Today

17 Dec 2020
Jesse Norman

The Enlightenment was a many-splendoured thing

History used to be so much easier. There were the Wars of the Roses, then the Reformation, the Civil War, the Enlightenment and finally the Victorians. Each one had its own century and its distinctive tag. Throw in Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, garnish with a few zealots and adventurers, some glorious triumphs and some grisly deaths. It was all part of our Island Story. You knew where you were. Take the Enlightenment, for example. Everyone knew that this was the Age of Reason: the moment when science finally started to impose order and banish religion. The French rationalists had their heyday, Voltaire, the philosophes and all that, before they were vanquished by the Scottish empiricists David Hume and Adam Smith and the great commercial acceleration of the late 18th century.

The Enlightenment was a many-splendoured thing

Thursday

9 Jan 2020
Jesse Norman

My clash with Cameron

MPs have a standard approach to political biographies, which falls into three phases: first, preliminary gossip about what will or won’t (always a lot more interesting) be in it; second, mildly salacious enjoyment of the usually tepid leaks and excerpts in the press beforehand; and third, once the book comes out, the inevitable furtive rummaging through the index to see if they get any mentions. Stage three is hardly restricted to MPs, of course: William F. Buckley famously sent Norman Mailer a book with ‘Hi Norman’ inscribed in the index, knowing Mailer would look there first. But I hadn’t got near stage three with David Cameron’s autobiography when my indefatigable assistant sent me a couple of spontaneous screen shots that made it clear that David had badly mis-remembered one small but significant episode: the 2012 rebellion over the government’s attempt to abolish the House of Lords.

My clash with Cameron

Thursday

15 Aug 2019
Jesse Norman

Wrong but revered

Who was Walter Bagehot? For generations of politics students he has been the all-but-unpronounceable — Bayge-hot? Baggott? — author of the magisterial The English Constitution (1867). Since the 2008 crash he has enjoyed a vogue among central bankers for Lombard Street (1873), his brilliant anatomisation of the City of London. He remains the most revered, though not the first, editor of the Economist. The historian G.M. Young wrote in 1937 of him: We are looking for a man who was in and of his age… with sympathy to share and genius to judge… whose influence… can still impart, the most precious element in Victorian civilisation, its robust and masculine sanity. In short, ‘the greatest Victorian’. That sobriquet is picked up in the title of James  Grant’s new book.

Wrong but revered

Thursday

27 Sep 2018
Jesse Norman

Politics trumps trade

‘What the hell is going on?’ That anxious wail of economic incomprehension has been heard ever since President Trump decided last January to impose tens of billions of dollars of tariffs on China and other countries, including Canada, Mexico and the member states of the EU. The wail went up another octave last week as the White House announced a further $200 billion in tariffs. Among the politicians and think tanks of Washington DC, where I have spent the past few days, there is talk of little else; talk rendered more feverish by the prospect of midterm elections in November. A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there — pretty soon we could be talking real money. Include retaliations from the other side, fold in a goodly measure of escalation, and the world’s first trillion-dollar trade war is not an impossibility.

Politics trumps trade

Wednesday

19 Sep 2018
Jesse Norman

John Law pioneered ideas about banking and monetary policy that are important to this day

John Law was by any standards a quite remarkable man. At the apogee of his power in 1720, he was the richest private citizen in Europe and controller-general of finance in France, responsible not merely for the country’s income and expenditure but for its commerce, navigation, agriculture and industry. He created and presided over one of the earliest and greatest of all stock market boom-and-busts, that of the ‘Mississippi Company’, and inspired another, the South Sea Bubble. And he pioneered ideas about banking, monetary policy and financial markets that were revolutionary in his own time, and retain their importance three centuries later. Yet Law was not French, not a noble, not an intellectual. On the contrary: he was a Scot, the largely self-educated son of an Edinburgh goldsmith, and a brilliant gambler.

