"If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain"
For much of my adult life I have misattributed the above quote to Churchill. A superficial web search throws enough doubt for me to be unsure of its true origin and slightly embarassed to have been wrong for so long; Churchill having famously left the Tories at age of 56 to join the Liberals for a two-decade stint.
I suspect the reason I have not questioned its origin is because it appears to be so self-evident. As we get older, we have more to protect. The most obvious corrolary is, "Turkeys don't vote for Christmas". And yet maybe I should start examining the things I believe to be obvious in more detail as 2020 seems to have more than a little topsy-turveyness about it.
I have felt disenfranchised for the best part of a decade, if not longer. My political choices have generally been choices between the least dreadful. I cannot remember voting for someone I genuinely trusted to do right by society. In my youth I despised Margaret Thatcher at least partly because I was young and to do so was fashionable. Looking back now, although I still disagree with most of her policies and grieve at the damage done to communities and society, I can at least respect a values-led politician.
John Major is a man to whom history has been surprisingly kind, although his fondness for cricket and Europe are probably behind my affection. And what wouldn't one give to have politicians of the stature of Clarke and Hesseltine more involved in government now?
It is odd that I feel most let down by Blair. Not because of the Iraq war. I have to admit that I did not oppose it at the time, so I will not fly that flag of convenience now. But because of the lost opportunity. New Labour could have done so much more and in the end was brought low by its squallid compromises. Brown I suspect, like Major, will weather increasingly better with the passing of time as the importance of his role in avoiding genuine global financial collapse in 2009 becomes more apparent. But timing was against him as was his slightly awkward style and he paid for his predecessor's crimes
I flirted briefly with the idea of Clegg, despite having probably been a possible Lib-Dem for many years before his accession. But I cannot really forgive the degree to which he enabled a government so much worse than the one that he claimed to have mitigated. He was so comprehensively outmanouvred that his party was consigned to irrelevance.
Whilst Boris probably only make's the 8th level of Dante's Inferno [i] but with claims to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th (go on look them up it's fun), David Cameron I condemn to the 9th. He must go down, amongst some stiff competition, as the worst leader this country has had in centuries.
I already have some sympathy for Teresa May but the sooner we are done with Boris and all who sail in him the better. Society is coming apart at the seams because of the box that David Cameron arrogantly flung open and I'm not sure that there's much hope left at the bottom.
The damage we have done to our country over the last decade borders on vandalism.
Would that the Greens had a little more pragmatism... [ii]
Footnote
[i] I do not believe in hell so this a merely a thought experiment in ranking catastrophic leaders
[ii] My political compass appears to have moved a click or so to the left since I last checked but I'm still quite libertarian (in American terms)
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