Britain’s Antonine Age 

The columnist George Will quoted a famous line by Churchill: “The leadership of the privileged has passed away, but it has not been succeeded by that of the eminent.”

The rest of Churchill’s remark was worth including: “The pedestals which had for some years been vacant have now been demolished. Nevertheless, the world is moving on, and moving so fast that few have time to ask, ‘Whither?’ And to these few only a babel responds.”

By “privileged,” Will presumably referred to the old aristocracy that governed Victorian Britain, not the pampered elites who govern us today. Churchill was referring to John Morley. “Such men,” he concludes sadly, “are not found today.”

Morley was born in 1838, during a century of peace, prosperity and progress. This, Churchill tells us, “was the British Antonine Age… 

The French Revolution had subsided into tranquillity; the Napoleonic Wars had ended at Waterloo; the British Navy basked in the steady light of Trafalgar, and all the navies of the world together could not rival its sedate strength. The City of London and its Gold Standard dominated the finance of the world. Steam multiplied the power of man; Cottonopolis was fixed in Lancashire; railroads, inventions, unequalled supplies of superior coal abounded in the island; the population increased; wealth increased; the cost of living diminished; the conditions of the working classes improved with their expanding numbers.

“Unquenchable racial animosity” 

John Morley was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, the son of a doctor who wanted him to become a clergyman. Disenchanted with the “High Church” and quarreling with his father, he left Oxford without an honors degree and pursued Law. He was called to the bar by Lincoln’s Inn in 1873. A few years later, to his “long and enduring regret,” he became a journalist. From 1880 to 1883 he edited the radical-Liberal Pall Mall Gazette.  

A strong supporter of Gladstone, Morley in Parliament was a fearless opponent of State intervention. It was wrong “to give the Legislature, which is ignorant [and] biased in these things…the power of saying how many hours a day a man shall or shall not work.” (One wonders what he would say today to a government that governs everything.

After six years out of power, Gladstone returned in 1892 and made Morley Chief Secretary for Ireland. Churchill, then a Tory supporter of the Second Boer War, nevertheless admired Morley’s “fierce, moving phrases” of indictment: 

Thousands of our women have been made widows; thousands of children are fatherless…. The expenditure of £150 million has brought material havoc and ruin unspeakable, unquenched and for long unquenchable racial animosity, a task of political reconstruction of incomparable difficulty, and all the other consequences which I need not dwell upon [in a] war of uncompensated mischief and of irreparable wrong.

Morley’s opposition to adventures abroad prefigured his attitude toward a far greater war to come.

“A quality about his rhetoric”

In 1904 Churchill “crossed the floor” to the Liberals, who swept into office in January 1906. Morley was Secretary of State for India when young Winston became Under-Secretary for the Colonies. In harness, they became friends, and Churchill was eloquent in his praise: 

As a speaker, both in Parliament and on the platform, Morley stood in the front rank of his time. There was a quality about his rhetoric which arrested attention. He loved the pageantry as well as the distinction of words, and many passages in his speeches dwell in my memory…. His gifts of intellect and character were admired on all sides.

There is an affinity between their mutual combination of firmness and magnanimity toward colonial peoples. While opposing lawless rioting, Morley sponsored the 1909 India Councils Act, bringing Indians to his Council and those of Madras and Bombay. This early step toward self-rule mirrored Churchill’s views.  

 “Master of English prose” 

In 1908 the new prime minister, H.H. Asquith, moved Morley to the Lords, where he fought for Liberal reform budgets. He retained the India Office, but by 1910 yearned for retirement. Churchill pleaded that he be kept in the Cabinet, so Asquith appointed him Lord President of the Council. There he campaigned for the 1911 Parliament Act, limiting the powers of the House of Lords. 

Morley linked young Winston to the father he worshipped, while adding qualities of his own. He was solid for “great doctrines”: Free Trade, Irish Home Rule, a social safety net. Churchill saw in him “a master of English prose, a practical scholar, a statesman-author, a repository of vast knowledge.” Despite their 35 years difference in age, they worked together  “in the swift succession of formidable and perplexing events.” Eventually those events would separate them.

