dmund Burke has been a hero of mine for nearly four decades. I first read his Reflections on the Revolution in France when I was eighteen years old, on board a ship, the Midnight Alaskan, on a diving expedition off the coast of Nicaragua which was trying to locate four Spanish galleons with a cargo of silver and emeralds that had sunk on the way from Cartagena to Havana in the winter of 1704/05. We never found them—indeed they were discovered thirty-five years later, several hundred miles away from where we'd been looking—but instead I discovered another treasure trove in the shape of Burke's thoughts on the nature of conservatism. These have provided me with a star by which to guide myself in both politics and life ever since.
My first essay at Cambridge University, delivered to Professor Norman Stone back in the days when undergraduates wore gowns to supervisions, was on Burke. My first edition of Reflections, published in 1790, is among the most prized books of my library. All my working life I have had a two-foot-high statue of Burke on my desk, so he literally oversees everything I write. I even chose a passage from Reflections—the one about ten thousand swords leaping from their scabbards to defend the honor of Marie Antoinette—to be read as the lesson at my wedding. You can imagine, therefore, how proud I am to receive this particular award.
And not only an award named after my lifelong intellectual hero, but also one from TheNew Criterion, a magazine that I have read religiously for well over a decade, and which provides a monthly infusion of wit, intelligence, fearless honesty, and uncommonly good writing into a body politic both here and in my country that desperately needs it, in our modern world of rampant political correctness, rancorous identity politics, and terrifyingly ubiquitous ignorance of the past.
Someone else besides myself, Roger Kimball, and the staff of The New Criterion who admired Edmund Burke was Sir Winston Churchill, who constantly quoted him in the House of Commons, wrote about him in his books, and saw him as a teller of truths by which to measure himself. In the third volume of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill wrote that Burke was “a great political thinker. . . . [He] was able to diagnose the situation with an imaginative insight beyond the range of those immersed in the business of the day and bound by traditional habits of mind.” There were criticisms of Burke in that book, too, of course, but ones that Churchill knew had also been directed against himself. Churchill said that Burke was a man of principle, but that he lacked a strong and well-organized party to support him, which of course was true of Churchill for much of his life, but especially during the 1930s. (As Churchill said of his decision to cross the floor of the House of Commons not once but twice in his career, “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”)
Just in case anyone had failed to spot the connections between Burke and Churchill, Churchill made them clear. “For years Burke was a voice crying in the wilderness,” he wrote. “An orator to be named with the ancients, an incomparable political reasoner, he lacked both judgment and self-control. He was perhaps the greatest man that Ireland has produced. The same gifts, with a dash of indolence and irony . . . might have made him Britain's greatest statesman.” In the event it was Churchill himself—who was totally lacking in indolence but who relied heavily on English High Irony—who must be awarded that accolade.
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