The National Interest
Summer 2001

Britain and the Intellectuals

by Ferdinand Mount

 

. . . In the winter of 1962-63, by now in my mid-twenties, I was appointed assistant courier and general dogsbody to Selwyn Lloyd, until recently our Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had been sacked by Harold Macmillan in a desperate purge to regain popularity-the Night of the Long Knives, as it was called. To keep Selwyn quiet, he had been given, by way of consolation, the task of investigating the Conservative Party to find out what defects there might be in its political machine. Of course, the real defect at that time was the Prime Minister, but in politics party organization is always a convenient scapegoat.

For me the assignment was an unforgettable experience. We traveled the length and breadth of England and Wales. To a young man from the soft south of England who knew only the gentle undulations of Salisbury Plain and the antique serenity of Eton and Oxford, this odyssey was an education. In those narrow rain-swept valleys of Lancashire and Yorkshire,it seemed as though nothing much had happened since the first Industrial Revolution. We passed by miles of great sooty brick factories often with broken windows stuffed with rags, all apparently derelict. Yet you could sometimes still hear the hum of ancient machinery, and a dim light might be visible through the murky panes. The local Conservatives we met-Bradford wool merchants, Halifax fireworks manufacturers, South Wales steel men-seemed scarcely less antique, most of them well advanced into middle age, swathed in waistcoats and watch chains, robust and forthright, yet, I sensed, with an underlying feeling that the great days of their particular industries were over. As indeed, alas, in many cases they were. . . .