Mullah Clarke and his frightening mediaeval faith of Europeanism
Mr Kenneth Clarke is the Conservatives’ version of that Muslim cleric with a hook in place of a hand. His every utterance to his followers secures enormous attention, especially in the right-wing press. Yet he is wholly unrepresentative of the wider Conservative community.
Most Conservatives are loyal to Britain and want to integrate. Non-Conservative Britain finds them alien, and frightening. But that is without justification since they have great difficulty in winning elections. It is therefore hard on them that Mr Clarke attracts so much attention. The Conservative majority owes allegiance to Britain. Mr Clarke and his followers owe allegiance to a holy city in the Low Countries. They will not rest until Britain is brought within the Dar-esBruxelles: a world entirely ruled by the mediaeval faith of Europeanism.
Being a minority among Conservatives, Mr Clarke and his faithful would not normally matter. But when the Conservative leadership falls vacant every four years, he and they launch a campaign on the British mainland. This week intelligence reports reached the authorities that they are about to do so again. Mr Clarke preached an elliptical sermon. The English translation apparently suggests that he is preparing to stand for the Conservative leadership yet again.
The public is warned to be vigilant. The merest Brazilian electrician on the London Tube could be a European. Europeans are nonetheless confined almost entirely to the Whitehall area of central London, and to the liberal media. If those areas elected the Conservative leader, Mr Clarke would have won years ago. But recently Conservatives have elected the Conservative leader. Most want nothing to do with Brussels. They reject Brusselite extremism.
Now it looks as if Conservative MPs will elect the next Conservative leader. Conservative MPs and Conservatives are not always synonymous. Many a young investment manager or special adviser pretends to be a Conservative in order to become a Conservative MP. Thereafter, their intention is for the liberal media to write them up as much nicer than one would expect for a Tory. Mr Clarke plays on the insecurities of such youths — their lack of a sense of identity and their alienation from a society which has declined to elect their party to govern ment, and thus give them employment. Here lies the danger to Britain in this new Clarke candidacy.
The number of Europeans on the Tory backbenches is thought to be no more than about 20. Their names are known to the intelligence services. They are not the problem. The problem lies with those weak-minded Members whom a section of the press might bully into believing that Mr Clarke is the only candidate who can win a general election. The test, however, is whether Mr Clarke would continue to do well in the opinion polls after some time as leader.
Then his extremism on the subject of Europe would become better known. It would also cause a split in the Conservative party. Split parties do not flourish in opinion polls, still less in elections. He could well have to deal with another problem. It could come from the very liberal media from which he has long derived good publicity. So long as that media could use him to cause trouble for the Conservative party — by constantly accusing it of rejecting the obvious leader one aspect of his career was not much publicised. It is that, as a magnifico of British American Tobacco, he earns a vast income from selling cigarettes to the world’s poor. If Mr Clarke had been a right-wing Tory, this would have been more publicised. If he became the detested Conservative party’s actual leader, certain newspapers and television people might find the subject irresistible. One can imagine an award-winning series or documentary about cancer statistics in countries to which Mr Clarke has sold his cigarettes.
In the end, Mr Clarke’s extremist proselytising in the tobacco cause could damage him as much as that on behalf of Brussels. Returning to haunt him would be his deeply held belief, going back to when he needed a well-paid job on ceasing to be chancellor of the exchequer, that Dar-es-Nicotine should rule the world under the caliphate of BAT. There has been no satisfactory explanation as to who exactly were the people who, in a BBC poll to find the nation’s most popular philosopher, gave Karl Marx a majority. The only explanation which comes to mind is that he won with the votes from a coalition of old polytechnics, most of which are now universities, and the now middleaged offspring of the 1960s for whom Marx is akin to Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Yellow Submarine, and carefree pot.
Anti-Marxists draw attention to his inspiring the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Marxists retort that he never intended his ideas to lead there. Most of his voters in the BBC poll undoubtedly believed that. It was a commonplace of 1960s Marxism, since by then the achievements of the Soviet Union especially were unimpressive.
But that excuse only makes him a poor philosopher. He could not see what would lead to what: what would replace the monarchies and bourgeois parliamentary systems whose overthrow The Communist Manifesto called for. Most people could have told him that it would not be benign workers’ councils.
Before 1917 Marx never commanded world fame. But Lenin, being an intellectual, needed an intellectual justification for his substitution of Tsarist authoritarianism with his own authoritarianism. He chose Marxism. Then he became ruler of a vast country. The world then heard of Marxism. Lenin ‘made’ Marx, not Marx Lenin.
That poll’s voters for Marx need him for the same reason that Lenin did: as an intellectual justification for what they believe in in any case. Their belief, unlike Lenin’s, is probably benign: equality and an end to exploitation. But in his writings, Marx ‘analyses’ capitalism to his own satisfaction, and predicts its collapse, but he is surprisingly vague about who and what would replace it. There is nothing about benign workers’ councils. This is perhaps because, had he been a ruler, he would not himself have been benign. His revolutionary contemporaries, such as Techow and Schurz, whom his biographers quote, recalled his authoritarianism and hatred of being contradicted.
But Marx still appeals because all ages seem to need someone who they think can make us all equal. Long ago, the title of H.B. Acton’s book on Marxism best described it: The Illusion of the Epoch. The BBC result suggests that the epoch is returning.
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