LETTERS It's the principle, stupid
From Mr Andrew Roberts Sir: Might I, on behalf of the late 3rd Mar- quess of Salisbury and Enoch Powell, refute Geoffrey Wheatcroft's suggestion that they, Oliver Letwin, William Hague, William Waldegrave and I — 'clever but silly' Tories, as he calls us — are about to lose the Conservatives the next election (`Edu- cated out of their wits', 30 September)?
Mr Wheatcroft's choice of Irish Home Rule as the issue over which to attack the silliness of the Tory Right seems bizarre, considering that Salisbury's refusal to go along with it led to Gladstone's Liberal party splitting and the Conservatives being in government for 17 of the next 20 years. Moreover, Salisbury was proved right about Ireland's untrustworthiness in time of war. When she was part of the Empire in 1914-18 — a war Salisbury foresaw 170,000 Irishmen fought for king and coun- try. When she was independent in 1939-45 — in a war Salisbury could not possibly have foreseen — the Irish Free State refused to take its place in civilisation's vanguard against Hitlerism.
Salisbury was also right that an indepen- dent Ireland would be disastrous for Protestants, as the exodus of 34 per cent of the southern Protestant population in 1922 proved — the only mass displacement of any native group in the British Isles since the 17th century. Mr Wheatcroft mocks Salisbury's fears for landed property in Ire- land; he should visit the great houses which were burned down, such as Palmerston, Castle Boro and Dessart Court. When Mr Wheatcroft (necessarily counter-factually) states that all would have been well had Home Rule taken place in 1886 before `Anglophobia' set in, he ignores the earlier outbreaks of revolutionary Anglophobia in 1798 and 1848 and plenty of terrorist inci- dents afterwards.
Salisbury acted towards Ireland with the `ideology' and 'zealotry' that Mr Wheatcroft denounced in his article, but also with High Tory principle as his guide. Not having many guiding principles is now being perceived as a source of weakness for Tony Blair, rather than of strength. William Hague's choice is not between being 'clever but silly' or `stupid but sensible', as Mr Wheatcroft would have us believe, but of being principled or not.
Andrew Roberts
London SW3
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