Tradition is more than mere habit... it is the patriotic glue that binds our Kingdom together
AFORTNIGHT ago in Westminster, a great crisis arose as, in the wake of the Christmas election, another State Opening of Parliament loomed.
Perhaps as a gesture to the gravity of the times, or what had been a sticky year for her family, the Queen was to dress down.
By contrast, the new Speaker of the House of Commons, the wonderful Lindsay Hoyle – jolly, self-mocking, his luscious Lancashire tones so reminiscent of clogs, cobbles and ’otpot – was no less determined to dress up.
In implicit rebuke to the outgoing and ghastly John Bercow, he would don full court dress – the buckled shoes, the black hose and britches, the doublet and jabot, the traditional robes, and the magnificent fullbottomed wig last sported by the late Sir Bernard Weatherill, who retired as Speaker in 1992.
But, despite exhaustive search of the Palace of Westminster, those long tight curls of horsehair could nowhere be found.
Old lags believe it was last sighted in 2000, when officials offered it to Michael Martin on his election to the Speaker’s Chair that autumn.
Gorbals Mick declined and, as he passed away last year, took the secret of the wig’s whereabouts with him. Hoyle, one gathers, has now ordered a new one, if only to be sported on high days.
Ours is not an age that respects tradition. Yet, as individuals and families, we all have them.
At 3pm on Christmas Eve, you will always find me making a batch of mince pies to the radio accompaniment of the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge.
It is a day otherwise of frantic preparations, duties, last-minute shopping and tussles with Sellotape and wrapping-paper.
But for that hour and a half I have stillness, those great hymns of the Church, and nervous undergraduates far away reading timeless portions of the King James Bible.
And at New Year, in my Hebridean community, we have two others – that, come ‘the Bells’ at midnight, one is always at home with the family, whatever revelries elsewhere might precede it or follow thereafter; and, about noon on January 1, we attend church for a special service of thanksgiving and hope.
In many ways the late general election was an emphatic backing of tradition. It was a great day for democracy but also, as a former Bishop of London has observed, a great day for patriotism.
For three years we had been tied in hopeless knots because, taking Parliament and the party leaders at their word, we had voted for something most MPs did not want to do – as became fast and horrifically evident once Theresa May blew her overall majority.
Pious
So for months on end we endured both fatuous talk about Parliament’s principal job being to hold the Government to account, pious quotation from Edmund Burke – that an MP owes you his judgment; and must not sacrifice it to your opinion – and ceaseless relitigation of Government decisions in the courts.
Burke’s line was in an address to the electors of Bristol. Few care to remember that they refused to vote for him.
When, thanks to the antics of John Bercow and the ring-banding of the Fixed Term Parliament Act, MPs first seized control of their own agenda last year, it fast became hilariously apparent that while most of them were against Brexit, they could not on any point agree what they were for.
So, three weeks ago, we – the people, and by the delicious little traditions of a general election, from stubby pencils on string to the hovering village bobby – swept that Parliament decisively away for a new one.
Notably, not one of the rebels and defectors successfully secured re-election. Nor, laughably, any of the candidates with whom Hugh Grant so pompously campaigned.
And, by the end of this month and in strong echo of the Reformation, this island nation will be back in full selfgovernment, overruled and patronised by no one.
Much has been made of the ‘Red Wall,’ all those baked-in Labour seats in the north and midlands of England which fell at last, and in such number, to Boris Johnson – and which had voted so robustly for Brexit.
Many contemptuous words have been written about their ‘low-information’ electorate. What is largely overlooked is their patriotism.
From those very shires, our armed forces draw most of their recruits; in those redbrick communities are most of our barracks.
And they most properly recoiled from a Labour Party which made no secret of its contempt for faith, family, and, especially, Britain itself.
Ours is an extraordinary land because so many of our wealthy, educated and influential people openly despise it.
As George Orwell observed, your typical intellectual would rather steal from the church poor-box than stand for the National Anthem – and in Sir Oliver Letwin, who typifies that class and whose 2019 Parliamentary antics infuriated so many, we saw just one example of a man educated out of his common sense.
Labour, in its ridiculous manifesto, sententiously promised to conduct ‘an audit of the impact of Britain’s colonial legacy to understand our contribution to the dynamics of violence and insecurity across regions previously under British colonial rule’.
The terrorist atrocities on our own soil, the West Bank, the instability of Hong Kong, the New IRA, the smouldering crisis in Kashmir, the basketcase that is Zimbabwe – they and much else, apparently, were all our fault.
There was no mention of the schools and hospitals founded, the Commonwealth over, by selfless Christian missionaries; the realms of superstition and cruelty to which we brought peace, order and decent roads, or how – uniquely – we spawned parliaments in the dominions, quietly laying the slipways to their independence.
Sermons
Was it any wonder that, three weeks ago, we swept emphatically behind a Prime Minister who unambiguously loves his country and sees Brexit as an exciting opportunity, rather than a Labour leader who thinks Britain and her history is something for which we should all apologise?
A big part of Boris Johnson’s appeal is that he draws on something deep in tradition – an earthy, self-mocking Falstaffian Merrie England, not given to great airs or to the trite and-furthermore-Isay-unto-you little sermons of a Blair or a Cameron.
One might even mischievously observe that Robert Walpole, too – considered to be our very first Prime Minister – openly maintained a mistress 25 years his junior.
Walpole held the office for 20 years.
Johnson is probably good for ten, especially if, as one of his predecessors has bitterly put it, a traditional Leftwing party continues to compete with a traditional Right-wing party – with the traditional result.