It isn’t unusual for the tail to wag the dog. Time and again in history, the powers that be have been deemed unfit for purpose. Hence the need for another locus for real power — the political aide. Kings have tended to be oafish and peevish creatures, and in the past, brainpower was instead concentrated in the heads of their meritocratic ministers and visionary viziers. In our time, it has been left to quangocrats and counsellors to remedy the cerebral defects of a photogenic political class whose odious lucidity reigns unchecked.
In practice, however, the division of labour between policy and politics, architect and salesman, has never been quite so benign. Far from being shrinking violets doing what is best, the powers behind the throne have all too often been true believers — feverish sectarians for fanatical causes. Here lies the paradox of the political aide. As misfits, they possess a greater desire for domination than do the exnominated parroters of establishment opinion. It is this quality that endears them to rulers. Donald Trump surely believed that only a batty figure like Steve Bannon was capable of doing something as daunting as draining the Beltway swamp. And yet the zealous aide is his own worst enemy. With no real curbs on his shadowy authority, there is the all-too-real danger of enemies accruing and mistakes multiplying. Ultimately, his unsound decisions catch up with him. So it is that his downfall is just as dramatic as his rise.
Take that political aide par excellence, Thomas Cromwell, who supplied the template for the tragedy of the power-drunk maverick. Half a millennium on, our fascination with the Cromwell story is still going strong. The late, great Hilary Mantel bagged two Bookers retelling it in her Wolf Hall series, which was followed by a Beeb adaptation. Now, the TV series is back with a sequel, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, another chiaroscuro romp through draughty Tudor piles enlivened by chiselled persiflage. The upshot of the renewed attention, no doubt aided by the taciturn brilliance of Mark Rylance’s sad-eyed performance, has been a reversal in Cromwell’s fortunes. Long vilified as an intemperate megalomaniac, he has been recast as one of history’s heroes.
What’s more, to contemporary sensibilities, Cromwell appears as a meritocrat. Here is the story of a plucky parvenu, a fellow of “base degree” as he himself put it, who rose to the very top through sheer skill. It’s a rags-to-riches tale that has beguiled the very best. The German historian Geoffrey Elton’s mid-century view, now discarded but explosive at the time, was that Cromwell yanked England out of its mediaeval past by ushering in the “Tudor Revolution in Government”. Cromwell himself cultivated that image. This is the Cromwell of Holbein’s stern portrait, a mandarin hard at work with his quill and papers, unflecked by emotion, begetting England’s modern bureaucracy.
Truth be told, he did no such thing. As Diarmaid MacCulloch, his no-nonsense biographer shows, Cromwell was the quintessential mediaeval fixer, a hard-nosed, power-grubbing politico. There was nothing modern about the way he went about gobbling offices, hogging the king’s calendar, and staffing all echelons with loyalists. The rationalisation of the Privy Council as a modern cabinet of sorts, which Elton credited him for, in fact came in the way of Cromwell’s progress. He thrived in the cut and thrust of court life, its perils and possibilities, much as his descendants have done. The maverick political aides of our century — from Alastair Campbell to Dominic Cummings — really are a throwback to this Henrician world of old. Properly speaking, they are the Cromwells of today.
His modern heirs, of course, aren’t quite up there with the OG. Cromwell could be quite unsentimental in his handling of adversaries. For prophesying against the royal mésalliance with Anne Boleyn, for instance, the Catholic nun Elizabeth Barton was hung and beheaded, becoming, according to MacCulloch, “the only woman in English history to have her severed head placed among those spiked on London Bridge”. Then there was the fire and fury brought to bear on the Pilgrimage of Grace, the popular uprising by conservatives protesting social change.
Such bestial blitheness pointed to a willingness to tear up the rulebook if the occasion demanded it. But while Cromwell was a disruptor, he was also a diplomat. During his teenage stint as a globetrotting merchant, he absorbed tongues like a sponge, and in due course became “the best Italian in all England” — a linguistic ability he turned to good account by becoming Cardinal Wolsey’s protégé and later Henry VIII’s advisor during his break with the Bishop of Rome. Cromwell’s savoir-faire extended to delicate situations as well. It was as a marriage broker that he got into the good graces of England’s ruler, dealing with his breakup with Katherine of Aragon; the marriage to Boleyn, and then her beheading; and finally his wedding to a German princess, Anne of Cleves. It was the latter foray into matchmaking that proved his undoing. The well-upholstered Henry, in that innocent age before Ozempic, couldn’t get it up with Anne. Poor Cromwell became the fall guy.
Throughout his brief decade in power, what was never in doubt was Cromwell’s ruthlessness as Henry’s enforcer. He proved capable of accelerating the pace of history without losing his grip on power — no mean achievement. Many historians have typically explained away some of his more radical measures as the work of a manipulative Machiavelli, loyal to no calling but his career. We now know, however, that Cromwell was that rare thing, a true believer, something of a fanatic even. His Protestantism, or more accurately his evangelicalism, was serious business. The historian Dominic Selwood wasn’t too far off the mark when he described Cromwell’s creed as the “Islamic State of his day”.
