The constitution of the English

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 96-127

  Colls, Robert ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 54749131189     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1998.46.97     Document Type: Article

References (127)

1. John Plamenatz, On Alien Rule and Self Government, London, Longmans, 1960, p. 38.
2. G. J. Renier, The English, Are they human? (1931), London, Ernest Benn, 1956, p. 41, p. 18, p. 171.
3. Marx had spotted these precise developments early. Writing in March 1855 for the Neue-Order-Zeitung, he stated what would be the core of Bagehot's thesis: 'The British Constitution is, in fact, only an antiquated and obsolete compromise made between the bourgeoisie, which rules in actual practice, although not officially, in all the decisive spheres of bourgeois society, and the landed aristocracy, which forms the official government'. Quoted in John Saville, 1848. The British State and the Chartist Movement, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 7.
4. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (1867), London, Fontana, 1963, p. 248.
5. Max Weber and Matthew Arnold are worth reading alongside. Weber saw the routinization of 'charisma', through institutions or the depersonalization of office or title, as a way of maintaining a sense of natural authority - 'personal devotion to, and personal authority of, "natural" leaders, in contrast to the appointed leaders of the bureaucratic order . . .' Max Weber, in, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds, Max Weber, Economy and Society, New York, Bedminster Press, 1968, p. 117. Compare Matthew Arnold's view of the middle, or 'philistine', class in Culture and Anarchy (1869) with Bagehot's as quoted in the text: 'Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively . . . would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?' The charisma of George Eliot's Sir James Chettam, a 'blooming Englishman of the red-whiskered type', relied on masculinity and tradition: 'A man's mind - what there is of it - has always the advantage of being masculine . . . [and] . . . a Kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.' Middlemarch, 1872.
6. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848), London, John W. Parker, 1857, vol. i, pp. 534-35;
7. J. S. Mill, On Liberty (1859), Harmondsworth, Penguin 1985, p. 67. For the intellectual link between nineteenth-century liberal voluntarism and 'one of the most uniform, centralised, bureaucratic and "public" welfare systems in Europe', as created after 1945,
8. see: José Harris, 'Political Thought and the Welfare State 1870-1940. An Intellectual Framework for British Social Policy', Past and Present 135, May 1992, p. 116. The linkage depended on 'idealism', and an increasingly optimistic view of state instrumentality (p. 140).
9. J. V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England 1660-1914, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986, p. 404, p. 459.
10. The most powerful statement of which is J. C. D. Clark's English Society 1688-1832. Ideology, social structure and political practice during the ancien regime, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, chapter six 'The End of the Ancien Regime'.
11. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990, p. 558, p. 604.
12. William Makepeace Thackeray, with an introduction by John Sutherland, The Book of Snobs (1847), St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1978, pp. 35-36.
13. Laurence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540-1880, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 240.
14. The assimilation myth on the Norman Conquest was William 'acquisivit, non conquisivit Angliam', quoted in David Miller, On Nationality, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 38.
15. The radical myth saw it differently: an overbearing aristocracy originated from foreign invaders. It is famously explored in: Christopher Hill, 'The Norman Yoke', in Puristanism and Revolution, London, Mercury, 1962.
16. On Beau Nash: Oliver Goldsmith, The Life of Nash, in The Bee and other essays, London, Oxford University Press, 1914, p. 317.
17. S. M. Brewer, Design for a Gentleman. The Education of Philip Stanhope, London, Chapman & Hall, 1963, p. 197.
18. Sir William Blackstone, edited with an introduction by Gareth Jones, The Sovereignty of the Law. Selections from Blackstone's Commentaries, London, Macmillan, 1973, p. xxviii.
19. Edward Bulwer Lytton, England and the English (1833), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970, pp. 318-20. On widening social and cultural divisions in the 1820s and 1830s,
20. see: Malcolm Chase, '"We only wish to work for ourselves": the Chartist Land Plan',
21. and Alun Howkins, 'From Hodge to Lob: reconstructing the English farm labourer 1870-1914', in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck, eds, Living and Learning, Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison, Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1996, pp. 138-39 and pp. 218-221.
22. Thackeray, Snobs, p. 22.
23. On Barry Lyndon (1856), the shameful history of the Irishman who would be a gentleman, see Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel, London, Allen & Unwin, 1981 - 'The result is a condemnation of the eighteenth-century gentlemanly code from the mouth of a character who slavishly upholds it' (p. 44).
24. Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (1929) New York, Doubleday, 1957, p. 10.
