Andrew Gimson: Let Jesse Norman be your guide through the life and work of Edmund Burke

By Andrew Gimson. Follow Andrew on Twitter.

To distil the genius of Edmund Burke is an almost impossible task. The problem is that as soon as one begins to quote from his works, in an attempt to convey the penetrating felicities and profound political insights which they contain, one feels the need to quote more.

As Hazlitt said in an essay published in 1807, only ten years after Burke’s death, ‘there is no single speech which can convey a satisfactory idea of his powers of mind: to do him justice, it would be necessary to quote all his works; the only specimen of Burke is, all that he wrote.’

But in Jesse Norman, elected in 2010 as the MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire and a regular contributor to ConservativeHome, we possess the best modern guide to one of the greatest writers on politics there has ever been. Norman solves the quotation problem by quoting very little. He is astonishingly abstinent.

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Adrian Hilton: The BBC would have us think that Ferguson trumps the Queen

Adrian Hilton is a conservative academic, theologian and educationalist. He writes a Daily Mail blog and is still agitating for Ann Widdecombe’s peerage. Follow Adrian on Twitter.

Is there a sporting equivalent for the philosophic or aesthetic philistine? If so, please excuse my socio-lexical ignorance: I must be one. I sat patiently through last night’s BBC News while the Gracious Speech played inglorious left-wing to the centre-mid resignation of Sir Alex Ferguson. I bit my lip as his departure from the field shunted the Coalition’s programme for government from the headlines of the national press, and Twitter tribalists obsessed all day about his legendary record of achievement.

Incredibly, there were even some comparing the moment to the death of The Lady, which is really quite appalling when you think about it. Did the late, great Alex Ferguson really do for football what the late and very much greater Margaret Thatcher did for Great Britain? Did he halt terminal decline, revive a national spirit, liberate half a continent or inspire a generation?

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Posted on 9 May 2013 14:58:23 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Paul Goodman: Colleague Harrison and Comrade Weatherhill: "This House" at the Olivier Theatre

By Paul Goodman
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Mike Smithson of Political Betting urged me, after I recommended an early break-up of the Coalition, to see this account of life without one - that's to say, of the travails and trials of the Labour Governments of 1974-1979, which had either a slender majority or no majority at all.  Only the Lib-Lab pact, towards the end of the period, allowed the whips to breathe more easily.  What they did before, after and during it provides James Graham, the author, with the substance of his play.  In particular, his gaze is fixed on two of them: Walter Harrison, Labour's Deputy Chief Whip, and Bernard Weatherhill, his Conservative opposite number.

This was the pre-Twitter age. No, never mind that: this was the pre-mobile phones age, when the the system was in the public sector and it took months to get one. There were only three television channels,  government fixed wages (or tried to), inflation touched over 25%, the unions were a mighty power in the land, the Prime Minister was rumoured to be a Soviet spy, America was traumatised by Watergate, and today's culture of disclosure was almost unimaginable. (Jimmy Saville was master of all he surveyed on Top of The Pops.)

In Graham's Commons, class divisions between the parties are as unrelievedly demarcated as those in any episode of Are You Being Served. There are few women, and those present in the Whips' Office (Labour's Ann Taylor) are treated as honorary men.  Some MPs are hauled through the lobbies blind drunk. Others lie sick on hospital trolleys and are counted through to vote.  Others still drop dead of sheer exhaustion.  Whips shout and scream, accusing each other of cheating.  Labour start with no majority, gain a small one, see it eroded by deaths and by-elections, win some relief from the Lib-Lab pact, watch it end - and are finally brought down.

This House started in the National's smallest theatre, the Cottesloe, and has transferred to its largest, the Olivier.  The staging slickly makes the most of its big spaces.  A huge Big Ben clockface hangs as a backdrop like a full moon.  A mini-rock band perches near it - ringing the musical changes of the times, as they move through Bowie to the Sex Pistols.  Members of the audience mingle with actors on green benches, which swing to and fro, re-creating the adversarial battleground of the Commons.  The Speaker is mauled, manhandled, mugged. No, hold on a second. He's not being mugged. He's being dragged to the Chair!

