Robin Harris worked for the UK’s Conservative Party from 1978, and collaborated increasingly closely with Margaret Thatcher herself from 1985, writing her speeches and advising on policy. He left Number Ten with her and, as a member of her personal staff, he then drafted the two volumes of her autobiography and a further book on her behalf, continuing to see her regularly after her retirement. He is the author of numerous books, including Not for Turning: The Life of Margaret Thatcher (2013), The Conservatives: A History (2013), and Dubrovnik: A History (2003). He is currently vice president of the Croatian Centre for the Renewal of Culture.
You were close to Margaret Thatcher, at the time of Ronald Reagan and St. John Paul II. Each of them were strong personalities who knew how to face the challenges of the Cold War. Did our victory then give rise to complacency now—which has produced, in turn, the worst class of politicians in the West—and to an absolute loss of values?
I agree with most of your assumptions, and things today in the West are bad. Whether this is the ‘worst’ political class, I am not sure. That is not pedantry. Politicians are not, in general, people we should look up to, but rather people of whom we should be profoundly suspicious. The reasons why people go into politics are mixed, and some have principles, conscience, and virtues, as did Reagan and Thatcher. But politics always attracts those who overestimate their own worth and who cannot do anything else to earn a good living. We should insist on limited government always, as a cardinal principle, even if we think our own people will sort things out, because they will probably not stay ‘our people’ for long.
Although understandably linked with Reagan and Thatcher, I consider John Paul II’s appointment at that juncture nothing less than divine providence. The Catholic Church has a mixed record of dealing with communism. Paul VI’s Ostpolitik betrayed the Church in Eastern Europe—most egregiously, Cardinal Mindszenty—and Pope Francis and the Vatican show no sympathy for the persecuted Church in China now. In both cases, the Vatican has preferred dealing with the Party. John Paul II was different.
I also agree that victory in the Cold War allowed the mediocrities to flourish, probably because Western electorates became less fearful, and so were less demanding. The Catholic Church leadership has similarly lost its bearings.
Has cultural surrender to the Left been the cause or the consequence of that complacency?
It is the consequence of complacency. The right-wing error is to forget something that Mrs. Thatcher used to say, namely that there are no final victories in politics. The Left keep up their networks, infiltrate institutions—at a basic level, they look after each other. You think that they have disappeared, but far from it: they are just waiting for the next opportunity. It is rather admirable in a way, even though their remorselessness is fuelled by hatred.
The Left’s takeover of institutions in the West, especially the United States, their increasingly successful exclusion of their critics and counterarguments from the mainstream media, along with their recruitment of multinational corporations to their agenda, all together constitute the greatest threat to our culture in modern times—greater even than in the Cold War.
To fight it, we on the Right must take a few leaves out of the Left’s own war book. In most of the West, conservatism of the traditional kind is now pointless because there remains so little that is worth conserving. The Revolution has happened. The sole antidote is counter-revolution. Defining what that entails is the challenge now, before which all other disagreements are insignificant.
An example of the victory of the leftist narrative is the case of Salvador Allende. Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Allende’s overthrow. However, the ‘official’ history pushed by the mainstream has nothing to do with reality and continues to present him as a hero and defender of democracy.
That is correct, as I have been privileged to be able to point out in a lengthy essay in the columns of [the Fall edition of]The European Conservative. Allende was, it now seems, a believer in eugenics, as well as a Marxist-Leninist, a KGB agent, a self-indulgent overseer of the drugs trade, and a practised liar. Luckily, he was sloppy, as Castro complained, while the Chilean Armed Forces, nourished on a diet of Prussian discipline, were not. The military counter-revolution overcame the incipient communist revolution.
The Left’s ability to impose its false historical narrative on what happened in Chile has had a large impact on events elsewhere in South America. Having donned the mantle of victims whilst facing feeble and unconvincing conservative opponents, they have been able to return to power almost everywhere. They will stay in power, barring local upsets—as recently seen in Argentina—because the United States is more interested in pushing woke ideology than in defending its interests in Latin America, and also because the new post-Marxist rulers have their hands on the enormously profitable narcotics trade.
In many countries, the Right has gradually taken on the values of the Left until it is nearly indistinguishable from it. What happened in the United Kingdom? What was the turning point that led the Tories to abandon conservative values?
The place of Britain in the history of conservative politics is different from that of other countries. The Conservative Party in a recognisable form—and with that title—existed from the 1830s, longer than any other party. It was shrewd, professional, retained a capacity to compromise, and was mainly defined by the threats and ideologies it opposed. The Conservatives were thus the party of the Union of the United Kingdom, of the Empire (while it lasted), and then of order and prosperity. They were ‘a safe pair of hands’ in emergencies.
