THE Conservative Woman thinks highly of the lateSir Roger Scruton and acknowledges his views in its mission statement: ‘How important having a home is, how important virtuous nationalism is, how important looking after your neighbour and patriotism are! Yet we are still taught to hate ourselves and to apologise for our history. He was correct then; he is correct now; he will be correct always. Conserving, not trashing, that which best sustains you is fundamental.’
He was a friend and I miss him. I suppose I would be exaggerating if I were to boast of having saved his life. But I certainly saved him from – at the very least – being beaten up. In 1985 I told him of an alternative way to get back to his digs after the raucous lumpen intelligentsia of York University had threatened, shouted him down and called for his blood – during and after his talk on the virtues of free speech. For years I wrote a column for Roger’s influential journal the Salisbury Review – though we later fell into disagreement about Wagner, God and Parsifal.
We spoke about belief over the phone the week before he died and Roger said: ‘I’ll hear you again on this.’
Alas, we never got the chance
Well, let me get my penitence in. I want to confess to that most misunderstood thing, being a conservative – what it is and what it isn’t.
Apart from a mercifully brief period as a Fabian socialist when I was a child – of which I repent daily in sackcloth and ashes – I have been a lifelong Tory, dyed in blue wool. I learned early on that Socialism never works anywhere – and especially not in Hampstead, even though it is toasted there every evening with champagne. When it is practised moderately, it multiplies sclerotic bureaucracies – look no further than the NHS, state education and our befuddled C of E while the so called ‘moderate’ Socialism of the ‘soft left’ impoverishes everyone who chooses to work rather than spending other people’s money in a life on benefits.
When Socialism is practised thoroughly, it leads to such as Lenin, Stalin, the KGB, commissars and the gulags. Funny how Hitler is always caricatured as extremely right wing. But do remember, his gang were the National Socialist Party. Government spending in Hitler’s programme was astronomical: beyond even that of Sir Keir Starmer’s mis-government and Angela Rayner’s slavering aspirations. Hitler built autobahns, tanks, U-boats and the Luftwaffe out of the national coffers – borrowed, of course.
Under our present Socialist Government public borrowing is higher than it has ever been. And its policy – which can be summed up in the phrase ‘the politics of envy’ – penalises everyone who is not a member of its client state. What was once the party of the workers and the diligent is now the party of the scroungers and the bureaucrats.
And today’s ‘Conservative’ Party is only Labour-lite. Major, Cameron, May, Johnson and Sunak were appalling. Badenoch is bad enough.
But let me clear up the usual misunderstandings. When I say I’m a Tory I don’t mean, as the Guardian would have me, the next thing to a fascist or a member of the SS.
I don’t boil babies in cauldrons. I don’t eat them either: unlike those whose vile pictures in Margate’s Joseph Wales Studios defame Jews as infanticidal cannibals. I don’t march around the spare bedroom making the Nazi salute. And when I speak of conservatism, I don’t mean monetarism or libertarianism. None of those ‘isms’. For to be a Tory is not an ‘ism’, not a doctrine or an ideology. Instead, conservatism is the antidote to political theories. To be a Tory is a way of life. And, if I feel in need of a definition, I look to Dr Johnson’s Dictionary:
‘Tory: One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England.’
That is an elegant shorthand for one who believes in – that’s me – the Monarchy, the principle of continuity embodied in the ownership of land, a sovereign parliament, an adequate and efficient standing army, the judiciary, the Lords temporal, the magistrates and the other national institutions which uphold the rule of law. Funny again, how Starmer elevates his cronies to the peerage while promising to abolish the hereditary members. But Sir Keir has raised hypocrisy to the status of an art form. He is the Rembrandt of nepotism.
And I believe all my Toryism under God.
All real Tories are traditionalists. And so we come to that other word so misunderstood and misapplied. Traditiondoesn’t mean all those stale old things that people used to believe before our present enlightenment. Tradition is not the vestry cupboard filled with frayed cassocks. Tradition comes from an old word which means something that is alive – because it is both inherited and handed on. That is what TS Eliot meant by it in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent.
Go on – read it! It only takes 10 minutes, and it will provide lifetime immunity to Hilary Mantel.
My sort of Toryism then is that of Dr Johnson and Samuel Coleridge, of Lord Salisbury, TS Eliot, TE Hulme, CH Sisson – and Sir Roger Scruton.
Let me start with God, and here we are unfortunate. For the country no longer believes in God. Instead, we have given ourselves over to idols – that is to other gods in the now obligatory multifaith pantheon. And behold, the chief new god is a jealous god: for while it is commendable for 3,000 Muslims to pray audibly in Trafalgar Square to celebrate the ending of Ramadan, the Christian Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested for praying solitary and silently outside an abortion clinic.
But usually in our anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, Islamophiliac orthodoxy, any god will do – so long as he is not the Judaeo-Christian God – and preferably no god at all. My God is the one I answer to in that quintessentially English creation, The Book of Common Prayer.
But these days I am an unhappy Tory – because I can hardly find a friend or colleague to agree with me about what being a Tory means. When King Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham, Tories were Cavaliers. Life was something to be celebrated in the tavern as well as in the nave. There were games, cakes and ale and laughter.
Not these days. Why are those who now call themselves conservatives as humourless po-faced and deadly glum as the Socialists for whom, of course, jokes are no laughing matter? The answer to my own question is plain: it is simply because today’s conservatives conserve nothing. Therefore, they have nothing in which to rejoice and be happy.
The so-called ’right’ doesn’t know what the word Torymeans.