From it, he calls out the names of the MPs by constituency - whether the action is set in the Chamber, where a bonkers-looking Heseltine grabs the mace and brandishes it, or in the Government and Opposition Whips' Offices, where exhausted men and one woman crack up and make up.  "Wakefield," calls the Speaker. "Croydon North East". "Henley." "Chelmsford." Those of us old enough to remember the MPs of the period (a category into which I fit - as does Smithson, come to think of it) may be distracted by the physical differences between the politicians and the actors that portray them, but the renditions somehow ring true.

It is ensemble acting but, for me, two performances stand out.  The first is Vincent Franklin's apprehensive Michael Cox, who becomes Labour's Chief Whip: bowed, stooped, body hunched defensively against shock and betrayal, he finds solace by clambering up to the clock tower and nattering to an attendant.  The second is Rupert Vansittart's portly Carol Mather - or, rather, Carol Mather MC, whose impressive bulk, wartime courage and graphic swearing are a throwback to a vanished age.  But the axis around on the action turns is Reece Dinsdale's Harrison and Charles Edwards's Weatherhill.

Like the two soldiers in that last poem by Rupert Brooke, the two men are drawn together by adversity.  "I am the enemy you killed, my friend," Brooke writes, and their mirror-image work as fixers somehow turns Graham's whips, so different in political viewpoint, into reflections of each other.  He writes in the programme note that "some incidents and characters have been altered for dramatic purposes", so I doubt that, driven by a sense of honour, Weatherhill offered, in effect, to save the Labour Government by not voting in a division.  But I may well be wrong.

Three of the authors's previous plays are based on Conservative politicians - not always sympathetically - and much of his account is drawn from former Labour Whips.  So I feared the worst.  I shouldn't have done.  The wily Harrison may be at the forefront of the play, but Graham presents the views of the two sets of politicians fairly and evenly: "You don't mind s**t, so long as everyone's equally in the s**t," Julian Wadham's Humphrey Atkins cries to Cox (or words to that effect).  Graham triumphantly captures the claustrophic fragility of the 1970s.  His play ends with Margaret Thatcher's voice intoning her opening words outside Downing Street.

All this is a reminder how quickly time speeds by and how antique the past becomes. But the play also conveys a sense of the slowness of the passing of time.  "Five years, my brain hurts a lot/Five years, that's all we've got," the cast chants as it joins Bowie's chorus.   I came to this This House very late, and its run is almost over.  But a moral I draw from it is that while governing without Coalition for half a decade would be unbearable, doing so for six months would be another matter entirely.  "Better hope, though, it's not another hung Parliament in 2015," I said to an MP friend with whom I saw it. I suspect that the same thought had already occured to him.

This House ends its run on May 16

Posted on 2 May 2013 08:59:04 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Daniel Hannan MEP: The Whig aesthetic that helped to create the virtues of the Anglosphere

Daniel Hannan is an MEP for the South East and blogs for the Daily Telegraph

Is there such a thing as a Whig aesthetic? Do we find buildings or works of art that radiate the liberal, patriotic, small-government values that in time came to define the Anglosphere?

One answer is to imagine how the British Isles might have looked had the civil war ended differently, and had the Anglophone peoples not bucked the seventeenth-century European trend towards royal absolutism. These islands would, I suspect, have looked a lot more like the Continent. Our public edifices would have been grander, our paintings louder.

The British, after all, are technically capable of Palladian architecture. Its greatest master, Inigo Jones (1573–1652), is as fine an architect as our country has produced. But his designs struck opponents of the Stuart monarchy as foreign, autocratic, transalpine.

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Posted on 25 Apr 2013 06:11:19 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adrian Hilton: Music, Hymns, Poetry and Scripture – the solemn majesty of Lady Thatcher’s funeral

Adrian Hilton is a conservative academic, theologian and educationalist. He writes a Daily Mail blog and is still agitating for Ann Widdecombe’s peerage. Follow Adrian on Twitter.

