A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
From this profoundly moving passage of T.S. Eliot emerged the name of a conference in the heart of Westminster, called “Now and England”. Organised by the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, and pulled together by the Stakhanovite Cambridge Theology Professor Dr James Orr.
You might have thought that a conference, held in a stifling, un air-conditioned room, hosted by a Cambridge don and named after a line of elegiac poetry might have been a mournful, melancholic affair.
You would be wrong — gloriously wrong, in fact. The event was full of people talking about new initiatives, and debating fundamental questions about identity and philosophy in a way that would have had CCHQ’s party conference organisers glancing nervously at what the lobby was writing, and their Labour reaching for a dictionary to try to keep up.
Speaking were the usual mix of academics, MPs, and journalists, but there was a much more entrepreneurial spirit to the contributions than normal. The first speaker was Robert Jenrick, who came almost literally from down a mountain to speak (he had spent the weekend completing the three peaks challenge).
His was a wide-ranging speech veered ever so slightly off his shadow brief, covering immigration, energy costs and, err, the economy. Quoting Scruton liberally, he also became the first MP to describe himself as an “Anglofuturist”, an exciting, positive new idea that holds the radical contention that England should once again be really good at stuff and nice to live by embracing both technology and tradition — think thatched-roofed space stations and small modular reactors on underneath every cricket pavilion (thanks to Calum Drysdale and Tom Ough for those!).
The next session was on paper, again, an unlikely source of dynamism. But almost all of the panellists used their slots to advertise new organisations and projects that are actually trying to change policy, change the academy and inspire people.
There’s Patrick Nash’s Pharos Foundation and an announcement of funding for proper academics.
Then there was architecture influencer Conor Lynch and tales of summer schools where architectural students are actually taught how to make beautiful things.
And Ed West took time out from writing his excellent but doom-spiral-inducing Substack to promote the new Canon Club, to introduce newcomers to the classical canon (declaration of interest; I’m involved in the latter).
It was almost as if Dragons Den was hosted in the Lyceum.
The only dull part of the day was when I sat on the stage over the lunch break and attempted to defend the Conservative Party from all-comers. Hopefully I channelled Horatius at the Gate more than Hiroo Onoda.
The final session actually threatened to have too much soundness in one room; MPs Danny Kruger and Rupert Lowe, historian Robert Tombs, and the BOSH man off Twitter. That’s right, a day of political entrepreneurialism was capped off with the “absolute guv’nor”; Apprentice finalist, market trader and all-around charisma nuke, Tom Skinner.
The targets of ire are becoming increasingly familiar, in a highly encouraging way; Robert Tombs talks of the Quangocracy with the cold fury that Nelson reserved for French sailors. The left were filleted by Danny Kruger, pulverised by Lowe, and then liquidised by Skinner.
Speaking of political entrepreneurialism, there was one question on everybody’s mind before heading to the pub; was Tom Skinner going to get into politics? Based on the way he almost blew out the AV system, not to mention the raw enthusiasm radiating off of him, he would eat Sadiq “like a Lasagne at Dino’s diner at 4:30 in the morning”.
We just need, again in Eliot’s words, make the fire and the rose one
Understanding the British right in the 2020s is to realise that it must be an alliance of the archetypes assembled on stage at this conference. It will take esteemed academics like Tombs, gentry farmers like Lowe, Christian apologists like Kruger, and pint-necking, Bentley-driving massive lads like Skinner. The common factor is that they all love England, even now.
We just need, again in Eliot’s words, make the fire and the rose one. If we can do that, then:
… all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