25. Goldsmith said of Nash, he was 'a person so much talked of, and yet so little known': Life of Nash, p. 275. On American masquerades, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the world's first best-selling novel, begins with two gentlemen of Kentucky discussing their property, which was human.
26. One, on closer inspection, 'did not seem it'; the other 'had the appearance': 'For convenience sake, we have said, hitherto, two gentlemen' - Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin or Negro Life in the Slave States of America (1852), Wordsworth, Ware, 1995, p. 3. Victorian literature is obsessed with the gentleman, and those who would be so.
27. Gustavele Bon, The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind, London, Fisher Unwin, 1896. The modern crowd was portrayed as excitable, gullible, shallow, irrational, intolerant and dangerous - 'everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics' (p. 21). Bill Schwarz's companion piece in this issue extends Le Bon's point to a feminized electorate.
28. Robert Colls, 'Englishness and the Political Culture', in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, eds, Englishness. Politics and Culture 1880-1920, London, Croom Helm, 1986,
29. and James Vernon, ed., Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England's Long Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
30. From the start of proper public record keeping in Britain, between 1838 and 1854, the Home Office and the Foreign Office were keen to suppress information in order to preserve past good names and maintain the view of an 'English past . . . seen not in terms of a series of conflicts but, in classic Whig terms, as a natural progression of events tending towards . . . the peaceful, civilised and prosperous society which was the Britain in which they lived': Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional. Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 107-08.
31. The clubs were keen to lend their own interpretation of how a man 'that is a man', under their influence, becomes 'a gentle man': Henry Solly, reprinted in, B. T. Hall, Our Sixty Years: the story of the Working Men's Club and Institute Union, London, CIU, 1922, p. 290.
32. Schwarz's notion of 'political rhetoric' 'refers not merely to verbal address but to the whole paraphernalia of invented rituals . . .', in this issue.
33. Alison Light, Forever England, Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars, London, Routledge, 1991, p. 17.
34. On public opinion and national character, Mill had said that 'Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests and its feelings of class superiority': On Liberty, p. 65 .
35. W. Gordon Murray had been the President of the Oxford Union. He blamed jingoism and conquest for playing 'an altogether disproportionate part in the soul of the nation': 'A Young Man's View,' in N. P. Macdonald, ed., What Is Patriotism?, London, Thornton Butterworth, 1935, p. 288.
36. Great Britain, Washington DC, War Department 1942, p. 2, p. 3.
37. Originally Colonel Blimp had been a cartoon figure - a British army officer who was a fool and a bigot. The War-time filmic treatment, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Powell and Pressburger, 1943, saw him much improved and adapted.
38. A. V. Dicey, Introduction to the study of the law of the Constitution (1885), London, Macmillan, 1964, p. 3;
39. G. B. Adams, Constitutional History of England, London, Cape, 1920,
40. preface; Sir Maurice Amos, The English Constitution, London, Longmans Green, 1934, p. 7;
41. W. S. Shears, This England, London, Right Book Club, 1937, p. 46;
42. H. Butterfield, The Englishman and his History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1945, p. 113.
43. Chapter by Jacquetta and Christopher Hawkes, Ernest Barker, ed., The Character of England, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1947, p. 1.
44. 'Business schools are about as British as drum majorettes: in fields where they believe success depends primarily on experience and instinct, the British only turn to teaching as a last resort' - Grahame Turner, in 1969, quoted in John F. Wilson, A History of Manchester Business School 1965-1990, Manchester, Paul Chapman and MBS, 1992, p. 1.
45. For brisk reviews of the wider debate see D. C. Coleman and Christine Macleod, 'Attributes to New Techniques: British Businessmen 1800-1950', Economic History Review 2nd ser. xxxix, November 1986,
46. and M. J. Daunton, 'Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Industry 1820-1914', Past and Present 122, Feb. 1989. It is worth remembering that Bagehot was as well informed on the City as he was on Parliament: he was editor of The Economist 1860-77 and published Lombard Street. A description of the Money Market in 1873.
47. Christopher Brookes, English Cricket, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978, p. 127. In 1968, the MCC ceded its control of English cricket to the Test and County Cricket Boards. In 1993 it transferred its secretarial powers to the International Cricket Council. In 1996 all English cricket was put under a single body, the English Cricket Board. With a twenty-year waiting list for members, a premier ground, a comfortable club and lot of history and real estate, the Marylebone County Cricket Club is now the House of Lords of English Cricket. For the game's 'survival', still couched in Bagehotian strategies, see Matthew Engel, currently editor of Wisenden's (the cricketer's 'Bible'), in the Guardian, 5 July 1994.
48. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963). London, Stanley Paul & Co, 1990, pp. 34-35. Another Trinidadian, V. S. Naipaul, saw the facade as mimicry and considered it as never intended to be authentic so much as a necessary part of colonial life (The Mimic Men, 1967).
49. Richard Holt asks 'Why were batsmen the heroes when the best cricket brains knew it was bowlers who won matches? and answers a lot more besides: 'Cricket and Englishness: the batsman as hero', in R. Holt and others, eds, European Heroes. Myth, Identity, Sport, London, Frank Cass, 1996, p. 49.
50. If James the formidable black intellectual loved cricket, Mahatma Gandhi loved the British constitution - 'I can see now that my love of truth was at the root of this loyalty': M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927), Ahmedabad, Navajivan, 1976, p. 128.
51. Roy Lewis and Angus Maude, The English Middle Classes (1949), London, Pelican, 1953, p. 69.
52. 'I last took dope in a little place off Karlsplatz . . . "lets go and get a fix", she said': Alan Whicker in Men Only, February 1953, pp. 19-20.
53. Jon Savage, England's Dreaming. Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, London, Faber & Faber, 1992, p. 373.
54. John Walton, 'Blackpool Carnivals of 1923 and 1924', Labour History Conference, Newcastle, 25 November 1995;
55. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End. A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939 (1940), New York Norton Library, 1963, p. 299.
56. An Act to re-enact the Official Secrets Act, 1889, with Amendments, Geo V, 1911, c.28, p. 102, p. 103.
57. Departmental Committee on section II of the Official Secrets Act 1911 (Franks Report) vol. 1, cmnd 5104, Parliamentary Papers 1971-72, xxxvii, p. 25.
58. Christopher Andrew, Secret Service. The Making of the British Intelligence Community, London, Heinemann, 1985, p. xv, p. 408.
59. John Alder, Constitutional and Administrative Law, Basingstoke, Macmillan 1989, p. 3;
60. '. . . one may ransack British public security laws in vain for any definition of their central concepts . . . even the elementary "breaches of the peace". . .', Charles Townshend, 'The state and political violence,' in S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting, The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 278.
61. Dicey quoted in D. L. Keir, The Constitutional History of Modern Britain since 1485 (1938), London, A&C Black, 1969, p. 565 .
62. Gladstone had said that the constitution presumed 'more boldly than any other the good sense and the good faith of those who work it': quoted in Peter Hennessy, The Hidden Wiring. Unearthing the British Constitution, London, Victor Gollancz, 1995, p. 27. John Gray has noted how the English conservative philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, used the British constitution as the paradigm of political experience. From its practical workings and reliance on the internal understandings of those who work it, Oakeshott derived his theory of knowledge as a distillation of practice, not rational principles:
63. John Gray, 'Berlin, Oakeshott and Enlightenment', in Endgames. Questions in Late Modern Political Thought, Cambridge, Polity, 1997, p. 87.
64. 'The crowns of George I and George IV should not be sold to a private buyer. They are starry emblems of what Bagehot called the dignified part of the constitution': The Times, editorial, 5 December 1995.
65. Sir Ivor Jennings, The Queen's Government (1954), Harmondsworth, Penguin 1961, p. 30.
66. The latest is Peter Hennessy. Few could know its faults as much, yet love it just the same. Another journalist turned scholar, he too thinks the constitution is in need of reform, but would not want to go against its nature. He wants the 'modern-within-the ancient reformist spirit'. He wants to be a properly constituted citizen and an Englishman of the constitutional type: Hidden Wiring, p. 206. The book represents Professor Hennessy's bid for oracularity.
67. Nevil Johnson based his study on a search: In Search of the Constitution: Reflections on State and Society in Britain, Oxford, Pergamon, 1977.
68. Edmund Burke, 'Speech on the Reform of the Representation in the House of Commons' (1782) in, The Works of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, London, Bell & Daldy, 1869, vol. vi, p. 147;
69. Sir Ivor Jennings, The British Constitution, London, Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. 205;
70. Amos, The English Constitution, pp. 26-27;
71. Edward A. Freeman, The Growth of the English Constitution from earliest times. (1872), London, Macmillan, 1890, p. x. p. 96, pp. 40-41, p. 118, p. 115, p. 121, p. 145.