The chimes of Big Ben did not strike 10am. For three whole hours they were silenced in reverence, as London paused and the flags of England bowed. Draped in the red, white and blue of the country she loved, the coffin carrying the body of the late Margaret Thatcher made its way out of the Crypt of St Mary Undercroft, past the statue of Richard Coeur de Lion, the kingly symbol of England’s enduring Christian faith; and then past Cromwell, sword in one hand and Bible in the other, forever reminding us that the people are sovereign, Parliament is supreme, and God makes the law. And then she passed by Churchill, the last prime minister to defend these islands against invasion and the indignity of surrender to a foreign power.

Emmeline Pankhurst looked on, smiling at the fulfilment of her revolution. Nelson and the proud lions of Trafalgar joined in the homage – with spontaneous applause from the thousands who lined the streets to honour the longest-serving prime minister of the 20th century. She was, by popular consent, the greatest of our post-war leaders: after Churchill, the most remarkable and heroic of this second Elizabethan age. An intimate service in a Grantham chapel would have left the world asking: “What ceremony else?” So, black horses, a 1.5 ton gun carriage, cathedral bells, the insignia of the Armed Forces and the Queen herself all joined together in tribute to The Lady. Anything less would have shamed the nation.

The funeral service itself was an act of prayerful worship to God; not a thanksgiving with half-a-dozen eulogies glorifying man. The music, hymns, poetry and scriptures reflected her essential character and the core of her Christian conviction. The foundation of her Conservatism was English and Methodist. Certainly, she migrated in her later years toward Anglicanism, but John and Charles Wesley themselves never ceased being so. There is in the Church of England a form of worship, a depth and breadth of theology and a seriousness of moral reflection which coheres with the essential culture of England. Margaret Thatcher came to find this very much to her liking.

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Posted on 18 Apr 2013 07:49:54 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Peter Hoskin: Margaret Thatcher, screen icon

Do you remember when James Bond met Margaret Thatcher? Actually, “met” is probably too strong a word. And, come to think of it, it wasn’t really 007. But, whatever, it happened at the end of For Your Eyes Only (1981), when Roger Moore’s Bond had disrobed to enjoy a moonlit swim with the restrainedly named (for a Bond girl) Melina Havelock. Locked in lust and liquid, the spy disregards an incoming call to his boat from No.10. And so Mrs T, played by the impressionist Janet Brown, ends up conveying the nation’s gratitude to a blue macaw. Skyfall this was not.

But, a year before the Falklands War, this was one of the earliest screen depictions of PM Thatcher. And, in some respects, it was typical of what would follow. Although Janet Brown made her name with impressions of the Iron Lady – so much so, in fact, that she titled her autobiography Prime Mimicker – this is more a caricature, and a rather off one at that. The hairstyle is perfect, the elongated vowels are present, but the be-aproned bustle about the kitchen is probably overdoing it. And then Denis stumbles in, and smiles into camera, with drink and cigarette in hand.

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Posted on 13 Apr 2013 08:51:57 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adrian Hilton: Et tu, Shakespeare?

Adrian Hilton is a conservative academic, theologian and educationalist. He writes a Daily Mail blog and is still agitating for Ann Widdecombe’s peerage. Follow Adrian on Twitter.

My name is Caius Marcius, who hath done
To thee particularly and to all the Volsces
Great hurt and mischief; thereto witness may
My surname, Coriolanus...

I was in the Upper-6th. I still remember that Eng Lit class and reciting those words to a horde of A-level Volscians, many of whom really wanted to be Romans, and most of whom were entirely unimpressed by my lilting vowels and crisp, Olivier-like consonants. Shakespeare was my antidote to the interminable Dark Period of teenage angst. At school I could be a Roman, a Greek, a pauper or a king. One day it was virtue and beauty; the next villainy and treachery. There was infatuation and isolation; vengeance and pride; romance and melancholy; and hormonal virility with bouts of exotic cross-dressing trans-sexuality. I lived and breathed blank verse: I was Romeo, Richard, Malvolio and Hamlet. Tomorrow I would be Lear. But, for today, I was Caius Marcius.

