There would have been a time for such a word
J. Enoch Powell
THE FABER BOOK OF CONSERVATISM edited by Kenneth Baker Faber, £17.50, pp. 291 Aman should not be blamed for what he suffers his publisher to put upon a dust- jacket, but Kenneth Baker might have been smart enough to prevent Faber from informing the world that 'after the 1992 election he decided to leave the Govern- ment'. There is nothing, after one gets to a certain age and stage, to be ashamed about in being 'dropped', and no harm at all about passing the time in compiling a polit- ical anthology. Mr Baker, however, was born in 1934; and when someone born in 1934, who has been useful and adaptable enough to 'hold a variety of ministerial posts', is 'dropped' in the wake of his party winning a general election, it is time to sit up and take notice. There has been a changing of the guard, and a changing of the guard in a party which has still not quite lived down the effect upon its age structure of the Night of the Long Knives in 1962, not to mention four leadership changes in 1963, 1965, 1975 and 1990.
All of which brings me to Mr Baker's anthology. I enjoyed browsing through it. Yet it was like a journey though a Tunnel of Time. As one whom the anthologist by no means neglected, I found myself forced to reflect how much we politicians and political philosophers take our colour and find our theories in the moods and prob- lems of the passing hour. Did the authors of One Nation (1950) really rediscover the theme of community as a basis from which to launch a critique of the Labour Party's welfare state, or were we just meeting the need of a stranded opposition party to find some home and shelter for itself after the 1945 debacle in an unfriendly and uncongenial world? Was it because monetarism's hour had struck that Peter Thorneycroft and his junior col- leagues mustered the will to resign at Epiphany 1958? And did the strains and stresses that brought on the birth pangs of monetarism have something to do with the enthusiasm of Change is our Ally (1954) to explore anew the delights and enchant- ments of the market mechanism? What is more, once Seldon Man, with his market mechanism, had become a paid-up member of the Conservative Party in the 1960s, how could he be prevented from entering the holy of holies and laying sacrilegious hands upon that sanctified anti-market monopoly, trade unionism itself? Disraeli long ago had sanctified it in the 1870s; and it strains credulity to suppose that the world had been waiting all those years for Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit to notice in the 1960s how like a sore thumb trade unionism stuck out in the brave new world.
From Mr Baker's pages there rises unmistakably the odour of the age to which his various extracts belonged. It would have been no good whistling lilliburlero' before James II had driven matters to extremity. A time comes for everything; and seers and soothsayers only perceive and announce what the events of their time permit them to perceive and to announce. I mean no harm, not a bit. Burke's formulation of Conservative principles as displayed in a prescriptive constitution stands irreplace- able, a work which, once done, does not have to be done again. I ask only to be allowed to wonder whether the work could have been accomplished without the accompaniment of the French Revolution and of Britain's war against revolutionary France.
As we read such an anthology as Mr Baker's, we hear and see the individual members of an orchestra. We watch the first fiddle scraping, the clarinettist blow- ing, the percussion percussing and the bas- soon bassooning. What remains hidden from us is by whom and how the political score came to be composed, published and popularised. Those of us whom fate has chosen to be instrumentalists cannot help sometimes stopping to speculate upon the origin and nature of those grander causes which we articulate — from whence they came, and whither they are going. I cannot help it if, re-hearing the Conservative polit- ical voices of past years in Mr Baker's anthology, I am reduced to enquiring with the prophet Isaiah: 'Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, "what makest thou?".'
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