72. Strathearn Gordon, Our Parliament, London, Hansard Society, 1952, p. 32.
73. A. V. Dicey, Introduction to the study of the Law of the Constitution, with an Introduction by E. C. S. Wade, Downing Professor of the Laws of England, Cambridge University (1885), London, Macmillan, 1964, p. lvii;
74. F. W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1908, pp. 282-85;
75. Adams, Constitutional History, p. 360;
76. Keir, Constitutional History, p. 270;
77. Alder, Constitutional and Administrative Law, p. 11.
78. Dicey, Law of the Constitution, p. 40.
79. 'Thus the personal will of the King was gradually identified with and transformed into the lawful and legally expressed will of the Crown [-in- Parliament]. This transformation was based upon the constant use of fictions. It bears on its face that it was the invention of lawyers': Dicey, Law of the Constitution, p. 470.
80. Hennessy is very good on all this. He calls his Preface 'A Back-of-the-Envelope Nation' in reference to the speed with which 'conventions' can be brought to life, put to death, or committed to print - among them, Stowe's interlocking circles (1976), the Wheeler-Bennett solecism (1940), 'QPM' (1945), the office of Prime Minister (1878), the Cabinet (1937): Hidden Wiring, p. 17, p. 29, p. 34, p. 90. The former secretary in the cabinet office is Sir Peter Kemp: Lord Nolan, First Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life (HMSO May 1995) vol. ii, Transcripts of Oral Evidence, p. 190, 948. On the new cabinet secretary, Sir Richard Wilson, and his place in 'the college', the secret committee of permanent secretaries, it was said that in his dealings 'he can shimmer without stain': Independent on Sunday, 4 January 1998.
81. Trying to estimate the true extent of monarchical power (influence and prerogative) is to enter a Catch 22 nightmare where questions never get properly answered, never can be properly answered, by those in authority. Thus, there is no clear point at which the sovereign's powers begin, or end, but final responsibility for the integrity of the constitution lies with her - 'it may be suggested'; formally, these powers are enormous and should be able to uphold and defend the constitution, but in practice ministers wield these powers (to an extent which threatens the constitution); it is best that ministers have these powers, or most of them, because by so doing the sovereign is kept above politics even though all former monarchs made their political views well known and were politically active in the constitution, although it is impossible to say by how much: Vernon Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, chapter three. Very senior civil servants in England are known as 'Mandarins' - high ranking bureaucrats in the Chinese Empire known for their secrecy and inscrutability; in Chinese culture, 'Tao' is that which cannot be admitted, can hardly be thought, is nearly impossible to speak, is certainly impossible to resolve and, though passive, is all the stronger for being believed. Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd's speech to the Royal Society of Literature in 1994 celebrated Parliament for 'In the end only reasoned argument, expressed in words, can lead to right decisions':
82. Independent on Sunday, 22 May 1994.
83. Judicial review concerns '. . . the jurisdiction of courts to keep public authorities within what we shall describe as their remit': B. Smythe and C. T. Emery, Judicial Review: Legal Limits of Official Power, London, Sweet and Maxwell, 1986, p. 3;
84. Maitland, quoted in Henry Parris, Constitutional Bureaucracy. The Development of British Central Administration Since the Eighteenth Century, London, Allen & Unwin, 1969, p. 80.
85. Rt. Hon. Sir Richard Scott, The Vice Chancellor, Report of the Inquiry into the Report of Defence Equipment and Dual-Use Goods to Iraq and Related Prosecutions (HMSO, 15 February 1996, 115) vol. i, pp. 54-55, pp. 159-61; p. 177 D.1.80, p. 414 D.3.100, p. 427 D.3.122, p. 418 D.3.107, p. 427 D.3.124.
86. E. M. Forster is quoted in Edward Timms and Peter Collier, Visions and Blueprints, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988, p. 117.
87. Scott also investigated the misuse of 'Public Interest Immunity Certificates' by ministers, certificates which seek to hold back certain documents, by prerogative, on national security grounds. The concept of public interest immunity has its origins in the convention of Crown Privilege. In 1947 the Crown Proceedings Act ended Crown immunity from court actions but retained the prerogative of withholding documents in the 'public interest'. Section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act (1981) made courts the arbiters of disclosure or retention of documents, but it remains the case that the state has tried to use public interest immunity against the courts and 'that the courts are never absolutely bound to accept a government claim to immunity, no matter what its basis'. In 1984 and 1985 the House of Lords ruled in favour of government prerogative in two sensitive cases - the banning of trade unions at GCHQ, and the forcing of the Guardian newspaper to disclose its source on the intended siting of nuclear missiles: Smythe and Emery, Review, p. 79, pp. 74-77, pp. 79-80.
