Edmund Burke: The Visionary Who Invented Modern Politics. Jesse Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ taken to make it too small for the membership. In Churchill’s words, ‘The essence of good House of Commons speaking is the conversational style, the facility for quick, informal interruptions and interchanges … [This] requires a fairly small space, and there should be on great occasions a sense of crowd and urgency … a sense of the importance of much that is said and a sense that great matters are being decided, there and then, by the House.’ The chamber thus measures a rather modest 68 feet by 46 feet, and contains only 427 places for 650 MPs. Yet the eighteenth-century chamber was smaller still, at about 58 feet by 33 feet or 300 to 350 places for 558 MPs, an even smaller percentage. It functioned effectively simply because many county members only rarely attended.

      The sense of enclosure was increased after 1707, when Sir Christopher Wren remodelled the chamber, bringing the ceiling down and installing galleries supported by columns along both sides. Then as now, such a confined space is infinitely removed from the empty caverns of the great modern democracies. In it politics becomes, literally, hot and personal. Today the chamber of the House of Commons is the only air-conditioned public space in the Palace of Westminster, and a blessed refuge from a steamy summer day. In Burke’s time it must have been stifling.

      Then as now, the members faced each other. The seating reflected the institution’s earliest origins in St Stephen’s Chapel; for in an English chapel the congregants look across the aisle, not towards the altar as in a church. The Speaker and clerks sat, wigged and gowned, at the east end beneath three high windows. Senior ministers wore full court dress, with swords; the sartorial contrast with backbenchers was such that it caused something of a stir when large numbers of them lost office in 1782 and the Rockinghamites appeared in the Commons from court, bedecked in blue, with swords, lace and hair powder. But, ministers apart, there was no dress code as such: members wore hats, boots, sometimes spurs, and often carried sticks. They talked among themselves, ate fruit or nuts, and not infrequently slept in the chamber; but they were forbidden to smoke or read. Without the microphones and tiny speakers dotted around the modern chamber, members needed formidable powers of vocal projection if they were to make themselves heard.

      Since Walpole’s time the modern custom had arisen that government ministers would sit on the front bench on the Speaker’s right, and by the 1770s senior opposition figures sat on the bench directly facing them. But – there being as yet no political parties in the modern sense – other members sat individually or in groups as they chose. Burke normally sat, with other Rockinghamites, on the third row behind the opposition front bench, close to a pillar and not far from the Speaker’s chair. That was close enough to be fully engaged in the cut and thrust of debate, but distant enough to underline the group’s independence in opposition.

      There followed the awful initiation of a maiden speech. Some of life’s terrors are inevitable, others self-inflicted, and among the latter there are few to compare with the task of making a maiden speech in the House of Commons. To dull the pain, both for the speaker and their audience, the convention has arisen in recent times that maiden speeches should be short, pleasant and uncontroversial. They often take place late at night, in minor debates, when few MPs are present and the chamber is becalmed. The new member sings the praises of their predecessor, however evil or incompetent, and takes those present on a light and ideally brief tour of the constituency, before identifying some worthy cause as their one true political ambition. Rare and brave is the MP who deviates from this primrose path.

      Things were very different in Burke’s day. A maiden speech was a political statement, of course; but it was also a social one, in which the ambitious novice sought to cut a certain figure, regardless of his – and it was always ‘his’, until the twentieth century – personal origins. Most importantly, it was a first presentation of political force. In the days before round-the-clock media coverage, political debate focused on the chamber of the House of Commons. Moreover, a really controversial Bill hugely increased attendance, from 200–300 members to over 400, most of the extra being county members, of more independent mind. There being relatively little ‘whipping’ or party discipline to speak of, none of the present party lines to take and no national political organizations to take them, effective oratory could make a huge difference. Careerists heeded the MP Hans Stanley’s advice: ‘Get into Parliament, make tiresome speeches; you will have great offers; do not accept them at first, then do: then make great provision for yourself and family, and then call yourself an independent country gentleman.’ But, given the stakes, many MPs simply could not bring themselves to make a maiden speech at all. The great historian Edward Gibbon was one such, in a political career of nine years; the poet Andrew Marvell was another, a century earlier. More than half the 558 members never spoke at all on public matters.

      Burke took the plunge on 17 January 1766. This was no primrose path. The occasion was the stormy debate on repeal of the Stamp Act, the chamber packed and rancorous – Karl Anton Hickel’s painting of Pitt addressing the Commons after news of the French declaration of war in 1793 conveys something of the atmosphere (see following page/s). But not only did Burke speak once; he spoke again, and once more, and then frequently on subsequent days. There were no official, full or accurate records of debates at that time; the great crisis of whether or not the Commons would permit public reporting of debates only occurred in 1771. But even so it is clear that Burke was extremely effective. No less an authority than the Great Commoner himself weighed in: after a speech in February it was remarked that Burke ‘received such compliments on his performance from Mr Pitt as to any other man would have been fulsome, but applied to him were literally true and just’.

4. The House of Commons 1793–94

      Under other circumstances this might have been the beginning of a long friendship between the older and the younger man. In fact the opposite was the case. Shortly afterwards Burke went on a mission to see Pitt at his house in Kent. He sought to persuade the older man of the merits of a free port in Dominica, but also to ask on Rockingham’s behalf whether and how Pitt might be prepared to return to government. The mission underlined the fragility of Rockingham’s government, and his increasing reliance on his secretary. But in hindsight it was exceedingly ill judged, for even the most cursory understanding of Pitt’s character would have made clear that this supreme egoist was not about to discuss such issues with a mere parliamentary whippersnapper. Pitt dismissed Burke in the most cutting terms, and sent him away with a flea in his ear. The result was to create bad feeling between them, magnified by Burke’s increasing view that Pitt was in fact a bombast who lacked any real intellectual substance. When the Younger Pitt took office some fifteen years later, Burke’s view of him may already have been coloured by a degree of familial antipathy.

      The Rockingham administration fell in July 1766, after little more than a year. It was undermined by the inexperience and incompetence of its ministers, by Rockingham’s unwillingness to treat with the followers of Bute, whom he regarded as mere placemen for the King, and most of all by the opposition of Pitt. Pitt had denounced the Stamp Act as unconstitutional, as asserting a right to tax colonists who were not represented in the Commons, a position which earned him wild popularity in America. Now he turned around and distanced himself from Rockingham and his followers, through a general denunciation of political parties and factions as such. The King, who similarly despised parties, took the hint and invited Pitt himself to form a government. This Pitt did from the House of Lords as the newly ennobled Lord Chatham, a transformation from Great Commoner to Noble Lord which earned him enormous public ridicule and opprobrium.

      Burke’s reaction, as so often, was to turn to his pen. The result was A Short Account of a Late Short Administration. At just 750 words, it was less a political pamphlet than a squib, a brief piece of instant history designed to present a favourable image of the departed ministry’s year in office and its achievements. The Rockingham administration had brought calm to the Empire, the argument went, and placed British trade upon a settled basis. It had preserved the constitution, and enhanced the liberties of the subject through СКАЧАТЬ