“Gently, gaily almost, he withdrew…”

Predictably, Morley opposed continental entanglements, distrusting the system of alliances that impelled the world toward Armageddon. He turned 75 in 1914, frail but not unconscious of what Churchill called “the madness sweeping across Europe.” As Germany and France clanked towards battle, the Liberal Cabinet was divided. But Germany’s invasion of Belgium, and the possibility of a German fleet in the Channel, turned opinion.  

Winston Churchill tried to assure Morley that events gave them no choice. His pacifist friend was sympathetic but unyielding. “You may be right,” he said. “But I should be no use in a War Cabinet. I should only hamper you. If we have to fight, we must fight with single-hearted conviction. There is no place for me in such affairs.” There was no turning him. “Gently, gaily almost, he withdrew from among us,” Churchill wrote, “never by word or sign to hinder old friends or add to the nation’s burden.”

“I do not ask myself if I am a good European” 

Morley was 80 when peace returned, but no less doubtful about the so-called “War to End Wars.” Like Churchill, he criticized President Wilson’s naïveté at Versailles. He had always been a Little Englander, a Home Ruler. He did not object to the new countries created after the war. But he had no faith in a concert of nations to keep the peace. When asked in 1919 about the Covenant of the League of Nations, Morley said: “I have not read it, and I don’t intend to read it. It’s not worth the paper it’s written on. To the end of time it’ll always be a case of ‘Thy head or my head.’ I’ve no faith in these schemes.” He was more right than he knew.

While Churchill had hope for European powers to keep the peace, Morley remained scornful. When a prominent Liberal praised someone as “a good European,” Morley quipped: “When I lay me down at night or rise in the morning, I do not ask myself if I am a good European.” Nations, he insisted, would always act in their own interests. If that coincided with the world’s, it was a mere lucky coincidence. When Ireland erupted again in 1921 he declared: “If I were an Irishman I should be a Sinn Feiner.” When asked, “And a Republican?” Morley said “No.” Home Rule within the Empire was as far as he would go. 

“I foresee…Winston leading the Commons” 

Toward the end, Morley seemed to accept Churchill’s view of him as a Victorian eminence, against which modern politicians were no match. In postwar politics, Morley said, “One man is as good as another—or better.” Yet he still had hopes for his young colleague:  

I foresee the day when Birkenhead will be prime minister in the Lords with Winston leading the Commons. They will make a formidable pair. Winston tells me Birkenhead has the best brain in England…. But I don’t like Winston’s habit of writing articles, as a Minister, on debatable questions of foreign policy in the newspapers. These allocutions of his are contrary to all Cabinet principles. Mr. Gladstone would never have allowed it.

His prediction would have required Churchill to change parties again. Churchill did, but Birkenhead died young, in 1930. Still, Morley was half right: Winston did lead the Commons…and the nation. Alas, that was in another war he would have hated and feared. And, contra Mr. Gladstone, Churchill kept writing—fortunately. Some of what he wrote was in tribute to his old friend. 

“Two hundred definitions of Liberty” 

Churchill considered John Morley “among the four most pleasing and brilliant men to whom I have ever listened…. There was a rich and positive quality about Morley’s contributions, and a sparkle of phrase and drama which placed him second to none….”

Morley died in 1923, not to be replaced. Churchill mourned his loss: “The tidal wave of democracy and the volcanic explosion of the war have swept the shores bare.” No one better resembled or recalled “the Liberal statesmen of the Victorian epoch.” Morley was not born to privilege; he earned it. He deployed “every intellectual weapon, of the highest personal address, and of all that learning, courtesy, dignity and consistency could bestow.”

Churchill wrote: “Each succeeding generation will sing with conviction the Harrow song, ‘There were wonderful giants of old.’ Certainly we must all hope this may prove to be so.” 