I couldn’t have foreseen the following year that I’d be delivering that same speech to the legendary Yat Malmgren and Christopher Fettes for a coveted place at the Drama Centre London; or that a few years later I’d be reciting it at the Globe as part of my “Bardathon” to earn a place in the Guinness Book of Records; or that a few years after that I’d be performing it again for Terry Hands and John Barton to become a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

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Posted on 5 Apr 2013 07:58:28 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nick Pickles: Let’s move away from New Labour’s X-Factor politics

Nick Pickles is Director of the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, and a music photographer whose work can be viewed here. Follow Nick on Twitter.

As David Miliband exits the political stage, the commentariat have seized on the opportunity to pontificate about what it means for Ed, about what might have been for David, and about their favourite Thunderbirds characters. And yet, alas, I fear that there has been glaring omission: what does it mean for culture?

And the answer? Well, in a nutshell, not a great deal. The closest that David Miliband ever got to a cultural impact was when Rage Against the Machine appeared on stage at Reading in Guantanamo Bay-style orange suits – although, in that case, I don’t think the former Foreign Secretary arranged the air travel.

However, I do think there is something to be said about New Labour and culture. Specifically, about how culture was used as a political tool, and then became a social phenomenon, that did more to undermine aspiration than almost any quantity of Budgets can. What do I mean? Basically, without Tony Blair there would have been no Simon Cowell.

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Posted on 29 Mar 2013 13:03:15 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Peter Hoskin: Lessons from the censorial past

What would you do if a band released a single called ‘How Does it Feel to be the Mother of a Thousand Dead?’ in reference to Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War? Would you lap it up? Would you listen to it first, and try to judge it on musical, rather than political, grounds? Would you dislike it by default? Or would you try to have it banned?

This isn’t just a pop quiz, but something that actually happened. The band Crass did indeed release that single, in 1982, in a black sleeve decorated with tiny white war crosses. Those who were around at the time – I wasn’t – might remember Margaret Thatcher being asked about it in Prime Minister’s Questions. They might also remember the political commotion that followed. Some Tory MPs, led by Tim Eggar, brandished the Obscene Publications Act at the song. Of the options listed above, they basically chose the fourth.

As it happens, Mr Eggar lost his battle against Crass, but the episode still typifies the cultural tension of the Eighties. There was music in the cafés at night, alright – but also censoriousness in the air. The police paid Morrissey a visit after the release of his song ‘Margaret on the Guillotine’, and at the insistence of Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens. Parliamentarians debated the bloody influx of “video nasties,” and how it might be stemmed. And Monty Python’s Life of Brian – yes, Life of Brian – found itself slapped with an X certificate, or just banned outright, by 39 local authorities.

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Posted on 22 Mar 2013 07:57:39 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nick Pickles: Politics, like music, shouldn’t be done by the manual

Nick Pickles is Director of the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, and a music photographer whose work can be viewed here. Follow Nick on Twitter.

When I was asked to pen this column, the idea of bringing together politics and music seemed an entirely reasonable ask. I could try to find an analogy between Nigel Farage and Justin Bieber; plug my weekly Spotify playlist; and hopefully demonstrate, as Jessie Norman did at the ConHome Victory2015 conference, that the cultural industries are awash with conservative values, and anyone who dismisses the arts as leftie claptrap should be locked in a small room with Keith Richards and a bottle of tequila.

Foolishly, however, I agreed to write my first article the week after Paul Abbott’s stellar juxtaposition of comic books and Conservativism. Perhaps more in desperation than well-considered design, I took my inspiration from a bloke who, under the moniker Deadmau5, performs wearing a rather large mouse head on his head.

Last week, Mr Deadmau5 – or Joel Zimmerman, as his parents know him – spoke at the South by Southwest festival in Texas, an annual gathering of music industry folks, artists and journalists engaged in a spectacular crawl of parties, free gigs and borrowed floor space.

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Posted on 15 Mar 2013 08:17:16 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Paul Abbott: What Conservatives can learn from comic books

By Paul Abbott. Follow Paul on Twitter.

 A comic book is – normally – a single forceful idea writ large. It is a hardened view of society, dramatised. A political battle-cry which gives impetus to the hero and drives the plot.

Thus, the entire Batman franchise can be summarised: “if only we refrain from taxing billionaires, they will fight crime at night”. (Wealthy Bruce Wayne doesn't have to pay mansion taxes in Gotham, and is therefore free to invest in his Batmobile.)

