A case of pots and kettles

Am I alone in wondering what on earth the fuss is about over Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s appearances in black and brown-face images decades ago?

Is this not another case of imposing the judgements of today on incidents long ago when attitudes to what was acceptable were very different?

Is it really a scandal that will doom Trudeau’s bid for re-election as some commentators are breathlessly predicting?

Or is it the case of a young man larking around in an era when this kind of thing was not looked upon in the same way as it is today?

Let me put this into context. In my youth in the United Kingdom, the British Broadcasting Corporation ran a light entertainment program called The Black and White Minstrel Show.

It featured male dancers and singers in black-face performing traditional American minstrel and music hall songs together with females and other supporting artists who did not wear the black make-up.

The show was not a one-off. It ran for 20 years and at its peak had a viewing audience of 21 million. I watched it myself and to this day I do not believe it encouraged me to adopt racist attitudes.

But that was then, and this is now.

The Black and White Minstrel Show would not last a single performance if someone was daft enough to put it on now. It would rightly attract condemnation for promoting racial stereotypes.

If Justin Trudeau turned up at an election rally wearing the black-face he thought was okay back in the 1990s that would be the end of him politically.

Times have changed, and both the BBC and Trudeau know that what was once socially acceptable is now beyond the pale.

Can we really believe the Canadian Prime Minister is a closet racist because of some youthful pranks all those years ago?

There would not be many people who pass through their younger years without doing something which, looking back, makes then squirm.

Remember Prince Harry turning up at a party wearing a swastika armband?

Trudeau has offered a fulsome apology. “I let a lot of people down and I am sorry for that,” he says.

I suppose it’s inevitable that political opponents are going to play it for all its worth. There’s an election on after all.

But in most cases — and especially for people over a certain age — I would say it is a case of pots calling the kettle black.

Dear me, did I let slip a racist remark?  

Why Cameron failed the Disraeli test

The Conservative Party is the United Kingdom’s oldest and most successful political organisation.

It managed the transformation from a Victorian-era guardian of landed privilege into a standard bearer for the aspirational middle classes of the 20th century.

Above all, it was a party of survival.

In doing so, it established a set of unwritten rules governing that survival, the first and foremost of which was the provision of strong leadership. 

Benjamin Disraeli put it succinctly when he said that if the masses were not led, they would find leaders from among their own ranks — leaders of dubious quality and questionable ambitions who might ferment chaos for their own ends.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, when the fortunes of the party reached a low ebb under the leadership of Arthur Balfour, Chief Whip Alexander Acland-Hood lamented a “want of backbone” and “vacillating policies”

Disraeli was speaking of the dangers of Chartism; Acland-Hood of tariff reform, but the message was the same. Conservatives only prosper with a strong person at the helm. Someone prepared to lead rather than follow the vagaries of public opinion.

These thoughts coincide with the imminent release of the memoirs of David Cameron, who led the Conservative Party up to 2016 when he authorised the referendum on membership of the European Union that plunged the United Kingdom into a three-year still unresolved crisis.

Cameron became Prime Minister six years earlier as a mild Eurosceptic, but his time in office convinced him the country was better off inside the EU.

However, he failed to control hard-liners within Conservative ranks, and concerned over the growing influence of the right-wing UK Independence Party agreed to a referendum on membership.

That was a mistake, and a failure of leadership, followed by allowing Ministers to campaign for leaving the EU while still in office, even though the official position of the Government was to remain.

That gave respectability to the Leave campaign, while presenting the picture of a Government that was trying to have it both ways.

Agreeing to the referendum was the moment Cameron lost control.

A strong leader in the Tory tradition of Disraeli might have sacked the Leavers from the Cabinet; announced that the UK would not leave the EU until a party dedicated to that aim won a majority of seats in the House of Commons at a General Election – and then, perhaps, called one himself.

In interviews connected with his book Cameron comes across with a mixture a mea culpa and anger over Brixiteers for “trashing the Government”.

He says the 2016 referendum result left him hugely depressed and recognises that some people “will never forgive me”.

