’s imperial past, summed up in the question asked of a well-known senior British charity leader: ‘where do you really come from?’. The question was asked at a Buckingham Palace reception, the charity leader was a British person of colour, and the questions came from a very senior member of the royal entourage, who subsequently had to resign in a baffled manner. One response to her question might well have been: but where does the British Monarchy really come from? If we leave aside the conquering Normans, Germany seems a reasonable answer, given that the House of Hanover reigned under four Hanoverian Georges in the crucial period from 1714 to 1830. They were neatly summed up by the noted historian J.H.Plumb : ‘It is almost impossible for a monarch to be dull, however stupid’, and he also suggests that ‘to men who had to watch their children starve, the antics of the royal buffoons made a mockery of life’. By the time of the death of the fourth George in 1830, Plumb writes, ‘thousands of men and women hated the monarchy, hated it as a symbol of wanton extravagance in the face of their poverty and degradation’.

From left to right, King George I, II, III and IV (image courtesy of Geri Walton)

The first George came to the throne as the Elector of Hanover, and a great grandchild of James I. Unable to speak English, he arrived without his wife (who he left incarcerated in Hanover) but brought with him not one but two mistresses upon whom he showered (English) honours. He was buried in his beloved Hanover. His best known successor was George III, famous for losing the American colonies, then going mad. His successor, first as Prince Regent, then as George 1V distinguished himself mainly in the bedroom, having many illegitimate children but no legal ones.

This would eventually lead to the succession of his niece Victoria in 1837, and the creation of another German-based dynasty through her husband Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Both Victoria and Albert had a strong sense of public duty. She herself was jealous of the ‘royal prerogative’ which led to several conflicts with her ministers; indeed the constitutional expert Walter Bagehot likened it to having ‘a family on the throne’. With Albert’s death she virtually withdrew from public life, though later renewed losing battles with her Prime Ministers. Her position as a constitutional monarch became considerably weakened as her reign progressed by the democratic expansion of the electoral system, and the strengthening of political parties. Her principal achievement was to reflect the flawed glories of Empire; by the late 1890s one person in four of the global population was the subject of Queen Victoria. One of the mourners at her funeral in 1901 was her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who declared war on Britain thirteen years later.

Let’s draw a veil over her appalling playboy of a successor, Edward VII and go straight to George V, who would be so seriously embarrassed by his German connections during the First World War that he changed the family dynastic name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. This did not, unhappily, remove the embarrassment, occasioned by the fact that the succession fell in 1936 to Edward Duke of Windsor. Edward VIII committed the then heinous crime, as head of the Church of England, of wishing to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorcee, and American to boot, and creating a political crisis that resulted in his abdication in favour of his brother George VI.

Much worse, he was a strong Nazi sympathiser just as Britain moved towards war with the Hitler regime. He met Hitler personally and was feted by senior military Nazi officers. A Channel 4 documentary (July 2023: Edward VIII: Britain’s Traitor King ) fronted by a reputable publisher and biographer, Andrew Lownie, shows on the basis of recently released Nazi records and BBC archival documents that just prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, Edward Duke of Windsor believed that Britain should make peace with Hitler. He was prepared to be installed again as monarch as part of a negotiated settlement. He is reported as saying that he didn’t have a drop of English blood in him, and was really German; and is described by a biographer, Anna Pasternak, as ‘needy and narcissistic’. Churchill was alert to all this and in effect banished him to be Governor of Bermuda, unable to play any active role or embarrass anyone. After the war he never again lived in Britain, cold-shouldered by the rest of the royal family.

Things looked up for a while for the Windsors, George VI seen as having ‘a good war’, then succeeded by his daughter Elizabeth II, who is now regarded as almost beyond reproach, largely for simply staying alive for even longer than Victoria. By this stage, the constitutional powers of the monarch were very strictly limited and confined, and almost never gave any cause for controversy. Indeed one of the anxieties about the new King Charles III is that he may be temperamentally inclined to interfere in unacceptable ways.

