out of date thoughts on the Whigs

It took the final election result of 2010 before I truly understood the early eighteenth century.

On the morning which marked the consummation of the New Politics, a noted, hirsute Liberal Democrat activist approached me over breakfast and shook me by the hand. This being Balliol JCR, I was the best he could do by way of symbolic Toryism; an underwhelming, motheaten tiger in a zoo more noted for its herbivore collection.

‘Welcome to government,’ I said, feeling uncomfortably far from satire.

‘The Coalition’ suffers from problems of definition more, I think, than from those of will. That bald ‘Coalition’ won’t do alone; it sounds dystopian, the government in a book by Cormac McCarthy or Magnus Mills, encompassing shades of the unsuccessful Mitchell and Webb sketch about the post-apocalyptic ‘Emergency’.

The first internet suggestion was the vapid ‘Change Coalition’, but the New Politics are after all supposed to be ‘historic’; other nerds put forward ‘The Churchill Coalition’ (because he was in both parties. Strewth). My instinct – after considering the social ramifications of ‘The Operagoing Coalition’ – was to go back rather further.

In 1710 the governing Whig Junto suffered a serious backlash for many reasons. Queen Anne had been convinced by her latest lesbian favourite, Lady Masham, that they were imperilling the Church, and the government had also unwisely tried to have the popular High Church preacher Sacheverell executed for sedition. That October a massive Tory majority was returned to the House of Commons for the first time since the 1688 revolution. It was under the control of two men.

Robert Harley, the new Lord High Treasurer, was an ex-Whig of Puritan descent. Henry St John, the Secretary of State, was a high-born, womanising Tory. They were by all accounts best friends, and they had a pretty handy set of spin doctors back at CCHQ too – Pope, Swift and so on.

They inherited a nation exhausted by the long, bloody and expensive War of the Spanish Succession, and to the fury of the patriotic Whigs but with the approval of Queen and country they put a stop it.

Their problem was that they ended up fatally divided over Europe – to wit, St John wanted the Catholic Stuarts to return and Harley didn’t. St John was about to win this argument by impeaching the Treasurer when, in 1714, the Queen died, King George came over and the whole government found itself in exile, the Tower, or at best obscurity, “men half ambitious, all unknown”.

I would accept that the resemblances between the Harley Ministry and our own present administration are superficial, though I would certainly welcome any sympathy for the Jacobite cause from Mr. Cameron, and would very much like to be employed to write poems, a la Pope & Swift, in his favour. But this pudding does nonetheless contain, after all, the proof.

When the pact was announced Signor Marco Meola’s facebook status read:

¾ Conservatives + ¼ Lib Dems = New Labour!?

I think he was nearly on the money but a few hundred years out, and I accordingly propose that we refer to our new government as the Whig Party.

Two clauses in the coalition agreement have upset a very large number of people. The core Tory membership is in ferment over Cameron’s promise to offer a referendum on AV; pragmatically, because it lowers the Conservative Party’s chance of governing alone; idealistically, because “to any true Tory the idea of the constitution being negotiable and mutable is itself a kind of sacrilege”.

We aren’t at the moment hearing so much about a more radical change that has been decided without a referendum – fixed-term, five year parliaments. This irritates people in two political directions – natural 17th century Tories who believe in a “strong crown”, a powerful executive; and Radicals who see it as diminishing the decision making power of the electorate. The 55% opposition requirement to topple a government is a similar kind of safeguard. In Melanie Phillips’s words, it “locks the parties in a fatal embrace”. It is a clause designed, in fact, to protect a junto or elite.

A weakened executive and a stronger oligarchy has been born, classic hall-marks of Whiggery. There have been complaints of “two white millionaires walking into Downing Street and announcing the New Politics”, that remind me of nothing so much as Pope’s and Swift’s complaints against their super-rich Whig rulers – “see, what huge heaps of littleness abound”.

So the Whig Junto, shadowed by a chaotic ‘radical’ opposition, is after more than two hundred years the beast that has lurched into being once more. I would not be surprised if it remained so for some time. The Whigs made Blair and Brown’s determination to retain power look amateurish. I’m fully expecting a wholly coagulated Whig juggernaut to sweep its grandiloquent consensus over even the next election.

What then of the Tories? Well, evidently those Conservatives who accuse Cameron of “abandoning Toryism” are quite right; he is a Whig Prime Minister, which does leave them in an awkward position.

After King George’s accession the Whigs were even more deeply embedded in power than they had been in Anne’s reign; Toryism was in fact a prescribed creed, practically tantamount to treason and for fifty years and more identified with the seditious Jacobite cause. The following choices faced the beleaguered Tories:

a) They could apostacise to the Whigs, as most did. This way lay mainstream power and patronage, vide Mr. Cameron. I am myself most attracted by this position. It will be so pleasant being, as I told that Lib Dem, in government; and many of my best friends, whether they know it or not, are in fact Whigs.

b) They could whisper against the government in secret and plot (in the event fairly ineffective) vengeance. Henry St John after an unhappy spell in exile returned to England and, forbidden his seat in the House of Lords, led the Tories from his secluded country villa into a sly media campaign to discredit the new Prime Minister Walpole. I’m not sure about the precise political parallels, but shall we intimate Mandelson and the Blairites here?

c) They could take the most gallant and romantic path and offer their swords to the Jacobite Pretender, James VIII and III, who resided at St-Germain in France. Here there seems to me a more precise modern equivalent. In Oxford itself, most Jacobite of cities, Ronnie Collinson, of the Union and, sometime, of Balliol is supposed to be circulating secret and treasonous propaganda against the Whig Coalition. He also at one point suggested that he was on the point of emigrating to New Zealand. He need not fly so far.

For there is still one “court-in-exile”, one legitimist claimant to the Tory cause; a man clearly uncomfortable with, defiant of, Lib Dem Whiggery; a man, whisper it, with an esoteric claim to the Throne of Britain itself. Bonnie Prince Boris resides in London. You say 1715, I say 2015…