John Law pioneered ideas about banking and monetary policy that are important to this day

Thursday

6 Sep 2018
Jesse Norman

A law unto himself

John Law was by any standards a quite remarkable man. At the apogee of his power in 1720, he was the richest private citizen in Europe and controller-general of finance in France, responsible not merely for the country’s income and expenditure but for its commerce, navigation, agriculture and industry. He created and presided over one of the earliest and greatest of all stock market boom-and-busts, that of the ‘Mississippi Company’, and inspired another, the South Sea Bubble. And he pioneered ideas about banking, monetary policy and financial markets that were revolutionary in his own time, and retain their importance three centuries later. Yet Law was not French, not a noble, not an intellectual. On the contrary: he was a Scot, the largely self-educated son of an Edinburgh goldsmith, and a brilliant gambler.

A law unto himself

Thursday

8 Mar 2018
Jesse Norman

Polemicist of genius

‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ Ronald Reagan made this most unconservative of lines a leitmotif of his 1980 presidential campaign, knowing its radicalism would highlight his energy, personal optimism and desire for change. As it duly did. The astonishing power over words of its author, Thomas Paine, persists to this day. In a letter of 1805, the former president John Adams said of Paine that there can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Yet even Adams was forced to confess: I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the past 30 years than Thomas Paine … Call it then the Age of Paine.

Polemicist of genius

Thursday

25 Sep 2014
Jesse Norman

Passion, authority and the odd mini-rant: Scruton’s conservative vision

Roger Scruton is that rarest of things: a first-rate philosopher who actually has a philosophy. Unfortunately at times for him, that philosophy is a conservative one. But his personal loss has been our great collective gain. As his new book again demonstrates, over the years his has been one of the few intellectually authoritative voices in modern British conservatism. In 1980, at the outset of the Thatcher decade, Scruton wrote The Meaning of Conservatism, a book which reportedly blighted his academic career: it remains an embarrassment to the British Academy that he was not made a Fellow until 2008. Academia may be softening at last, as his various professorships at Oxford and St Andrews testify. Yet living by his wits has not served him so badly.

Passion, authority and the odd mini-rant: Scruton’s conservative vision

Thursday

13 Feb 2014
Jesse Norman

Where did the Right and the Left come from? 

What is the origin of left and right in politics? The traditional answer is that these ideas derive from the French National Assembly after 1789, in which supporters of the King sat on one side and those of the revolution on the other. Yuval Levin in The Great Debate, however, argues not for seating but for ideas: that left and right enter the Anglo-American political bloodstream via the climactic public clash in the 1790s between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, the prime movers in a pamphlet war that convulsed opinion and engaged readers on two continents. If this is right, then the touchstone of modern political debate in Britain and America is not capitalism v. socialism, or religious fundamentalism v. cosmopolitan secularism, but an earlier and deeper disagreement over the nature of the modern liberal political order itself.

Where did the Right and the Left come from? 

Saturday

7 Jul 2012
Jesse Norman

Diary - 7 July 2012

House of Lords reform is like a dose of the clap: it may feel good at the time, but the result is an unending pain in the proverbials. I can’t, er, speak from personal experience, but even the briefest glance at the government’s plans to elect the Lords makes the point. The new bill comes to the Commons next week, for what promises to be a stormy debate. It’s a disastrous hotchpotch which will create a free-floating class of electorally empowered senators on 15-year terms, with no constituencies and no possibility of re-election to discipline them. Even Lord Strathclyde, Leader in the Lords, has admitted that the new senators will have no accountability. Result: competing chambers, legislative gridlock, cronyism, and a free pass for the government of the day.

Saturday

27 Aug 2011
Jesse Norman

Borneo Notebook

•••After a week in the jungle, it is perfectly clear to me that in any contest for creepy-crawly capital of the world, Borneo would be right up there with no questions asked. They tell you about the mosquitoes. What they don’t tell you about are the leeches, which are everywhere. The ordinary brown kind lie in wait on the path, rearing up like two-inch mini-Godzillas full of gangster attitude and the will to win. Used to chomping through boar and mouse-deer hide, they made short work of my hiking socks. They pump up from matchstick to chipolata size in a few minutes if you don’t catch them quickly, and inject an anticoagulant so you end up bleeding for hours after the bite. But worse are the tiger leeches: nasty little blighters with go-faster stripes, which shimmy up into the trees and drop down on to you.

Borneo Notebook
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