While we can commend Queen Elizabeth II’s strong sense of duty, she could not be said to have presided over a happy family, nor could it be easily regarded as a model for the rest of us. Let’s examine her record in this respect.

1 Princess Margaret In the early 1950s Queen Elizabeth refused to allow her sister Margaret to marry a divorced commoner (Group Captain Peter Townsend, a royal equerry), an example of what has been described as ‘the stuffy morality’ that characterised royal institutions at that time. It should be added that Margaret was noticeably unwilling to give up her rights to succession and the related financial privileges.

2 Princess Diana Queen Elizabeth was said to be cool but friendly towards her son Charles’ first wife Diana, but while knowing of Charles’ long-standing and ongoing relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles, would not intervene. After a messy process of separation in 1992, and divorce in 1996, Diana’s accidental death made a national icon of her for a time, much to the chagrin of senior Royals. Charles in due course married the woman with whom he had for a long period been unfaithful to his wife Diana, and who is now Queen Camilla, all with his mother’s evident approval.

3 Prince Andrew Queen Elizabeth’s son Andrew was said to be her favourite, and her support enabled him to survive the enormous scandal of his close friendship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein’s long-time associate Ghislaine Maxwell (also now convicted) which involved Andrew’s suspected illicit sexual involvement with an underage American woman, Virginia Giuffre. He vehemently denied even having met her, a story undermined by the photo below showing Ghislaine Maxwell in the background with Andrew apparently on friendly terms with the young woman. There have also been several press photos of him socialising with both Epstein and Maxwell even after Epstein’s conviction. Since Andrew has notoriously always been in financial difficulties, it appears certain that the royal family and very possibly his mother, must have provided him with the substantial financial sum needed for him to meet the costs of an out of court settlement estimated at between £10 and £12 m. His tarnished reputation was scarcely improved by a catastrophic televised personal interview in which he seemed quite unable to give straight answers to straight questions. While he was stripped of his royal titles and duties in January 2022, he still lives in the Royal Lodge in Windsor with his divorced ex-wife Sarah Ferguson. It has been reported that the files on Prince Andrew will remain secret until 2065: something to hide, then?

4. Prince Harry and Megan Then there’s the case of the hostile treatment by the royal family of Diana’s son Harry and his American wife Megan. Accusations and counter-accusations have flown in all directions, a rich and confusing broth of family misogyny happily stirred (and very possibly by illegal journalistic means) by the Daily Mail and other hyper-ventilating tabloids. Here is another family member of foreign blood, neither German nor blue, though ugly rumours about the possible colour of any royal offspring were added to the stew. It seems as though yet another American wife may in effect be persona non grata in Royal family circles, with a legal bloodletting instigated by an angry and vengeful Harry, who is now not invited to significant family events. This makes an interesting comparison with the treatment accorded to Prince Andrew by royal circles, an institution long labelled ‘the Firm’, always protective of royal rights, privileges, and reputations (something of a challenge this). Clearly the Firm’s view is that a reputation for being ‘disloyal’ (Harry and Megan) is significantly more heinous than a reputation for mixing with convicted paedophiles (Prince Andrew). There are clear indications that King Charles intends to admit Andrew back into the family fold, an olive branch unlikely to be extended to Harry and Megan.

The insistence on secrecy is a troubling aspect of royal affairs, not least because we taxpayers are expected to foot at least some of the royal bills. So here I follow the injunction of Paul Johnson, in a brilliant new book that advises that if we want to understand what really happens in public life and decision-making, we should ‘follow the money’. Let’s do that with the royal family and its finances. We instantly find that our public system, aided and abetted by ‘the Firm’ itself, does everything it can to obscure the path, and to keep out of the public domain any real awareness of the enormous wealth and privilege that underpins the British monarchy and its powerful social elitism. I will quickly turn to this in Part 2 The Royal Welfare Benefits System

Good reads :

J.H.Plumb: The First Four Georges ( Fontana edition 1966)

David Cannadine: The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Picador 1992)

Paul Johnson: Follow The Money: How Much Does Britain Cost? ( Abacus Books 2023

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DISHONOURABLE HONOURS: 100 Years of Corruption from Lloyd George to Boris Johnson

Published by Martin on July 14, 2023

England is the most class-ridden society under the sun, ruled largely by the old and silly…. One of the dominant facts in English life in the past three quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class George Orwell, writing in the 1930s

My apologies to readers for the unduly long gap between this blog and my previous one. I had long planned to write a blog on the British honours system, expecting to tie it to what I assumed (correctly) would be an appallingly self-serving ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list. But long after his resignation we had to wait and wait… and wait and wait.