The same fanaticism can be glimpsed in Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s enforcer and latterly has-been podcaster. In recent years, he has tried to present himself as no more than a ventriloquist for New Labour, but at the time, Campbell appeared to be a true believer. Blair certainly thought so, describing his first encounter with the former tabloid hack as some kind of coup de foudre. Campbell had “clanking great balls”, Blair wrote in his memoirs. A rather abrasive character, Campbell was prepared to bare them at the slightest provocation, as he did during his war of retribution against David Kelly, the weapons inspector who accused Campbell of “sexing up” the Iraq dossier that made the case for the invasion that New Labour was itching for. Soon after, Kelly committed suicide. Relations between the press and government continued to deteriorate in the runup to the war thanks to Campbell’s bullying and hectoring. As a result, Campbell was dropped as Downing Street director of communications in August 2003.
Campbell may not have “sexed up” the dossier, but it is important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The fact remains that Campbell not only joined in beating the drums of war, but did so with an amplitude that put many of his party mates to shame. Like the cocksure Cromwell, he had something of the fundamentalist about him. And like Cromwell, his actions exacted a toll on the world beyond. The Iraq war resulted in some 600,000 deaths according to Lancet. Blair himself paid a price: along with his weird pact with Gordon Brown, it was his plummeting popularity on account of the war that led to his resignation. Still, as late as 2010, Campbell could declare that the war was one that Britain ought to be “proud of”.
The bearded Brummie Nick Timothy, by contrast, was a lesser Rasputin, despite his appropriate mien. As unelected advisors go, his reign wasn’t in any way damaging to the national fabric. His sin was more of a peccadillo. But he seems to have shared the hubris of a Campbell or Cromwell, and like them, was ultimately responsible for the reckless gambit that led to his downfall. Along with his joint chief of staff Fiona Hill, Timothy had the bright idea of cajoling his ruler into calling a snap election in 2017, thus giving Corbynism a new lease of life and his English compatriots a lesson in Northern Irish politics when May inevitably lost her majority and needed to be shored up by the DUP. After an inevitable Tory revolt, Timothy and Hill were duly put out to pasture.
Thomas Cromwell’s greatest modern heir, undoubtedly, is Boris Johnson’s Svengali, Dominic Cummings. Their backgrounds, though, couldn’t have been more different. Cummings is no working-class lad from Putney. He may be an anti-establishment figure, but his credentials signal its deepest depths: Oxford via public school; father-in-law the baronet owner of Chillingham Castle; an Islington townhouse for a pied-à-terre. Also unlike Cromwell, who kept his cards close to his chest, Cummings likes to lay it on the line, as those subjected to his epithets know all too well: David Davis (“vain as Narcissus”), Nick Clegg (“revolting character”), Ed Llewellyn (“classic third-rate, suck-up-kick-down sycophant”) among others. Like Cromwell, however, Cummings was capable of being perfectly unforgiving when the occasion demanded it. Take his defence of herd immunity: the aim of the government, he declared early on in the pandemic, was to “protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”. It’s a sentiment Cromwell might have approved of.
As Johnson’s unelected fixer, Cummings unleashed a “reign of terror”, according to Whitehall mandarins. He went over the head of Sajid Javid to fire one of the chancellor’s advisors, ordering “an armed police officer to escort her out of Downing Street”. Javid later resigned over Downing Street’s penchant for muscling in on Treasury appointments. Throughout his career, Cummings has cultivated the reputation of an iconoclast, by turns intrepid and independent. His Oxford tutor recalled that he was a bit of a Robespierre: “someone determined to bring down things that don’t work.” When he left his job as advisor to education secretary Michael Gove in 2014, Cummings explained his decision with a 237-page manifesto in which he argued that education ultimately didn’t really matter, since in the end it was genetics that determined ability.
The following year, he found himself in charge of Vote Leave, a perch from which he urged Leavers to “pick up a baseball bat and smash David Cameron and George Osborne over the head”. Cummings ran a slick show. “Take back control” was a clever empty signifier, throwing up a tent wide enough to encompass Left sovereigntists, Right xenophobes, and patriotic bien pensants. Less convincing was the downright dishonest claim that some 80 million Turks would descend on the Thames and Tyne. Cummings and his cronies would have surely known that Ankara’s accession was never a real prospect. The misrepresentation brings to mind the manner in which Boleyn was thrown under the bus by Cromwell, who maligned her for, inter alia, conducting incestuous relations with her brother.
Cummings’ next gig, his last real one, was his 16-month tenure as Johnson’s chief advisor. Early on, he set about courting “weirdos from William Gibson novels”, whose presence in the civil service would, he hoped, diminish the outsized influence of “Oxbridge English graduates”, the kind, apparently, “who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers”. At all events, unlike Cromwell, Cummings never really had a chance to shape the government in his image. His general disdain for “the rules” no doubt prompted him to break them by driving up to Durham despite reeling from Covid with his family, and then making a further sojourn to Barnard Castle despite a “weird” sensation in his eyes. His sorry-not-sorry mea culpa cut no ice. Not even Benedict Cumberbatch playing him in a biopic, nor for that matter BrewDog’s Barnard Castle Eye Test IPA, could save him from the Tory MPs clamouring for his ouster. Very simply, Cummings had made too many enemies.
These days, Campbell is a sterile podcaster, Cummings a logorrhoeic Substacker — forlorn advisors abandoned by their masters now adored only by a vanishing minority of diehards (Campbell) and blowhards (Cummings). They can thank their lucky stars that they don’t live in the age of Cromwell, when the ruling class tended to be rather literal-minded about the expression “heads will roll”. For all that, Cromwell’s age is closer to us than we might think. Shadowy figures of the likes of Morgan McSweeney, purger of the Left, and Waheed Alli, Santa to the front bench, continue to haunt Westminster, running the Labour show from behind the scenes. The throne may be gone, but the powers behind the throne remain.
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