Morley pronounced the epitaph for his age in May 1923, four months before he died. His words sound more like 2023:  

Present party designations have become empty of all contents…. Vastly extended State expenditure, vastly increased demands from the taxpayer who has to provide the money, social reform regardless of expense, cash exacted from the taxpayer already at his wits’ end—when were the problems of plus and minus more desperate?  

Powerful orators find “Liberty” the true keyword. But then I remember hearing, from a learned student, that of “liberty” he knew well over 200 definitions. Can we be sure that the “haves” and the “have-nots” will agree in their selection of the right one? We can only trust to the growth of responsibility; we may look to circumstances and events to teach their lesson.

A few years ago Britain’s Nigel Farage was a political curiosity, head of a fringe party, gadfly member of the European Parliament, an ex-commodities broker who never went to college, dismissed as a nutter by ruling elites in London and Brussels. On 23 June 2016, he was widely credited with a key role in the referendum favoring Brexit— Britain’s exit from the European Community.

“Our Nige,” his supporters call him—personable, chatty, good-looking, beer swilling, cigarette and cigar smoking—wants Britain, not the European Union, to govern British affairs. To flip an uncertain quote from his hero Winston Churchill, he has all the vices they admire, and none of the virtues they despise. He also has the Churchillian habit of saying exactly what he thinks, regardless of polls, focus groups and the establishment.

Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKIP officially, “kippers” to critics) has been rolling like the nascent Labour Party a century ago, which displaced the Liberals and dominated political thought until Margaret Thatcher’s time. In 2014 UKIP turned 21 years old—Labour formed its first government at age 23.

In 2013’s local elections, kippers finished third. Last May, UKIP became the first party since 1906 to out-poll Labour and the Conservatives nationwide, winning 24 of Britain’s 73 seats in the rubber-stamp EU legislature.

This October UKIP elected its first member of Parliament, Douglas Carswell, and nearly ousted a Labour member in a “safe seat.” In November it’s likely to elect another MP. The party’s rising 25 percent in national polls—a political tsunami suggesting they may eventually hold the balance of power. [Since the Brexit vote, things haven’t gone very well for the party, so as of 2016 this was very much up in the air.]

Mr. Farage insists he isn’t against trade or immigration—he wants national control over them. “Right now, we have an open door to 485 million Europeans, and can’t make our own trade deals. Iceland, with 350,000 people, has a free-trade agreement with China. You’re telling me 63 million Brits can’t do such things?” He wants more trade with the “Anglosphere”: the U.S., India, and “the Commonwealth we so shamefully deserted.”

Nothing fazes Nige, a razor-sharp debater who jousts joyfully with the “ghastly” EU bureaucrats. The 2009 appointment of Herman Van Rompuy as “President of Europe” was just so much red meat: Instead of a giant global figure, Farage said, “all we got was you…And I don’t want to be rude, but you know, really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk. And the question I want to ask is, Who are you?”

That earned him one of many fines, which, typically, he laughed off. “It’s been calculated that if I’m fined another 63 million times I personally will have paid the entire Euro bail-out fund.” A UKIP tea towel with Van Rompuy’s image proclaims, “genuine Belgian damp rag.”

UKIP has a libertarian agenda: lower taxes, an end to limitless debt and extremist environmentalism, drastic reductions in enterprise-stifling regulation, and no more military actions without a clue what the goal is: “What have we to show for our support of rebels in Libya, Syria, Egypt?” he asked American interviewer Lauren Lyster. “In Afghanistan and Iraq, we’re achieving, let’s be honest, nothing. I’m extremely tired of the UK joining overseas adventures where we never really think what the endgame’s going to be.”

With an understanding of reality American conservatives might emulate, Farage has learned that you can’t win big with a narrow base. He’s purged UKIP of extreme “full-mooners,” resisted the easy charge of racism. UKIP has an Indian-born Brit who says how hard it is to run a small business, a Caribbean-Brit who sounds like Adam Smith. Farage has a senior adviser named Raheem. In the 1980s there were Reagan Democrats; now in Britain there are Labour kippers.