Rumours abounded:

that Johnson had so many nominees for peerages that the House of Lords would comfortably extend its position as the second largest legislative body in the world after the Chinese National People’s Congress;
that charges of nepotism were being fuelled by Johnson’s intention to honour his father, scarcely a pillar of the community, and Boris having already knighted his own brother;
that most of his gongs would go to a longish list of mediocre advisers and hangers-on, some extremely junior;
that he would continue his attempts to reward his old tabloid journalist friends, notably Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail;
that he would also reward those who had defended him throughout the Partygate scandal.

There were calls for Prime Minister Sunak to intervene to blackball some on the Johnson list. In any event the formal approving bodies (the House of Lords Appointments Committee, and the Honours Committee of the Cabinet Office) had clearly been something of a battleground. It eventually took an unprecedented 9 months before an approved List was published.

Significant dissension also arose over this period about the proposed Resignation Honours List of the ill-fated Liz Truss, who only survived for 49 days (becoming the briefest Prime Minister in British history) but still acquired numerous freebies associated with her brief Prime Ministerial role, as well as the ability to nominate close political friends for honours, not that she had many of those.

I’ll come back to all this later, after examining aspects of the British Honours system over the last century or so, in order to judge whether ‘political corruption’ is an appropriate label for all these goings-on. My title and sub-titles will alert you to where I stand on this issue.

100 Years Of Corruption: From Lloyd George to Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson, Prime Minister 2019 – 2022 and Lloyd George 1916 to 1922

OLD CORRUPTION

Essentially, this label embraces the ways in which bribery, nepotism and patronage maintained aristocratic landed interests in Parliament, and thereby control of the state, largely in the 18^th and the first half of the 19^th centuries. The House of Lords was the province of the upper landed interest, the House of Commons also controlled by this interest through ‘placemen’ attached to influential patrons. Political competition developed through the formation of loosely organised political groups we know through the labels ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’, later developing into Liberal and Conservative. These groups would either control the nomination to particular Parliamentary seats or would buy support for their candidates. Many parliamentary seats were held through so called ‘rotten boroughs’, often with sparse populations or sometimes even none.

The divisions of the honours list, formally policed and awarded by the monarchy, but in actuality mostly in the gift of political leaderships, were a steady form of political patronage. It’s astonishing how much this ruling class luxuriated in the awards of honours to themselves and each other, doubtless regarding them as appropriate marks of their elevated social status. Anyone overlooked could feel quite cross. An excellent example is provided by Richard Wellesley, younger brother of the future Duke of Wellington. Richard already enjoyed the powerful imperial position of Governor General of Bengal (from 1797 to 1805). Deeply sensitive about the inferior status of his Irish marquessate, which did not allow him to sit in the House of Lords, he took to his bed for ten days, raging at the perceived insult of the absence of a promotion: ‘I am ruined here, everyone perceives my degradation: I don’t care about any honour except the Garter’. (from William Dalrymple, ‘White Mughals’). On his return to Britain he would become possibly the worst Foreign Secretary ever recorded, at least until displaced by Boris Johnson in that role over a century later.

This essentially aristocratic system did not survive the major economic changes wrought by industrial, agricultural, and commercial transformations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; even less the social and political changes driven by the great War of 1914-18. The world of rotten boroughs, politics as an aristocratic playground, quickly crumbled in the Edwardian era. The Parliament Act of 1911 sounded the death knell of the House of Lords, and further broadening of the electoral franchise to all adults, including women, supported the increasing supremacy of the House of Commons. The leading authority on the history of the aristocracy (David Cannadine) describes 1911 as ‘the very year that, in reality, witnessed the most successful attack in recent history on the House of Lords – and thus on the hereditary, titled, landowning classes of the British Isles’.

