The Economist 2012 03 10 by The Economist

Author:The Economist [Economist, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Economist
Published: 2012-03-09T21:11:18+00:00

Bagehot

A wit may also be wise

In praise of an unconventional democrat and guardian of the original Bagehot’s memory

HIS foes saw only snobbery and a peacock’s weakness for dazzle and colour. In truth Norman St John-Stevas, who died on March 2nd, aged 82, drew delight and succour from pageantry and tradition as others take warmth from the sun.

An important memory dated back to his teenage years, when the future academic, journalist and Conservative politician watched the wedding procession of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. In middle age, an Icarus-like government career (a shimmering rise, cut short by incaution) already behind him, he recalled the strength and comfort that he derived from that glimpse of royalty in a glass coach: a “shaft of light” amid the “physical and spiritual greyness” of post-war Britain.

Yet Lord St John of Fawsley, as he became, saw more than glitter in the great institutions of state. He saw a valuable, oak-beam solidity beneath their gilded sheen. And he was convinced that though the British public are a mistrustful lot, deep down they share that yearning for strong constitutional structures.

His beliefs were reinforced by study of Walter Bagehot, a Victorian writer and editor of The Economist. St John-Stevas, who was a correspondent at this newspaper before entering Parliament in 1964, spent two decades editing Bagehot’s complete works, in 15 volumes. (He also tracked down the great man’s 89-year-old nephew, who fondly remembered his uncle and how he pronounced his name. It’s with a soft “g”, as in badger.)

Both men saw the monarchy as embodying the “dignified” parts of the state, conveying serene continuity while politicians squabble. A paternalist, St John-Stevas shared his hero’s view that to be a member of Parliament was a splendid thing—at least when an MP was free to follow his judgment, rather than instructions from constituents (St John-Stevas spent years defying his Essex electors, notably voting to abolish the death penalty, to outlaw racial discrimination and to legalise homosexuality).

He loved to cite Bagehot’s view that the “essence of Toryism is enjoyment”. Rather more furtively, he quoted Bagehot’s faith in the “stupidity” of the English, by which he meant a stolid resistance to novelty, and thus to the wilder excesses of ideology.

St John-Stevas was an elitist, sometimes outrageously so. He was also a democrat and much concerned with social justice. Out of that tangle of beliefs came his greatest legacy: the system of MPs’ select committees overseeing each government department that he established in his brief time as Leader of the House of Commons. To achieve it, he had to fight fellow-ministers, who rightly foresaw “a shock to the system” and a huge increase in scrutiny, says Lord Fowler, a former cabinet minister. But St John-Stevas was willing to fortify tradition with a dose of progress, says Lord Lamont, a former chancellor of the exchequer and a friend for 40 years: “He was above all a Tory romantic. He loved Victoriana, he loved Parliament, Disraeli and Gladstone, but he saw the good things in modernity.”

Many tributes have dwelt on his personal contradictions.

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