Scorn (10 page)

This goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and uncharted woods of Celtic antiquity.
John Maynard Keynes on David Lloyd George

He aroused every feeling except trust.
A.J.P. Taylor on David Lloyd George

The tenth possessor of a foolish face.
David Lloyd George on any aristocrat

When they circumcised Herbert Samuel they threw away the wrong bit.
David Lloyd George. Attrib.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.
Margot Asquith on David Lloyd George

The Right Honourable gentleman has sat so long on the fence that the iron has entered his soul.
David Lloyd George on Sir John Simon. Attrib.

It is fitting that we should have buried the Unknown Prime Minister by the side of the Unknown Soldier.
Herbert Asquith at Andrew Bonar Law's funeral. Attrib.

For twenty years he has held a season-ticket on the line of least resistance.
Leo Amery on H.H. Asquith

If I am a great man, then a good many of the great men of history are frauds.
Andrew Bonar Law. Attrib.

I must follow them; I am their leader.
Andrew Bonar Law

I met Curzon in Downing Street, from whom I got the sort of greeting a corpse would give to an undertaker.
Stanley Baldwin. Attrib.

One could not even dignify him with the name of a stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air.
George Orwell on Stanley Baldwin

I would rather be an opportunist and float, than go to the bottom with my principles round my neck.
Stanley Baldwin

Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.
Winston Churchill on Stanley Baldwin

He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally
sterile mind … Listening to a speech by Chamberlain is like paying a visit to Woolworth's; everything in its place and nothing above sixpence.
Aneurin Bevan on Neville Chamberlain

The people of Birmingham have a specially heavy burden for they have given the world the curse of the present British Prime Minister.
Sir Stafford Cripps on Neville Chamberlain

There but for the grace of God goes God.
Winston Churchill on Sir Stafford Cripps

Well, he seemed such a nice old gentleman, I thought I would give him my autograph as a souvenir.
Adolf Hitler on Neville Chamberlain

He saw foreign policy through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.
Winston Churchill on Neville Chamberlain; also attrib. to David Lloyd George

He was a meticulous housemaid, great at tidying up.
A.J.P. Taylor on Neville Chamberlain

WANTED! Dead or alive! Winston Churchill. 25 years old. 5 feet 8 inches tall. Indifferent build. Walks with a bend forward. Pale complexion. Red-brownish hair. Small
toothbrush moustache. Talks through his nose and cannot pronounce the letter ‘S' properly.
Jan Smuts on Winston Churchill

I thought he was a young man of promise; but it appears he was a young man of promises.
Arthur James Balfour, writing in his diary of Winston Churchill's entry into politics

His style … is not very literary, and he lacks force.
The Daily News
on Winston Churchill's Maiden Speech

His impact on history would be no more than the whiff of scent on a lady's purse.
David Lloyd George on Arthur Balfour

Wherever Sir Stafford Cripps has tried to increase wealth and happiness, grass never grows again.
Colm Brogan, in ‘Our New Masters'

I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities; but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described ‘The Boneless Wonder'. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.
Winston Churchill on Ramsay MacDonald

Sit down, man. You're a bloody tragedy.
James Maxton, Scottish Labour leader, heckling Ramsay MacDonald during the latter's last Commons speech. Attrib.

Winston had devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromptu speeches.
F.E. Smith on Winston Churchill

Tell the Lord Privy Seal I am sealed to my privy, and can only deal with one shit at a time.
Winston Churchill when interrupted on the toilet in his wartime bunker and told the Lord Privy Seal wished to see him. Attrib.

A glass of port in his hand and a fat cigar in his mouth, with a huge and bloody red steak which he puts in his mouth in big chunks, and chews and chatters and smokes until the blood trickles down his chin – and to think this monster comes of a good family.
Joseph Goebbels on Winston Churchill

A sheep in sheep's clothing.
Winston Churchill on Clement Attlee

A tardy little marionette.
Randolph Churchill on Clement Attlee

Dear Randolph, utterly unspoilt by failure.
Noël Coward on Randolph Churchill

A triumph of modern science – to find the only part of Randolph that wasn't malignant and remove it.
Evelyn Waugh on Randolph Churchill after an operation

An empty taxi arrived at 10 Downing Street, and when the door was opened Attlee got out.
Winston Churchill (attrib.) on Clement Attlee. But Kenneth Harris (
Attlee,
1982) says Churchill denied the quote.

He will be as great a curse to this country in peace as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war.
Winston Churchill on Aneurin Bevan

Christopher, I don't think Mr Mikardo is such a nice man as he looks.
Winston Churchill to his parliamentary private secretary, Christopher Soames, about Ian Mikardo, who was a famously ugly MP

He has a brilliant mind, until he makes it up.
Margot Asquith on Sir Stafford Cripps,
Autobiography

I must say that (Profumo) never struck me as a man at all like a cloistered monk; and that Miss Keeler is a professional prostitute. There seems to me to be a basic improbability about the proposition that their relationship was purely platonic. What are whores about? (turning to Macmillan) What is to happen now? We cannot just have business as usual … I certainly will not quote at him the savage words of Cromwell, but perhaps some word of Browning might be appropriate:

‘… let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation and pain.
Forced praise on our part – the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again.'
Nigel Birch MP on Harold Macmillan: Commons speech

Above any other position of eminence, that of Prime Minister is filled by fluke.
Enoch Powell

Defeat comes from God, victory comes from the Government.
Aneurin Bevan on Winston Churchill

I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.
Winston Churchill

I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.
Winston Churchill on Molotov

He never spares himself in conversation. He gives himself so generously that hardly anybody else is permitted to give anything in his presence.
Aneurin Bevan on Churchill

I stuffed their mouths with gold!
Aneurin Bevan, explaining how he persuaded doctors to accept the National Health Service. Attrib.