NEW CORRUPTION

‘You cannot throw a stone at a dog without hitting a knight in London’ (Tory grandee Lord Salisbury early 1900s)

There was a conundrum here. How would political control of these new versions of Lords and Commons be exerted? The answer lay in the increasing competition for office of more closely organised political parties linked to nation-wide Parliamentary constituencies. From the beginning of the twentieth century the system settled down to competition between three parties: the Conservative Party, broadly representing aristocratic and wealthy upper middle class groups; the Labour Party broadly representing the labouring working classes; and the Liberal Party, broadly representing middle class commercial and trading interests. But these arrangements at this period were notably fluid. Winston Churchill happily crossed from Conservative to Liberal and back again as it suited his ambition; Lloyd George fuelled his own equally strong political ambitions by constructing coalitions.

Soon, competing political parties learned that with a universal franchise, and growing modes of communication (newspapers and later radio, then television) electoral success carried a large price tag: and party donations must have a quid pro quo. Hence the sudden expansion of the honours system, no longer monopolised by the landed classes, but spread more widely, The First World War and its political aftermath opened the floodgates and ‘some of those who had accumulated vast new fortunes acquired their titles as they acquired their houses: by paying for them’ (Cannadine). From 1875-1884, 448 knighthoods and been awarded, and 48 baronetcies; but from 1915-25 , the figure was 2791 knighthoods and 322 baronetcies. Titles – peerages, knighthoods, decorations – proliferated. George V professed to hate presenting gongs to clearly undeserving recipients yet invented several new ones including the Order of the British Empire (which, unlike the Empire, survives to this day).

Enter Lloyd George, the Welsh wizard

According to historian AJP Taylor, Lloyd George, the first and so far last Welsh Prime Minister of this country, detested titles, while distributing them lavishly. He saw that political competition and organisation required increasingly substantial amounts of money. Coming up to significant elections after the end of the 1914-18 War he would in effect give a peerage or a knighthood or a baronetcy to anyone willing to pay for it (you will see perhaps why I link him to Boris Johnson in my title). This largesse would include ‘hard-headed’ men who had made money by dubious, even criminal means during the war; wealthy Americans who expected a return for their party donations, such as William Waldorf Astor who would buy a seat in the House of Commons and duly a peerage in the House of Lords; and an assortment of businessman and financiers who sought the kind of status that landed wealth had brought to the old aristocracy. Perhaps most important were newspaper proprietors, who would give political support as well as financial donations, and expected nothing less than a peerage in return. During the Lloyd George time there was even a going rate for gongs: £10,000 for a knighthood, £30,000 for a baronetcy, £40,000 plus for a peerage. Many of these transactions were in the hands of political touts, such as the infamous Maundy Gregory, who fronted a sort of honours auction from an office in Westminster. In this way Lloyd George created 90 peers between 1916 and 1922, many of them extremely dubious characters, and bought up several influential newspaper owners and editors. (Incidentally the going rate for a peerage now appears to be a £3m donation to the Conservative Party.)

The epithet ‘corruption’ had already entered the public domain in the 1890s, but the later Lloyd George regime was widely regarded as a scandal, not least because much of the money he raised by these indiscriminate awards went into his own personal fund. But much of the recrimination came from aristocratic Tory grandees who had lost control of their own system of political patronage; and the ‘new’ Tory leaders who eventually supplanted Lloyd George were little better morally and much less effective politically.

