Tinker Tailor Tory Traitor

Spring stories 1/

Alec Guinness in the BBC production of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Easter blessings or Chag Pesach Sameach, if you celebrate. And I hope you are enjoying the spring holiday, if you do not.

Over the break I want to leave the news schedule behind and run pieces on bigger themes.

• Christopher Hitchens and the death of the new atheism

• The tensions of being wealthy and left wing

• How liberals learn to loathe their country

But I will start with the more pertinent topic of how conservatives learn to loathe their country. After all, the right matters far more than the left because the right actually wins power. Academics and liberal journalists may write about street protests and alleged left-wing rebellions. But in our time, it has been the radicalism of the right that has changed history.

Members of the old elite have repeatedly broken with their friends to denounce Western decline and the treacherous liberals who have presided over it.

Yet once in power in the UK and US, the radical right does not build strong and prosperous countries. On the contrary, it produces chaos and bitterness. Rather than arresting decline, it accelerates it.

The new generation of conservatives beat their chests and pump their fists and bellow about how much they love their countries. But they succeed only in betraying them.

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Loving your country to death

Who is the author of this passage describing?

“He hated the EU very deeply, he said. For a while, he had remained content with Britain’s part in the world, till gradually it dawned on him just how trivial this was. In the historical mayhem of his own lifetime, he could point to no one occasion: simply he knew that if England were out of the game, the price of fish would not be altered by a farthing.

“The political posture of the United Kingdom is without relevance or moral viability in world affairs.”

It’s not Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Nigel Farage, or a columnist for a Conservative paper.