Asked to advise Americans, Our Nige is careful: “I’m a guest in your country. [But] we both want personal liberty and the responsibility that goes with it. Yet your public finances are no better than the Eurozone’s.”

During the 2012 presidential debates he did venture what Romney might have said: “Look, Barack is a nice chap, but he’s proved he’s not up to the job. I have been successful in business….I’ve run a company, I’m the man you need…And let me tell you, it’s going to be tough. There’re going to have to be some very big cutbacks in the size of the state. But if you follow me, we’ll get this ship steady again.” One wonders if we’ll ever hear a U.S. politician campaign like that.

Of course he’s an easy target. “Farage makes me proud to be British,” wrote Alan Tyers on BT.com in May 2014. “UKIP’s popularity is testament to British tolerance. Where else would such half-baked views be granted so much airtime?” Four days later UKIP rolled up the European elections. People used to say such things about Ronald Reagan. And then…

The establishment parties are worried—“they’ve never held a job outside politics; they’re social-democrats, indistinguishable from each other”—and the media is digging. Recently, charges surfaced of Farage romancing a staffer—hotly denied by both. Then in October 2014, Farage’s “Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy” (EFDD) Group in the European Parliament collapsed. EUP president Martin Schulz (“acting more like the president of a banana republic”) coerced the resignation of a key member and disbanded the group.

Undaunted, Farage replaced his loss and EFDD announced, “we’re back.” The new member was a Polish MEP from a right-wing party led by a Holocaust denier, though the man himself says Hitler was evil and deserved what he got. So it goes. Back on the offensive, Farage declared, “…this will be the last European Commission that governs Britain because within the end of this five years, we will be out of here.”

Clearly Nigel Farage is more than a blip on the radar now. How he handles his challenges may determine whether the EU revolt is real, and whether UKIP can redefine British politics.

But nobody who has seen him in action is counting him out.

Mr. Daniel Knowles (“Time to scotch the myth of Winston Churchill’s infallibility,” (originally blogged on the Daily Telegraph but since pulled from all the websites where it appeared), wrote that the “national myth” of World War II and Churchill “is being used in an argument about the future of the House of Lords.”

Mr. Knowles quoted Liberal Party leader Nick Clegg, who cited Churchill’s 1910 hope that the Lords “would be fair to all parties.” Sir Winston’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames MP, replied that Churchill “dropped those views and had great reverence and respect for the institution of the House of Lords.” Soames concluded: “But it doesn’t matter. The basis of this argument is mythology, not history.”

Churchill’s view on the Lords was more nuanced than Clegg stated, and certainly did change after passage of the 1911 Parliament Act, which Churchill helped pass. It eliminated the Lords’ veto of money bills, restricted their delay of other bills to two years, and reduced the term of a Parliament to five years. You can look it up.

What to do about the House of Lords is a matter for the British people and their representatives. My task is merely to refute nonsense about Winston Churchill—which I will now respectfully proceed to do, quoting from Mr. Knowles’s treatise:

 • “We idolise Churchill because we don’t really know anything about him.”

Only sycophants idolize Churchill. But if they do, it’s not because they know nothing about him. He has the longest biography in the history of the planet. He has 15-million published words. There are a million documents in the Churchill Archives. One hundred million words were written about him. He gets 37 million Google hits. Don’t be silly.

 • “His finest hours aside, Winston Churchill was hardly a paragon of progressive thought.”

Churchill’s was at times so progressive that he was called a traitor to his class. His own Conservative Party never quite trusted him because they knew he continued to harbor principles of the Liberal Party he had been part of from 1904 to 1922. To cite examples would bore you. So let’s just say that he favored a National Health Service before the Labour Party did, and believed in a system of social security before the Labour Party existed.

 • “He believed that women shouldn’t vote – telling the House of Commons that they are ‘well represented by their fathers, brothers, and husbands.’”

Churchill never said that in the Commons. It’s a private note pasted into his copy of the 1874 Annual Register in 1897, when he was 23. At that time the majority of British women themselves were opposed to having the vote. Churchill changed his view on women’s suffrage after observing the role women played in World War I—and when he realized, as his daughter said, “how many women would vote for him.”