Back to the Future and Boris Johnson

Let’s leap forward a hundred years, when we may compare Lloyd George’s confident and innovative Prime Ministerial grip on British politics between 1916 and 1922 with Boris Johnson’s slippery hold on the Prime Ministership between 2019 and 2022. There have been mixed judgements on the controversial Welshman, but he is credited with real and lasting social achievements in the fields of welfare benefits (introducing the first state pension); and education (reforms that protected and enhanced the lives of young children); with bringing the Great War to a relatively successful conclusion; and with the birth of a new and highly effective form of centralised ‘Cabinet’ government. Given his careless creation of peerages, it is ironic to find that he described the House of Lords as ‘a body of five hundred men chosen at random from amongst the unemployed’.

By comparison, Boris Johnson a century later was much given to expansive promises and pledges that were never realised or implemented. The achievement he would lay claim to himself – engineering the exit of the UK from the European Union – is now generally recognised as an unmitigated economic disaster. We can at least point to an honourable legacy from Lloyd George’s tenure; it is likely that historians will judge Johnson to have been one of the worst British PMs on record, a deeply flawed and failed state leader who demeaned every political office he occupied and was in effect dismissed from Parliament in disgrace.

But there is one area in which their records do bear comparison: the corrupt and immoral use of the honours system. We noted above Lloyd George’s relentless use of honours to raise considerable sums of money for his political campaigns, and his personal grip on these resources. And despite his considerable abilities and real achievements, he ultimately left a divided Liberal Party in a condition from which it never fully recovered.

Johnson’s manipulation of party and public resources was equally shameless, but he had very little to show for it other than personal aggrandisement. His besmirched political and journalistic careers constantly reveal the pursuit of the financial and personal rewards of political power for their own sake, devoid of any wider vision or moral compass. He may well have led his party to long term political ruin. He departs to almost total condemnation and contempt, with few friends except possibly in the tabloid press which Lloyd George also so relentlessly courted.

Johnson’s abuse of the honours system is not, therefore, unique but it seems as if it has been directed more to his own personal advantage, rather than to the well-being of his chosen political party. But then, the Conservative Party has never had any real meaning for him other than as a reliable conduit to political power. They have deserved each other. The actual final episode turned out to be both demeaning and laughable, honours not only as a disreputable system but as a bad joke, the only way to describe a system that regards third rate and under-achieving members of our political class such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Fabricant as worthy of special honour and recognition. Nadine Dorries is still loudly and vociferously demanding to know why she has not been given the peerage she was promised and expected. Meanwhile, Johnson’s final act has been quite pathetic: he goes out of political life, not with a bang, but a whimper.

In straddling a century of political corruption, I have left aside developments along the way. The 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act was an early attempt to respond to the Lloyd George scandal by making illegal the purchase for cash of peerages and other honours. Judged by the most recent attempt to apply it in a case relating to the then Prince Charles Foundation, it is a very weak legal foundation for prosecuting cases. Postwar institutional developments in Cabinet Government, political party organisation, the creation of an independent and politically neutral civil service, and agreed constitutional conventions on political competition and behaviour, created a less hospitable environment for openly corrupt transactions and relationships. There were some celebrated and controversial cases, on the Conservative side, the notorious cash-for-questions scandal under John Major’s government in 1994, in which Tory MP and Minister Neil Hamilton was discovered to have been getting envelopes stuffed with thousands of pounds in cash in return for asking Parliamentary questions favourable to his client, Harrods’ owner Mohamed Al Fayeed. Shortly after, Jonathan Aitken, a Defence Minister, lied about a hotel bill paid for by the Saudi royal family, who had an interest in procuring defence contracts. Aitken lost a court case and went to jail for perjury. These events inspired the Major administration to set up the Committee for Standards in Public Life, and a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, both of which continue today. Neither of these cases were directly connected with the honours system.

Rather less indignation had been generated by Harold Wilson’s so-called Lavender List in 1976. It is still not entirely clear whether Harold Wilson was much involved, with rumours that it had been compiled by the PM’s long-serving secretary Marcia Williams, later herself ennobled as Lady Falkender. The surprising aspect for members of the Labour Party was that many of the Wilson honours went to businessmen, not normally in the Labour Party’s good books. While much fuss was made by a police investigation of Tony Blair into a possible cash-for-honours transaction, nothing was proved, and possibly scarred by all this Blair did not issue a resignation Honours List. Blair accepted a Knighthood in 2022.

