Primrose Day
Stephen Michael MacLean, on a date with history
If Theresa May had any historical nous, she would have postponed divulging her polling intentions by one day and announced her plans the following morning, Primrose Day — once a high holiday in Conservative circles.
For April 19th is the anniversary of the death in 1881 of Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian premier who in many ways wrote the manual for successful Tory leaders. Rumoured to be Disraeli’s favourite flower, a primrose wreath was sent to his funeral by a mourning Queen Victoria. Lord Randolph Churchill — Sir Winston’s father — never one to let an occasion pass him by, coined the phrase Primrose League to take advantage of the deceased leader’s popular appeal. For decades, Conservative party ranks were filled with thousands of loyal members from Primrose Leagues across the United Kingdom.
But Dizzy would have admired Mrs May’s electoral gambit. ‘In recent weeks Labour has threatened to vote against the final agreement we reach with the European Union. The Liberal Democrats have said they want to grind the business of government to a standstill,’ she explained to the press. ‘The Scottish National Party say they will vote against the legislation that formally repeals Britain’s membership of the European Union. And unelected members of the House of Lords have vowed to fight us every step of the way.’ ‘The country is coming together, but Westminster is not,’ she lamented.
So, the Prime Minister reasons, ‘we need a general election and we need one now, because we have at this moment a one-off chance to get this done while the European Union agrees its negotiating position and before the detailed talks begin.’ Disraeli, a wily tactician himself, relished thwarting his political adversaries by ‘dishing the Whigs.’
He would have been equally impressed with the Brexit campaign to free England from European oversight. Having once declared that ‘the programme of the Conservative party is to maintain the Constitution of the country,’ Disraeli would be aghast to learn that his successors were content to suffer the EU to meddle with its institutions and to supersede its laws. Brexit was a vote for restoring Britain’s sovereignty – over domestic legislation, border security, and relations to the wider world.
Disraeli was acutely aware of continental intrigue. For every 21st-century Brussels bureaucrat there was a 19th-century Europhile grandee ready to belittle the patriotic ambitions of average Britons. ‘Influenced in a great degree by the philosophy and the politics of the Continent,’ Disraeli snuffed, trading retort for retort, ‘they endeavoured to substitute cosmopolitan for national principles.’
And he would cheer Theresa May’s agenda to unleash Britain once again, freed of EU constraint, as a diplomatic and trading power-house. Disraeli wore his imperial notoriety lightly, proud of his crafted vision that dwarfed the ‘Little England’ mentality that constrained the island nation to focus its aspirations inward.
As his beloved Tories prepare the writs for a June general election, Disraeli would have probably presented them with some Primrose Day advice ‘which statesmen ought not to forget’ — to wit, ‘Let your plan be founded upon some principle. But that is not enough. Let it also be a principle that is in harmony with the manners and customs of the people you are attempting to legislate for.’ This is a perfect summation of the Brexit agenda.
Stephen Michael MacLean maintains the weblog The Organic Tory
What a significant quote at the end. Every legislator in the world should have it imprinted in his memory.
Mrs May’s Mini-Manifesto has been grandly compared to the policies of Edmund Burke and Joseph Chamberlain. But the notion of drawing the workers into the fold has a closer, albeit still superficial, resemblance to the ‘elevation of the people’ into ‘one nation’ by the major Tory philosopher and brilliant wordsmith Benjamin Disraeli, who nevertheless was apprehensive about the long-term impact of the ‘demos’ on truly aristocratic governance.
Certainly he advised that legislation should harmonize with the (best traditional) customs of the people, though his opponent Robert Peel and others would have agreed. The outstanding importance of the ‘Sicilian Hebrew’ of ‘Young England’ to our earlier strength and stability is acknowledged by critics as diverse as David Runciman, Ian Birchall and Adam Gimson as well as partisans like Keith Feiling, Ian Gilmour or Eddy Butler.
Winston Churchill said Disraeli never wholly assimilated to English ways of life, but precisely such detachment enabled him to assess the ‘deeper political currents’ of his age. Tony Kushner (‘Independent’, 11.2.2005) was not alone in expressing a similar opinion. Dizzy, with his dandy rings and dusky ringlets, according to Norman Cantor, shrewdly exaggerated his Sephardic lineage to pose, and triumph, as the exotic magician who could transform a British Queen into the Empress of India.
Was the cleverest climber of the parliamentary pole also either the Rothschild right-hand man painted by T. P. O’Connor or the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist of Hannah Arendt, or even a well-informed bit of both? These perspectives should be tested against the critical biography ‘The Novel Politician’ by David Cesarani and the comprehensive left-deconstructionist ‘”All is Race”‘ by Simone Borgstede.
Isaiah Berlin said the conservative Benjamin and the communist Karl, alienated by baptism from what the latter called their ‘tribal comradeship’, both imagined and sought a better society, though the former was no more a nobleman than the latter was a labourer. Marxists of course thought that by beguiling the ‘multitude’ into the ‘false consciousness’ of patriotism and ‘material plunder’ of imperialism, Bismarck’s ‘alte Jude’ cunningly diverted the workers from the ‘class struggle’ and ‘proletarian dictatorship’ – not unlike his anti-Jewish successors in the 1930s.
The Earl of Beaconsfield rightly held that nations should be united by a shared culture; in our case, a largely Bible-based institutional heritage. He believed in ‘national character’, that England would be safe in the ‘race of men who inhabit her’ and that ‘race’ in the sense of ‘blood’, i.e. DNA, was a primary factor in history. ‘Tancred and Sidonia share a disdain for modern ideas of equality’ (Michael Howard, ‘New Statesman’, 15.4.2006).
However, Disraeli’s eventual satisfaction that Britain had become an ‘Asiatic rather than a European power’ returns to haunt us – after two giant dysgenic intra-European wars and the implosion of our civilizing mission east and then south of Suez. At his death our population was under 30 million; it has since doubled, with its officially classified ‘White British’ in rapid percentage decline. Post-Brexit, we still face mass-colonization by Afro-Asians that he considered ‘physiologically’ alien.
‘An unmixed race of a first rate organization are the aristocracy of Nature. Such excellence is a positive fact, not an imagination’, he wrote, ‘but perceptible in its physical advantages’. For a development of these, and related ideas, I recommend ‘Disraeli and the New Age’ by Sir George Stapledon, which contains, more than ever, valuable wisdom in the global era of three miniature monkeys: Merkel, Macron and – May.