88. In the face of these rulings, the Scott report showed how, in spite of intense pressure from government ministers (by signing Public Interest Immunity Certificates), as well as from the prosecuting counsel, Judge Smedley in the Matrix Churchill trial resisted, and disclosed documents to the defence thus saving innocent men from the prospect of imprisonment. Moreover, it seems that the Attorney General persuaded ministers to sign the certificates - one of them very reluctantly - on his interpretation of what sounds like a 'convention'. In a report by Heather Mills, 'PIIs' have been used 'by Whitehall and the police to great effect' to an extent of encouraging a 'cavalier' approach, according to Lord Justice Simon Brown, president of the Security Service Tribunal (The Independent, 17 February 1996). Matrix Churchill were a British company involved in the export of defence related goods to Iraq. The disarmament movement saw NATO's nuclear weaponry and the authoritarianism and secrecy which surrounded it as deeply damaging to civil liberties and democratic government. During the 1980s, E. P. Thompson returned as an essayist of the left in full spate against these threatening developments. See his Writing by Candlelight, London, Merlin Press, 1980
89. and The Heavy Dancers, London, Merlin Press, 1985.
90. The Times, editorial, 21 November 1979.
91. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791-92), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977, p. 138, p. 163, p. 153. France has had sixteen constitutions since 1789. According to Paine ('wherever a constitution cannot be produced in a visible form, there is none', p. 93) that would have been sixteen more than Britain.
92. Ian Harden and Norman Lewis, The Noble Lie. The British constitution and the rule of law, London, Hutchinson, 1986, p. 11, p. 224.
93. Dicey, Law of the Constitution, p. 3.
94. Ferdinand Mount, The British Constitution Now. Recovery or Decline?, London, Heinemann, 1992, p. 23, pp. 84-92.
95. Clark, English Society, p. 196.
96. For a check to Clark's views on the old aristocracy and eighteenth century society in general, see Joanna Innes, 'Jonathan Clark, Social History and England's "Ancien Regime" ', Past and Present 115, May 1987.
97. Amos, The English Constitution, pp. 5-6. Mount's three chosen interpreters, Bagehot, Dicey and Jennings, all believed in the 'secret personality' of parliamentary power: Constitution Now, chapter two.
98. Jennings, British Constitution, p. 120.
99. How a personalized British state - 'a peculiarly anthropomorphic view of public power', which 'is rarely explicitly acknowledged' - presents grave problems of accountability and constraint, see: Tony Prosser, 'Understanding the British constitution', Political Studies xliv, 1996, p. 473.
100. The classic study is Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot. Chivalry and the English Gentleman, London, Yale University Press, 1981.
101. Christopher Hussey, 'Bath and the Eighteenth Century', in The Book of Bath, Bath 1925, p. 67.
102. For the example of gentleman farmers, see: F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, p. 345;
103. S. Richards, 'Agricultural Science in Higher Education', Agricultural History Review 33, 1985
104. and J. R. Walton, 'Pedigree and National Herd Cattle 1750-1950', Agricultural History Review 34, 1986.
105. John Keegan, The Face of Battle. A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1987, p. 225.
106. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 193, p. 12.
107. On the shift in language conventions see Ted Bogacz, '"A Tyranny of Words": Language, Poetry and Antimodernism in England in the First World War', Journal of Modern History 58, September 1986.
108. Sir Roy Strong, quoted in Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry. Britain in a climate of decline, London, Methuen, 1987, p. 72.
109. For a state within a state see, Duchess of Devonshire, The House. A Portrait of Chatsworth, London, Macmillan, 1987, pp. 13-16.
110. Though the last Duke of Northumberland was famously Hon. Sec. Alnwick Working Men's Club (CIU Affiliated). For sweeping surveys of the English aristocracy, incorporating the public and private histories, see F. M. L. Thompson's Presidential addresses on 'English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1990-92.
111. It is interesting to observe how lesser parts of the constitution change in response to its greater parts. Thus a former Anglican Bishop of Birmingham told the Sunday Times (26 November 1995) that a divorced Prince Charles could indeed ascend to the throne, in spite of the Church's position on the marrying of previously married people; and that the monarch's title as 'Supreme Governor' of the Church of England doesn't mean what it says.