It’s reasonable to conclude that in 100 years of British political life there was nothing to compare with the Lloyd George scandals of the 1920s, until we reach the Boris Johnson scandals of the 2020s (with a little support from David Cameron and Liz Truss).

Do Honours Really Matter?

Well, yes and no. Yes, because they are pretty much a universal practice, most states have an honours system. The ‘best practice’ involves a sort of ‘democratisation’ of honours, where they are used to recognise and reward the contributions that representative ordinary citizens, not just the toffs, make to public life. Our own system incorporates this idea, which is genuinely realised in practice through a well-established process. Minor reform is needed, not least a change to the titles which purport to reflect an Empire we no longer possess.

But the political honours lists, in the gift of every Tom Dick and Harry (or Harriet) Prime Minister raise serious issues of corrupt and corrupting practice. Corruption is a slippery notion, for one person’s ‘corruption’ is another person’s ‘sleaze’, and a third person’s ‘opportunism’; in 19^th century USA we even get the label ‘honest graft’, corrupt control of major political institutions regarded as both appropriate and necessary. Here in the UK there is a curiously opaque relation to law and legality, largely because of the long-standing reliance in our constitutional system on unwritten rules we call ‘conventions’; unscrupulous politicians are quick to manipulate these conventions in their own interest. Typical here is avoidance of straightforward challenges to illegality by toothless codes of conduct. These are further weakened by the appointment of politically acceptable people to administer them. Controls on behaviours by members of the Houses of Lords and Commons are even weaker, because too easily circumvented through political channels, or by the promise of rewards (ministerial office, honours, high status official positions).

This kind of ‘corruption’ has got completely out of control in our most recent ‘low, dishonest decade’. Honours are only the surface of this, and much more reprehensible corruptions have taken place, especially in relation to the award of public contracts to political cronies, and of appointments to a wide range of public institutions of people whose only qualification for these posts is loyalty to the governing political party. A worrying aspect of all this is the myriad ways in which these political connections and corruptions are linked to foreign interests in ways which are clearly harmful (and sometimes not so clearly). Many concerns have been expressed about the extent of Conservative Party support and funding by the significant number of Russian oligarchs resident in London.

Evgeny Lebedec (left) with Boris Johnson (right) Evgeny Lebedev and Boris Johnson at an awards ceremony in London in 2009

A rather more obvious case for concern has been the elevation by Boris Johnson to the House of Lords in November 2020 of Evgeny Lebedev, son of former KGB spy in London, Alexander Lebedev, known to be a close associate of Vladimir Putin. Johnson overrode concerns expressed by the security services and the House of Lords Appointments Committee. It was reported that government officials had asked Buckingham Palace if the Queen would overrule the appointment, but this request was declined. Back in April 2018, while Foreign Secretary, and during the internationally shocking Skripal poisoning affair, Johnson was reported to have met Alexander Lebedev at a party in Italy hosted by Evgeny Lebedev, without any security or Foreign Office officials present, in breach of all normal protocols. He was photographed alone at an airport the next day, reported as ‘looking like he had slept in his clothes’ and ‘struggling to walk in a straight line’. He remains close to Evgeny Lebedev, who is owner of the Independent and the London Evening Standard newspapers. Alexander Lebedev has meanwhile been sanctioned by both Canada and Ukraine for his activities in Russian-occupied Crimea. This was Boris Johnson, our Foreign Secretary, then our Prime Minister, clearly a walking (just) security risk. At least Lloyd George was never a national security risk, though his enemies claimed that he rarely proceeded in a straight line.

Ultimately the whole business of disreputable honours, the inflated House of Lords, the over-hyped and over-privileged monarchy, the toothless regulatory bodies, and a parliamentary electoral system unfit for purpose, all require a major constitutional overhaul, probably requiring the protection of a written constitution. This will be a long and difficult haul, but when a system is so truly broken there is no real alternative but to mend it.