He has launched into the tactics of current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, claiming his sole reason for committing himself to the Leave campaign was to advance his own career.

Indirectly he blames the electorate for preferring Leave’s “powerful emotional arguments” over the “technical and economic arguments” of Remain.

In other words he is refusing to accept full responsibility for a failure, at a crucial point in the country’s fortunes, to have said: “Enough – it is my way or the highway.”

Disraeli would have appreciated the need to face down political foes — even those in his own party.

Balfour would have understood the reasons Cameron failed to do so.

Telling words from the last statesman

Observing the continuing turmoil in the United Kingdom Parliament and country, it seems that for many Britons history began on June 23, 2016.

I suppose in the 24-hour news cycle with clickbait continuously churning out sensational headlines on mundane reports, it is inevitable that anything more than a day old is quickly consigned to the archives, at least in popular memory.

At a time when it is most needed, a knowledge and understanding of the historical currents that have led to the present sorry state in the UK are shoved aside by breathless coverage of the latest uproar and outrage. 

The dangers were noted in 2001 by former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in his book Does America Need a Foreign Policy?

He wrote: “The study of history and philosophy, the disciplines most relevant to perfecting the art of statesmanship, are neglected everywhere or given such utilitarian interpretation that they can be enlisted in support of whatever passes for conventional wisdom.”

No more apt description could apply to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, both Oxford classic scholars who have allowed their learning to be subsumed by ego and ambition.

In this frenetic atmosphere, it has not been possible to canvas all statements and opinions, but I have not come across a single detailed discussion of the historical context of the UK’s engagement with Europe.

Does anyone today realise that the Conservatives were the original ‘Party of Europe’; that both Tory and Labour Prime Ministers sought to enter the then exclusive six-nation club before a Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, finally achieved membership?

Brexiteers, who continually try to recruit the ‘bulldog spirit’ of wartime leader Winston Churchill to their cause, conveniently forget (or perhaps they never knew) that Churchill was a proto-European.

Not only did he propose union with France in 1940 as a way of keeping his ally in World War II, he later advocated a “United States of Europe”, 10 years before the Treaty of Rome.

Churchill was in retirement by the time the treaty was signed and his successor, Anthony Eden, a hangover from the days of empire, neglected to be part of it. However, his disastrous Suez campaign demonstrated once and for all that the UK’s days as a stand-alone world power were over.

His successors, Harold Macmillan and Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, both made applications to join, both thwarted by French President Charles De Gaulle who did not want Britain in the way of his dream of a Europe dominated by France.

Finally, after de Gaulle had left the stage, Heath negotiated entry, which took place in 1972.

It is hard to pin down the tipping point in the Conservatives’ attitudes to Europe, but the change certainly began in the 1980s with the leadership of Margaret Thatcher and hardened during the years the Tories spent out of office during the Labour Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

David Cameron, a moderate Eurosceptic, was kept in check while in coalition with the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, but after winning Government in his own right succumbed to his more militant colleagues and announced the 2016 referendum.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Ken Clarke, the longest serving MP in Parliament is one of the last survivors of the ‘Party of Europe’. Sitting several rows behind Johnson this week he rose to give this withering assessment of his leader.

“His obvious strategy is to set the conditions which make a no deal inevitable, to make sure as much blame as possible is attached to the EU and to this House for that consequence and then as quickly as possible fight a flag-waving general election before the consequences of no-deal become too obvious to the public,” he said.

“Would Mr Johnson let me know whether that clear explanation of his policy is one he entirely accepts?”

The answer was expulsion from the party Clarke had served with distinction in Parliament for almost half a century, along with other Tory rebels who voted to outlaw a no-deal (among them Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames).

At 79, Clarke is one of the last true statesmen in this Parliament of fools. Attuned to history’s inevitable march, it has sustained him in the past few years as the party he loved gradually moved away from much he believed in. The final break this week was inevitable.

He has remained loyal to his values that have guided him over his long public life. Unlike so many of his former colleagues, he can now leave holding his head high.