The message of Superman is as follows: “skilled immigration is good, if newcomers will adopt Western values.” (Superman becomes a flag-waver for liberal democracy, and is weakened only when he is reminded of his alien home-world in the form of Kryptonite.)

The theme of Judge Dredd: “The state's first duty is defence, especially of minorities and the vulnerable." (As social order disintegrates in the future, Judge Dredd must dole out harsher and harsher “fixed penalty notices” in Mega City One, to protect ordinary people from thugs, corrupt local bureaucrats, and technological pressures.)

Clearly there is much in these comics that Conservatives might welcome: free market economics with a social conscience; an internationalist outlook, but rooted in values; and championing the cause of the downtrodden through the rule of law. If Margaret Thatcher once said that “the facts of life are Conservative” – well, so are the pages of most mass-market comic books.

But comics succeed where Conservatives often don’t – in terms of popularity and cut-through. I admit, I've shown up at a few London comic book conventions over the years (with a press pass, I swear) and it’s nothing like Tory conference. The demographics are different, for one thing. Our Party faithful have never (?) turned up to hear Francis Maude while dressed as their favourite Star Trek character, for example.

But the experiences of going to these expos have made me ask: how do comic books do it? What can we learn from their success?

The best answer that I've seen so far is from William Empson – a weirdy-beardy academic and poet from the early 20th century – in an essay titled The Structure of Complex Words. Conservatives would do well to read it because it outlines a useful theory about how words are weapons, and political rhetoric can win arguments.

Specifically, Empson says that words can slowly become “compacted doctrines”, like ideologies in miniature. For example, the word “racist” implies not just a person who has prejudicial views about race, but also implies a person who is flawed in their judgement. Nobody uses the word “racist” in a positive sense: so, it has become a compacted doctrine, a label of contempt. A slur.

In the same vein, comic book characters are – normally – a sort of compacted doctrine: a colourful, gripping shorthand for a particular view of human nature. Superman is the asylum-seeker made good; Judge Dredd is the State's monopoly on just violence.

George W. Bush's political team were masters at this. They understood very keenly that the media do not have time to explain the detailed, mad complexity of the modern world. Instead, journalists need simple labels for things. If you can define the name of something in your favour, there is very little else that you need to do. Hence, the US was not distributing potato chips in Iraq, but “freedom fries” – and what reasonable person could object to that? And so on.

The point is that comic books win by capturing the terms of debate. Ideas are crystalised as characters, so there is no rhetorical ground left for your opponents to stand on. The three comic franchises that I started with – Batman, Superman, Judge Dredd – all take a kernel of Conservate philosophy and weld it relentlessly into a compacted doctrine. The meaning of those characters is unspoken; hiding in plain sight. Audiences do not even realise it, perhaps. But the fact remains that the Batman series has done more to defend free market economics and the concept of “the good rich man”, in the popular mind, than all the think-tank pamphlets of the last 30 years.

So why does this matter? Let me frame it as another question: what is the Conservative Party's catchy, memorable, concrete name for the reforms that Labour have been calling the “bedroom tax”? Or the “mummy tax”? Or the “granny tax”? Labour may be wrong about the facts, but we are in dangerous territory when they are allowed too easily to define the terms of debate. Their language is full of compacted doctrines, smuggled in under the radar. We need our own substitutes. Comic books teach us how we can fight back.

Posted on 8 Mar 2013 06:28:18 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adrian Hilton: A good cultural education makes good individuals and a good society

Adrian Hilton is a conservative academic, religious and political commentator, journalist and author. On his Daily Mail blog he is currently campaigning for Ann Widdecombe to be awarded a peerage. Follow Adrian on Twitter.

Matthew Arnold – poet, essayist and Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools – famously wrote that culture is concerned with knowing “the best that has been said and thought in the world”. This has become the leitmotif of Michael Gove’s educational revolution: if children are not exposed to the classics of literature, music, theatre, dance, film, painting, sculpture – what we terms the “fine arts” – then society is impoverished, civilisation declines and future generations are inculcated with nothing but the banal, mediocre and vulgar.