 • “He was fiercely opposed to self-determination for the people of the Empire….”

Was the fierce independence Churchill admired in Canadians, Boers, Zulus, Australians, Sudanese, New Zealanders and Maoris a sham and a façade, then? Churchill did have a tic about the early Indian independence movement, with its Brahmin roots. Yet in 1935 he declared that Gandhi had “gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables.” And Churchill was proven right that a premature British exit from India would result in a Hindu-Muslim bloodbath—how many died is still unknown.

 • “….advocating the use of poisoned gas against ‘uncivilized tribes’ in Mesopotamia in 1919.”

That Golden Oldie has been refuted repeatedly for twenty years. The specific term he used was “lachrymatory gas” (tear gas). He was not referring to a killer gas like chlorine.

 • “Even his distrust of Hitler was probably motivated mostly by a hatred of Germans.”

Is this the same Churchill who urged that shiploads of food be sent to blockaded Germany after the 1918 armistice, incurring the wrath of his colleagues, who wished to “squeeze Germany until the pips squeaked”? Is this the man who wrote to his wife in 1945: “…my heart is saddened by the tales of masses of German women and children flying along the roads everywhere in 40-mile long columns to the West before the advancing Armies”? Really, Mr. Knowles should be ashamed of himself.

 • “In 1927, he said that Mussolini’s fascism ‘had rendered service to the whole world,’ while Il Duce himself was a ‘Roman genius.’”

Lots of politicians said favorable things about Mussolini after he restored order to a reeling Italy in the 1920s. Churchill was among the first to realize and to say publicly what Mussolini really was. Churchill wasn’t always right the first time—but he was usually right in the long run.

 • “In 1915, he had to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty after the disaster of Gallipoli.”

He had to resign because of the Dardanelles, not Gallipoli, which was someone else’s idea (and hadn’t yet become a disaster). Churchill initially was even doubtful about the plan to force the Dardanelles, but he defended it and was a handy scapegoat. He vowed never again to champion “a cardinal operation of war” without plenary authority; hence his assumption of the title “Minister of Defence” in World War II.

 • “His decision in 1925 to restore Britain to the Gold Standard caused a deep and unnecessary recession.”

There was already a recession. Churchill, Keynes and the Gold Standard comprise a far more complicated subject than Mr. Knowles represents. Among other things, the Gold Standard was insisted upon by the Bank of England. Churchill was certainly wrong to buy their arguments, and saw many of its effects coming; he was also incredibly unlucky in the way things transpired.

 • ”That led directly to the general strike in 1926, in which he was reported to have suggested using machine guns on the miners.”

Mr. Knowles confused his red herrings. It was the Welsh miners at Tonypandy in 1910 against whom Churchill is mythologically supposed to have sent troops—but top marks for the machine guns, a new twist on the old myth. (In fact, Churchill opposed the use of troops, in Tonypandy and in the General Strike.)

Mr. Knowles concluded:

Yes, he was, in the most part, a brilliant war leader. His role in the creation of the modern welfare state is also worth remembering. But his views on Lords reform are as irrelevant today as his views on India or female suffrage. This is a debate we should have based on principle, and on a practical evaluation of how well the House of Lords works. Citing dead men only muddies it.

Well, it is my instinctive feeling anyone who fails to do basic research can produce only what amounts to a national myth, divorced from reality.

Churchill was not always “a brilliant war leader.” He did help create what became the welfare state–and warned against its excesses. His views on Lords reform are not irrelevant, but they do require more study than we read in the Telegraph Blogpost. His views on India are still relevant to certain Indians who have written on the subject. (As one wrote, the Axis Powers had quite different ideas in mind for India than the old British Raj).

As for female suffrage, ask all the women who voted for him. Citing live Telegraph bloggers only muddies the waters.

Mr. Knowles has tweeted that “The whole point of the post was to take down Clegg. That piece is bizarre.” I certainly agree his piece is bizarre. But Mr. Clegg lasted until 2015.