MPs love letting fly at each other. The Speaker often struggles to police their language. Since the Official Report commenced in 1861, we can read a bewildering variety of judgements from the chair. What is or is not acceptable as Parliamentary scorn seems to depend on the Speaker's digestion. Take, for instance, rulings on how far a Member may go in calling another Member a liar. The following have been disallowed:

1862 a Member's statement was ‘entirely false and without foundation' (Speaker: ‘The hon. Member should express himself in proper language.')

1863 ‘scandalous and unfolded'

1868 ‘doing dodges'

1870 ‘false'

1881 ‘hardly credible'

1883 ‘resorting to trickiness'

1884 ‘shuffling'

1886 ‘dishonest and hypocritical'

1887 ‘foul calumny' and ‘gigantic falsehood'

1888 ‘flippant mendacity'

1909 ‘cold and calculated lie'

1914 ‘mendacious'
‘infamous lie'
‘wilful falsehood'

1932 ‘perverter of the truth'

1945 ‘dishonest evasion'

1946 ‘abdominal lies'

1952 ‘a wicked misstatement of the truth'

1953 ‘dishonest'

1961 ‘untrue'

1963 ‘duplicity'

1966 ‘deliberate fabrication'

1967 ‘twister'

1976 ‘fiddling the figures'

1978 ‘arch confidence trickster'
‘spoke with a forked tongue'

1987 ‘economical with the truth'

1988 ‘numerological inexactitude'
‘organized mendacity'

1992 ‘telling porkies' (Speaker: ‘I think we will not have that word. It escaped my notice last week. I had to look it up in the dictionary, but now I know what it means the hon. Member should please withdraw it.')

1993 ‘dishonest'

But these slipped through:

1864 ‘a calumnious [sic] statement'

1946 ‘devoid of any truth'

1959 ‘cooking the figures'

1988 ‘shameless lack of candour'

1994 ‘tissue of lies'

And the following lived a half-life, appearing in the first
edition of Hansard then disappearing from a Defence minister's lips, and the bound volume, after the Speaker declared it could not be verified on audio recordings:

2008 ‘absolute bollocks'
(However, in 2016 Emily Thornberry MP, Shadow Defence Minister, got away with mouthing the word)

It is similarly out of order to accuse another Member of being drunk. All the following having been ruled out of order:

1935 ‘Have you been drinking?'

1945 ‘Take him out, he's drunk!'

1951 ‘alcoholic jeers'
‘not sober …'

1974 ‘the appearance of being slightly inebriated'

1976 ‘a semi-drunken Tory brawl'

1983 ‘in this condition' (Claire Short, MP, of the minister Alan Clark. I was there. He was drunk. But the Deputy Speaker reprimanded Short.)

1987 ‘in a drunken stupor'

However, in 1974 James Wellbeloved did slip past the Chair this half-retraction: ‘I am not suggesting that they are drunk, I am merely suggesting that they are giving a very good imitation of it.'

Comparing another Member with an animal is also unwise. In 1976 the Speaker (Selwyn Lloyd) was clear: ‘I always object to the use of animal terminology when applied to Members of
this House.' He was banning a description by an MP of the Members opposite as ‘laughing hyena'. Withdrawing the words, the MP substituted ‘laughing Ken Dodds opposite', which the Chair found satisfactory. How Lloyd would view Michael Foot's description of Norman Tebbit as a ‘semi house-trained polecat' we shall never know. Hansard's first recorded animalistic references consisted only of noises. These, and terms in the list which follows, have been ruled out of order:

1872 ‘amid the general confusion were heard imitations of the crowing of cocks, where at the Speaker declared the scenes unparliamentarily, and gross violations of order'

1884 ‘bigoted, malevolent young puppy'

1885 ‘jackal'

1886 ‘Tory skunks'

1923 ‘chameleon politician'

1930 ‘insolent young cub'

1931 ‘lie down, dog!'
‘noble and learned camels' (of the Lords)

1936 ‘swine'

1946 ‘silly ass'

1948 ‘dirty dog'

1949 ‘stool pigeons'

1952 ‘you rat'

1953 ‘cheeky young pup'

1955 ‘rat'

1977 ‘snake'

1978 ‘bitchy' (of Mrs Thatcher)

1985 ‘baboons'
‘his shadow spokesman's monkey'

1986 ‘political weasel and guttersnipe'

1987 ‘the morals of tom cats'

1989 ‘political skunk'

And these were allowed by the Chair:

1989 ‘the attention span of a gerbil'
‘the wolf of Dagenham'

1992 ‘the hamster from Bolsover' (of Dennis Skinner)
‘cruel swine' (of Kenneth Baker)

A surprising permission was the Speaker's declining to stop an MP describing Margaret Thatcher as ‘behaving with all the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa constrictor'.

I have been helped in the selection of these examples by the research of parliamentary writer Phil Mason, whose book
Nothing Good Will Ever Come of It
quotes more than a century of MPs' recorded predictions, most of them hilariously off-target. Drawing on Mason's files, there follows a selection of various other Speakers' rulings on questionable language:

DISALLOWED

1861 ‘very insolent and scornful' (of the Chancellor)

1867 ‘returned by the refuse of a large constituency' (of an MP)

1872 ‘three peaceful shepherds had already turned their pipes behind him' (Speaker: ‘not becoming expression')

1875 ‘Villains' (Samuel Plimsoll describing shipowners)