This is important because it shows why the Conservatives, as British pragmatists, were not particularly reliable on the matter of values. Margaret Thatcher was a practising Christian, but the only Conservative prime minister who placed his faith at the centre of his life was the Marquess of Salisbury, a well-read Anglo-Catholic who was three times prime minister, leaving office in 1902. Interestingly, as a sign of the times, Salisbury’s nephew and successor, Arthur Balfour, was an agnostic (though the joke was that Balfour did not seem very sure even about that).
By and large, the Conservatives did what they thought necessary to hold and use power. But it is true that there was a continuing substratum—not so much of beliefs, as of assumptions—the assumptions of the Christian British middle class, which were also those of the Church of England. The Church of England has reflected in its personnel and pronouncements first the relative dominance and now the absolute eclipse of Christianity in British society. The Conservative Party has moved along the same path.
In modern times—that is, since Mrs. Thatcher’s departure—the Party has gone further. It has fully embraced social liberalism. This was the intention of David Cameron, Conservative leader from 2005 and prime minister from 2010 to 2016, now back as foreign secretary. Cameron was an upper-class liberal of no real convictions, but with a good private education, charm, and connections. He was a natural candidate when the Conservative Party wanted to get over the embarrassment of living with Margaret Thatcher and her divisive principles.
Cameron did two things which had profound—and profoundly bad—consequences. First, he legalised same-sex marriage; he now says that this was his most significant achievement. Second, he introduced a system of selecting parliamentary candidates, making use of ‘open primaries’ on some occasions, which was designed to make the Party more socially representative of the younger generation. This policy succeeded. The central party leadership, using vetoes and manipulating local pressure groups, imposed its preferred people, with a strong emphasis on women and ethnic minorities, and with much genuflection to woke values. It prevented committed and convinced conservatives from being chosen as candidates and becoming MPs. It promoted instead people without a shred of conservatism in their make-up. Those changes made the Conservative Parliamentary Party what it is today—which is not a compliment.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak surprised people with a statement, full of common sense, in which he said that “a man is a man, and a woman is a woman.” It is surprising because it is unusual to hear something conservative from a member of the Conservative Party. Do you think something is changing?
I think you are too generous in calling this observation by Sunak “full of common sense.” It is no more commonsensical than saying that a chair is not a cabbage, or that a light bulb is not a hippopotamus, but there we are. What is ‘changing,’ since you ask, is nothing more complicated than that the Conservatives have realised that, after 13 years, they are going to lose the delights of office. In a mad panic, they have started to rummage around to find and strike conservative attitudes and to pronounce conservative platitudes. It is like the oft-repeated pledge to stop boatloads of illegal immigrants arriving on British shores, though they continue to arrive all the same. The real issue is the level, not of illegal but of legal immigration. Sunak and his ministers wish to keep that flowing. It suits their economic model of trashy capitalism, and they have no wish to maintain whatever survives of British national identity—quite the contrary, I suspect.
Sunak’s persona deserves somewhat closer examination than it has received. The media editors are terrified of subjecting him to the ordinary stinging criticism which flailing Party leaders receive because he is Britain’s first Indian prime minister, and such criticism might be deemed racist. Journalists must quietly hope that he will reactivate his green card and go back to California with his family after the inevitable Conservative Party rout at the next election—then, they will be able to swing their axes.
Sunak made three announcements in his 2023 Party Conference speech—probably the last such speech before the general election. Each was notable for its unsuitability. First, despite being in Manchester, where the conference was held, he announced that the city of Manchester would not now be connected to the (hugely expensive) planned high-speed rail network as previously promised. This, though leaked, was hardly good news. Second, he announced that smoking would be entirely banned on a rolling programme, year by year. This is illiberal—when modern Conservatives are more liberal than ever—and obviously unenforceable. Third, being himself a mathematics and science enthusiast, Sunak announced that mathematics would be compulsory for everyone, whatever they wanted to specialise in, until 18. Many young people hate mathematics with a detestation reserved only for the worst kind of school food. Beyond what is required to calculate change, they will never be able to do it. He thus managed also to irritate their parents who will put up with their whimpering. By contrast, he promised nothing that anyone expects from a Conservative government, such as reducing the tax levels—currently at a 70-year high; a height to which he, as chancellor, raised them.
However, Sunak’s presence in Number Ten is also of symbolic importance. It demonstrates what has gone seriously, perhaps terminally, wrong with the Conservative Party. First, Sunak was not elected by the Party members, having climbed in after the ousting of two Conservative leaders and prime ministers who were elected. The Party managers think that the state of affairs is acceptable because they have a low view of Party members, and they think that a ‘technomanager’ (as the communists used to call this class) is all that the country wants.
Second, Sunak is, indeed, Britain’s most obvious political representative of deracinated technocratic globalism. He may mean well, but are his priorities those of most ordinary people? His conference speech confirmed that his priorities are not. Conservative voters—like right-wing voters elsewhere—increasingly resent globalism, but globalism on steroids is all that the Conservative Party now has to offer.
