We need more intellectuals like Rees-Mogg in Cabinet
Like most accomplished people, Jacob Rees-Mogg is innately modest. He dismisses the idea of leading the Tory party. I hope he’s wrong. His articulation of his sincere but unpopular antiabortion convictions last week not only showed his integrity, but also his intellectual fearlessness. This, I fear, is what has kept him off the front bench, while people with a scintilla of his intelligence swan into office.
John Stuart Mill observed in 1866 that “stupid people are generally Conservative”. It does the party little credit that it has striven lately to live down to his estimation of it. Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinets included many with minds of their own, with whom she relished arguments – after all, debate is the best way to arrive at the right policy. Even Ted Heath could cope with robust minds such as Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph, Iain Macleod and Mrs Thatcher herself in his Cabinet or shadow cabinet.
But under David Cameron and Mrs May, a capacity for independent thought and an ability to question seemed to block preferment. Difference of opinion is taken as disloyalty and therefore as a threat: it reminds one of the Soviet concept of the dangerous intellectual. Such people commendably disregard focus groups, believing in leadership rather than followership and distrusting a herd mentality; and they think not so much the unthinkable, but the unobvious.
Mr Rees-Mogg, who has had a very successful business career and is enormously capable as well as highly educated, is not the only victim of this prejudice. Given the paucity of brains in the Government it is incomprehensible that John Redwood, a distinguished fellow of All Souls, does not serve in it. Anyone who reads Mr Redwood’s blog – and I regard it as essential – will be aware that he has been right about just about everything for years, which must really upset his less gifted colleagues.
And what about Kwasi Kwarteng, whose PhD in economic history from Cambridge has enabled him, after seven years in the Commons, to rise to the dizzying heights of parliamentary private secretary – or bag-carrier – to Philip Hammond?
The recent, horrific, election campaign demonstrated an almost utter absence of ideas in the Tory party – not just about policy, but about strategy. When men of the calibre of Messrs Rees-Mogg, Redwood and Kwarteng are regarded as surplus to requirements, it is no surprise Conservatism seems so intellectually barren, and wedded to the appeal of sentiment or, even worse, ignorance.
Without challenging the timidity and caution of current Conservative thinking, the party will become pointless, and important principles – of liberty, the free market and the rights of the individual against the power of the state – will be disregarded. If reshuffle rumours are true, Mrs May can seize the opportunity to break the spell of blistering mediocrity.
An expert on the Battle of Britain, the annual celebration of which falls on Friday, tells me it is believed there are only five of The Few still alive. We owe our liberty to these men: as Churchill said in 1940: “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.”
Fighter Command, in August and September 1940, ensured Hitler did not break us. They were often boys of 19 or 20, who are now in their late nineties. When one thinks of the disgraceful honours list last year, in which baubles were doled out to those whose only distinction was to have failed to organise a successful campaign to dupe us into staying in the EU, it begs the question – shouldn’t we use the system to show our gratitude to people to whom the nation genuinely owes an enormous debt?
All five of these men should be driven to Biggin Hill in a fleet of Rolls-Royces, to be knighted on the tarmac by the Queen; there should be fly-past of Spitfires and Hurricanes; and the massed bands of the Armed Forces should play the RAF March Past.
Soon it will be too late to show our gratitude and, as Churchill was the first to recognise, it is just about the most important thank you in our history.