MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
T N her memoir on Ronald Cartland which has just been published,* I Miss Barbara Cartland refers to his dismay, on entering the 1935 Parliament, at realising the gap left by those who fell in the last war. Lord Baldwin, it is true, was consistently sympathetic to the younger men who had come to infuse new blood into the Party ; Sir Austen Chamberlain spared no pains in acting as the interpreter of age to youth ; Mr. Amery was unflagging in his encouragement of the ambitious young ; and Mr. Churchill was then, as ever, himself a member of the younger genetation.. Yet Ronald Cartland, on entering the House of Commons in those dark days of December, 1935, became acutely conscious of the gap left by the " lost generation," and of the " unbridgeable gulf " which yawned between the younger members and the veterans of the Conservative Party. " The left Conservatives," he confessed, " are immeasurably nearer to the right Socialists than they could ever be to the older members of their own party." I question whether Ronald Cartland, had he survived to experience the Churchill-Eden-Cripps epoch, would have felt that the gulf was so unbridgeable. He was a rebel by nature and he chafed exceedingly under the discipline of the Whips. Yet the Conservative Party knows well that it has always been rescued by its own heretics, and even as Ronald Cartland began as a recalcitrant at Charterhouse and ended by being one of the most polished head-stones of the corner, so also, had he but survived, would he have been regarded as one of the more shining hopes of Tory Socialism. His death in battle has given a sharp meaning to that loveliest of all Latin words, the word "desiderium," a word which implies both the vivid memory of an enchanting presence, and the dull ache of disappointment that his absence brings.
Previous page