Third—and this is something only to be muttered anonymously, it seems—Sunak is a Hindu. This should be addressed, but it is not. It matters not the slightest bit what is the pigmentation of Sunak’s skin. But even in Britain, which is by most definitions post-Christian, having as prime minister a Hindu, rather than a baptised Christian, is significant, not just because—at least in theory—every prime minister advises on certain episcopal appointments, but also because this prime minister practises a religion which is opposed to Christianity and is not even monotheistic. Apparently, an elephant-headed, four-armed Ganesh idol perches on his desk. The full nonsense of the British state was on show when Sunak read an extract from the New Testament at the coronation of King Charles III—a ceremony replete with the deepest Christian symbolism. Whether the episode was blasphemous is debatable, but it was certainly revealing of what Britain, for all the brass bands and busbies, has become.
You now live in Croatia, where there was no de-communization after independence but which retains a strong patriotic and religious sentiment. Is the vaccine of having suffered from communism enough to prevent the loss of Western values?
Croatia faces different problems from those that plague the West, though in due course those problems will arrive here. The successor countries of Yugoslavia, including Croatia, did not practise lustration. There was no possibility that Croatia would. One section of the Yugoslav communist elite fought another section and won (the actual warfighting was done by non-communist Croatian patriots, but the communists stayed in control). It is the non-communists—or, indeed, anyone hailing from the diaspora—who have been lustrated. The structures and families from the old communist system are still—with a few modifications, and under more civilised conditions—in charge. They steal, whereas their predecessors murdered—which, I suppose, is an improvement of sorts, but not a cause for rejoicing.
That said, I much prefer to live in Croatia than the West, including Britain. British society is decadent and disintegrating. Croatian society is sleepy and sometimes a bit primitive, but it is far healthier. Croats are neighbourly, kind, and even though there is a kleptocracy in charge, people are extremely honest at a personal level. The country is secure. You need not worry about walking through Zagreb late at night. This is because here there is a stigma that still attaches to bad behaviour. This is, in a word, a Catholic Christian society, and it works. I decided eight years ago to leave Britain and come to Croatia—where I was already a citizen—because I did not want to live anywhere other than in a Catholic country. And my remains will be eaten by Croatian worms when the time comes.
Whether Croats can hold on to their culture, given Western aggressive secularist liberal interventionism; given the unreformed local communist power structures, still hostile to Christianity; given the demographic crisis, which sees the ablest leave the country; and given the absence of any encouragement from the current Pope, I really do not know.
After the fall of the USSR, it was said that history had come to an end; but we see that this was a mistake and that history has actually returned with unusual ferocity. Do you think that in these difficult times strong men will emerge? Can the West give us heroes again?
Ideally, we should not need heroes. Heroes are often ill-adjusted people whose extraordinary gifts, along with their dominant personalities, make them problematic. I would rather we could gradually generate elites to provide the leadership required without turning everything upside down.
However, I do not believe this will happen. Only the few can ever save us. As you pointed out in your first question, there seems to be some kind of fateful cycle whereby the great ones are cast off once they have served their purpose. The weaklings and mediocrities—smiling, compromising, offering equivocal judgements, offending no one—crawl out of the woodwork where they have been hiding to reclaim their positions, while the rest of us are just too tired or jaded to stop them and find somebody better. And anyway, as I said, greatness is unnerving; we want to relax.
A further problem is that the globalists have gone a long way to sterilise society against heroes. As Edmund Burke writes (somewhat prematurely, it was 1790): “The Age of Chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”
Any focus of collective passion—the state, the nation, the faith—is demeaned and delegitimised. The new globalists have created—as did the old communists—an alternative set of ‘causes’: fighting climate change, ending global inequality, ‘decolonising’ history, and reshaping sexual identity. Only a small, unrepresentative section of humanity puts these things first, but that is enough.
The ‘New World Order’ devised by that least imaginative and insightful of American presidents, George H.W. Bush, has, naturally, been from the beginning vitiated by events. One of the first of these was the war in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Order itself, of course, is desirable; disorder—at any level—is to be avoided. But disorder—and so, war—is inevitable because of the nature of Fallen Man. The utopian illusion is that, with everyone paying lip service to democracy, war will either not occur—Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis—or that it will only be waged by madmen who can easily be crushed. This illusion is itself the greatest generator of conflict. It leads to complacency and a refusal to take threats seriously and prepare to meet them.
Mrs. Thatcher used to recite a disturbing poem, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” written by Rudyard Kipling in 1919. The poet was mocking utopianism after the end of the First World War, and she was mocking it after the end of the Cold War. The “headings” are the sententious maxims that Victorian children were tasked with copying into their notebooks. The section she used to quote runs:
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Why, then, should we be surprised when they do?
This essay appears in the Spring 2024 edition of The European Conservative, Number 30:46-51.