Tory England – its riches, its schools, its social influence, the inequalities over which it presides, its stranglehold over what is regarded as political common sense – remains as powerful as it was under Prime Minister Lord Salisbury in 1900 Will Hutton, Observer early 2023

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MEMOIR: a commentary

MEMOIR: a commentary

Published by Martin on March 1, 2021

Hello, I’m Martin Minogue, and though I have a considerable number of publications to my name in the form of academic books and articles, this is my first ever blog post at the ripe old age of 83. I’m doing this to comment on and expand the family memoir that I have now published (for details click here). This memoir covers only the first three decades of my life, from 1937 to 1965. But at its centre is a working class family whose roots reach well back into the nineteenth century, which lived lives of hardship and poverty, yet saw their three children succeed and prosper in ways denied to their own generation. It’s both a grim story and a heart-warming one, and a slice of social history that deserves to be recorded. My parents were unsung heroes, like so many of the ordinary working people of this country. A historian myself, I’m all too well aware that the voices and experiences of these ordinary families are rarely heard. My motive in writing the memoir was that my family’s story, specifically my parents’ stories, should be told, their heroic qualities recognised. Their own voices are heard in this account too, for I rely in part on a very detailed handwritten account my father left of his life as a farm labourer, itself a rarity, and the less organised but more creative reminiscences of my mother, including her poems.

A second motive was to tell this story to the family generation that succeeds me and my two sisters, (Maureen and Sally). Because of our (and their) educational and career successes, our children (and their children) are firmly and inescapably middle class. They know that their origins are in part in the working classes, but have had no experience themselves of what this meant, of what struggles this hard and impoverished background consisted. How could they, enjoying as they did comfortable homes and jobs and incomes well beyond the reach of their grandparents, and earlier generations of their family? So a big motivation for me was to let my own children (Nick and Ben, to whom the book is dedicated), my nephews and nieces, my grandchildren, my great nieces and nephews, know what their own social roots were, to understand where they come from.

A final motivation for me was to set this personal and family story in a wider context, both historical and contemporary. This story runs over almost two centuries in these terms and examines deep changes in rural social life and labour over that time. My parents and their forebears combined several significant strands in British social, economic and political history, my mother’s family drawn from the mining communities in Geordieland, my father’s family bringing together histories both of Irish immigrant labour and English agricultural labour. Part of their family history was rooted in a Catholic aristocratic estate in Yorkshire, on which my Irish grandfather worked for 28 years as a gardener and farm labourer, and my mother as a domestic servant for almost six years. My own career would lead to interaction with leading members of the aristocracy in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the 1960s. Prior to that, Cambridge University provided a context of quite sharp social differences. I am at pains to show in this memoir how significant social class relations continued to be in British life in the first half of the twentieth century.

But I also go on to argue, in a final chapter, that class structures and inequalities have continued to be crucial in dictating life opportunities right up to the present day. While the clear social changes in the post 1945 period have made class relations and identities more fluid, this still leaves us with a twenty-first century Britain in which at least a third of its people live in conditions of poverty relative to the other two thirds, so that as I write, we can see some purchase in the words of the traditional old song:

It’s the same the whole world over,

It’s the poor what gets the blame,

It’s the rich what gets the pleasure

Isn’t it a blooming shame?

I think it is a blooming shame, and recent social statistics appear to justify another old chestnut:

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

But I don’t want my potential readers to think that this is going to be just another miserabilist, doom and gloom-laden analysis of our modern times. In my childhood and teenage years I lived in five different villages and went to five different schools. These years were full of hardship and poverty for my parents, and often enough for me and my sisters. But they were full of warmth and laughter too, as some of the comic anecdotes I tell about Yorkshire village life will demonstrate. (This version of village life has now disappeared, so if you want to know what it used to be like, I describe it in the earlier chapters of the memoir.) We lived another commonplace label, ‘poor but happy’, though this is one my mother would have scornfully rejected during many of the grim years, when there was nothing funny about some of their living conditions. In this blog, I’ll attempt to describe both sides of the coin.

www.martinminogue.co.uk

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