112. 1988, three-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Rights, was a bad year in this respect, and worse was to follow: Donald Shell, 'The British constitution in 1988', Parliamentary Affairs 42, 1989, and the Report of Lord Justice Scott on government activities then and thereafter, vi. 46.
113. 'As a result of its tremendous economic power, the modern British state continues to exercise an invasive influence on social life of a sort only comparable to that of the absolutist monarchs of early modern Europe': John Gray, Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment, London, Routledge, 1993, p. 12.
114. Gray, Beyond the New Right, p. vii.
115. Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street. A Description of the Money Market (1873), in Norman St John-Stevas, The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, London, The Economist, 1978, vol. ix, pp. 52-53.
116. See for example Quintin Hogg, The Case for Conservatism, West Drayton, Penguin, 1947, pp. 8-14.
117. 'All general maxims in politics ought to be established with great caution', David Hume, lovingly quoted in Ian Gilmour, Inside Right. A Study of Conservatism, London, Quartet, 1978, p. 53.
118. Committee of Public Accounts, Eighth Report, House of Commons Session 1993-94, p.v.
119. From the promotional literature of The Walpole Committee, an exercise founded in 1992 to sell traditional Britishness and its 'understated excellence'. Among the member companies were British Airways, Daks and Land Rover.
120. Nolan, Standards in Public Life, vol. ii, op. cit., p. 498, 2304, on the Woosters and the former permanent secretary, evidence of Prof. Peter Hennessy, p. 370, 1715 and p. 365, 1696.
121. See also Professor Dawn Oliver, p. 498, 2303. For general conclusions on pressures and behaviours, see Standards in Public Life, vol. i, Report, p. 3 and throughout. Some witnesses in volume ii were sympathetic to Enoch Powell's refusal to disclose his interests, resting instead on his honour, but thought its time was past: vol ii, p. 10, 43; p. 52, 267; p. 59, 311. Lord Blake believed that corruption, or at any rate understandings of acceptability and unacceptability, went in phases: 1860-95, 'very little trouble'; 1895-1930, 'a lot'; 1930-65, 'I do not think you could write an interesting book about British corruption'; 1965-, new phase (p. 13). There might have been insider codes and they might have been seen as decent, gentlemanly even, but it is as well to remember that in the 1950s Hayek worried about the delegation of power from one set of gentlemen, the law-makers, to another set, the administrators who were, 'in effect, given power to wield coercion without rule'. He perceived little difference between socialists and Conservatives on this matter and saw it as a growing loss of liberty to gentlemen who mistakenly claimed to know best: F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960), London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976, p. 212, p. 243. He called his chapter 'Decline of the Law'. In 1969 the Strauss Report on MPs conduct was ignored. In 1976 there was the (Salmon) Royal Commission on standards of conduct in Public life. A Register of Members' Interests was introduced in 1974 after the political and financial scandals surrounding John Poulson's companies. But registration was voluntary, or gentlemanly. Nolan recommended full and compulsory disclosure.
122. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is Sir Gordon Downey, formerly of the senior Civil Service, the National Audit Office and the City of London: The Guardian, 7 November 1995. In 1978 Sir Ian Moncreiffe gamely reckoned that if the old species of gentleman was vanishing, or to be found only in 'a few select private zoos called clubs', a new generation of 'English leopards are, as usual, and with a long practice in camouflage, quietly engaged in adjusting their spots': Introduction, Douglas Sutherland, The English Gentleman, London, Debrett's Peerage, 1978, p. xi.
123. Alan Clark, Diaries, London, Phoenix, 1993, pp. 158-59.
124. Keith Robbins, ed., The Blackwell Biographical Dictionary of British Political Life in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, Blackwells, 1990, p. 291.
125. Dickens's Mr Veneering in Our Mutual Friend liked everything 'bran-new'. Mr Clark appeared to make something of the fact that his colleague, Mr Michael Heseltine, had had to buy his own furniture 'While all the nouves in the Party think he is the real thing; (p. 349). It is just likely that Mr Clark was playing games of literary allusion - possibly of the sort he thought his nouves would not understand - in a book whose only real subject is Mr Clark. In fact, Mr Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine (from 'the commercial middle-class of South Wales') did not only buy his own furniture but began his fortune by buying other people's: Robbins, Biographical Dictionary, p. 203.
126. See David Miller, On Nationality, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996, p. 172. Miller calls for constitutional changes accompanied by a new sense of national identity which affirms collective interests and sentiments.
127. Jeremy Paxman, Friends in High Places. Who Runs Britain?, London, Penguin, 1991, p. 335.