Out go TS Eliot, Wordsworth, Elgar, Monet and Mozart; in come Carol Ann Duffy, Damien Hirst, Russell Brand and Madonna. Critical thought is abandoned for formulaic answers – who needs epistemology when you’ve got a WH Smith’s revision guide? And academic rigour is replaced with emotional intelligence – what’s the point of straight-A*s if the child has low self-esteem?

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Posted on 1 Mar 2013 17:10:05 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Peter Hoskin: Next time David Cameron goes to India, he should take some artists with him

By Peter Hoskin. Follow Peter on Twitter.

There’s one particular reason why, of all the Best Picture candidates, I want Zero Dark Thirty to do well at Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony – and it’s got little to do with the film itself. The reason is that Zero Dark Thirty was funded by Megan Ellison, a billionaire’s daughter who is wiring her familial wealth to filmmakers so that they can operate outside the usual strictures of the studio system. She also backed the best American picture of last year, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master.

Ellison isn’t acting entirely charitably – her production company, Annapurna Pictures, presumably seeks a return on her investments, which now include the rights to the Terminator series – but there is still something charitable about her approach. She’s giving artists a chance, allowing them both financial and creative freedom. Or as Joaquin Phoenix, the star of The Master, tells the latest issue of Vanity Fair, Ms Ellison is “the Han Solo of filmmaking – you think it’s all over and she comes to save the day.” And, like Han Solo, she deserves a medal around her neck for that.

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Posted on 22 Feb 2013 17:40:45 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adrian Hilton: The language of culture

Adrian Hilton is a conservative academic, religious and political commentator, journalist and author. On his Daily Mail blog he is currently campaigning for Ann Widdecombe to be awarded a peerage. Follow Adrian on Twitter.

I caught sight of a tweet yesterday by the Shadow Culture Secretary Harriet Harman. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, critical of the Culture Secretary Maria Miller, who had apparently cast the “‘shameful slur that arts community ‘disingenuous’ & their concerns ‘pure fiction’”. I enquired of the context and, to my surprise, Ms Harman responded swiftly with a link to an article by the Culture Secretary which appeared in the Evening Standard in November last year.

I don’t quite know why it’s taken a quarter of a year for Ms Harman to decide to get upset about this, but – I think for the first time in my life – I find myself agreeing with her. If this article was written by Maria Miller personally, she seems purposely to perpetuate the myth that Conservatives are basically all philistines who don’t quite “get” the Arts. If it was written by a civil-service aide, he (or she) deserves something of a reprimand – even after the space of three months.

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Posted on 15 Feb 2013 11:16:26 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Paul Goodman: Adolescent views, mature art. Desire and memory at war in Pinter's Old Times

By Paul Goodman
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This being a conservative site, it's necessary to say at the start it's possible to be a bad man but a good artist.  I wouldn't dare to claim that Harold Pinter was a bad man, but he certainly had an immature streak.  He seems to have lived in that condition of shouty revolt against authority that most people leave behind with adolesence - not treating, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, say, as real people at all, negotiating the inevitable compromises of government, but as one-dimensional monster puppets.  So it was that the one-time conscientious objector ended up making excuses for "The Butcher of the Balkans".  It is as though all the sense of shade and colour in his psyche was lavished on his art, leaving only black-and-white for him to scrawl in when it came to politics.

Now it is true that some people who are very far from being conservative dislike the work of this man of the left (which he basically was).  The criticism is well-rehearsed: that Pinter is tricksy, glib and contrived, offering stagecraft rather than substance and sleight-of-hand rather than profundity - such as his insistence that a statement can be both true and false.  The revival of his Old Times at London's Harold Pinter Theatre offers a chance to test this judgement.  (The venue was originally the Comedy Theatre, and then renamed as the Harold Pinter Theatre. This spurred Tom Stoppard to ask Pinter whether he would be re-named Harold Comedy.)  It is a spare play with a cast of only three: Deeley, played by Rufus Sewell; his wife, Kate and her - or their - old friend Anna.

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Posted on 25 Jan 2013 08:11:28 | Permalink | Comments (0)