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The author, Vernon Bogdanor, a respected professor of government, argues that the influence of these six was based on being good communicators and “important teachers.”
By COLIN SHINDLER JANUARY 18, 2025 20:28
WINSTON CHURCHILL (R) with his brother John and their American-born British socialite mother, Jeanette ‘Jennie’ Jerome, aka Lady Randolph Spencer-Churchill, in 1889.
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
During the 1930s, Winston Churchill cast out from the political establishment as an eccentric warmonger, earned his living through his writing.
In 1937, he coined the phrase “making the weather” in his book Great Contemporaries about figures who changed history but never made it to the top. Churchill specifically directed his attention to Joseph Chamberlain, a former mayor of Birmingham who was well known to the early Zionists as the colonial secretary who formulated the Uganda Plan to settle Jews in East Africa and delivered it to a sympathetic Theodor Herzl.
Making the Weather: Six Politicians Who Changed Modern Britain, focuses on more recent movers and shakers in British politics – three from the Left and three from the Right – and all men. All were mavericks of independent views and far from today’s robotic mouthers of slogans and clichés.
Five have passed on, leaving only Nigel Farage. He was elected to Parliament in July 2024 as the leader of the populist Reform Party. He is known for his vaudeville, cheeky, chappy persona – someone who convinced a narrow majority of voters in a referendum in 2016 that the United Kingdom should leave the European Union. Union. Two weeks ago, his friend and supporter, Elon Musk, suddenly and inexplicably ditched him with the comment, “He doesn’t have what it takes to lead.”
The author of Making the Weather, Vernon Bogdanor, a respected professor of government, argues that the influence of these six was based on being good communicators and “important teachers.”
Aneurin Bevan was the leader of the left-wing Labour Party and the founder of the National Health Service (NHS) in the 1940s which proclaimed that it provided healthcare based on need and free at the point of delivery. This marked a moral watershed. The poor were no longer turned away at the door because they were unable to pay the medical fees.
Bevan embraced Zionism and threatened to resign from the Labour government because of British conduct in Mandatory Palestine during the post-war years. He was incensed by the policies of his near namesake, foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, in Palestine after 1945. Harold Wilson, a future Labour prime minister, remarked at the time that Bevan was “a significant cabinet malcontent” concerning Palestine.
One of 10 children, and having to leave school at age 13, Bevan raged against injustice and used his great powers of oratory to support the cause of ordinary working people. He undoubtedly reflected the Zionist ethos for the embryonic Jewish state with his vision of “a society, based on fellowship rather than on a competitive struggle for existence.”
Once secretary of state for health and social care, Enoch Powell, on the other hand, was prickly, an absolutist, and the promoter of English nationalism 50 years ago. A professor at 25, he is remembered in the UK for his “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, in which he warned against uncontrolled immigration.
Bogdanor points out that Powell always denied that he was a racist, but his rhetoric and political stand undoubtedly inflamed racial tensions. Even so, he reminded his critics that he had returned from Australia in 1939 to fight the Nazis.
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Bogdanor recalls the notorious murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence at a bus stop in London in 1993. The white youths who were accused of the killing, he reveals, worshiped Powell. He was their inspiration and guiding light.
Initially, the accused were acquitted of the crime on the basis of insufficient evidence. A public inquiry, however, demonstrated that the Metropolitan Police Service’s investigation was both incompetent and “institutionally racist.” It nevertheless took another 20 years to finally convict two of Lawrence’s assailants of his murder.
ANOTHER FIGURE featured in Making the Weather is Sir Keith Joseph, the first Jew to sit as a minister in a Conservative cabinet. Nineteenth-century prime minister Benjamin Disraeli did not count as a Jew, having nominally converted to Anglicanism and describing himself as “the blank page between Judaism and Christianity.” Joseph’s appointment came at a time when Jewish MPS were overwhelmingly Labour MPs and the Conservatives were not noted for their liking of the Children of Israel.
Joseph was more of a Jewish Briton than a British Jew. Educated at the fee-paying, elitist Harrow School and at Oxford University, he never displayed even a scintilla of interest in Zionism. He was critical of the British involvement in the Suez campaign in 1956 – even though a large number of Jews lived in his Leeds constituency. His grandfather, Montague Gluckstein, was a founder of J. Lyons and Co., whose corner tea houses famously peppered cities in Edwardian England.
In 1978, Joseph gave a speech at the Conservative Party Conference on the day after Yom Kippur. A journalist quipped that this was a sign of Joseph’s “growing confidence… and that this is thought to be the first time that he has atoned for a speech before making it.”
This sense of confidence was based on his sudden, mid-career, “conversion to Conservatism” a few years earlier – and, like Powell, he criticized the post-war consensus. Joseph attacked the idea of a mixed economy, the central role of the state, and its nationalized sector. There was, he argued, “too much socialism,” no short cuts to utopia, and excessive public spending.
Joseph emerged as the prime candidate to succeed Edward Heath as party leader – who had lost three out of four elections. However, he unexpectedly denounced “the permissive society” as being responsible for a litany of woes in post-war Britain. This did not go down well with his fellow Conservatives.
Suddenly, no longer a prophet, he withdrew from the leadership contest – to be replaced by his ardent supporter Margaret Thatcher, who won the vote. While Bogdanor believes that Joseph would not have been a good leader, his political fundamentalism became the bedrock of Thatcherism during the 1980s.
One of the most interesting figures
TONY BENN is perhaps the most interesting of all of Bogdanor’s architects of change. Anthony Wedgwood Benn was a Labour MP and a passionate advocate of Zionism in 1948. He regularly contributed articles to the Jewish Vanguard during the 1950s.
When Benn’s father, Lord Stansgate, died, he succeeded to the title but was barred from entering the House of Commons. As the new Lord Stansgate, his place was now considered to be in the House of Lords. In 1963, Benn succeeded in passing the Peerage Act, which allowed him to renounce his title. This was the beginning of his transformation from the centrist Lord Stansgate into the left-wing ideologue, Tony Benn.
His shuttling leftward meant leaving behind all his strongly held Zionist convictions and their replacement by support for the Palestinian cause and the far Left. While he never quite backtracked on the right of self-determination of the Jews in Israel, he ended his days attending Right of Return rallies for the Palestinians in London’s Trafalgar Square.
At the end of his life, Benn was viewed as “a national treasure” – a remarkable shift from his image as the most dangerous man in Britain. He left many disciples of whom Jeremy Corbyn, the last and expelled leader of the Labour Party, was the most prominent. Benn once commented: “That’s the final corruption in life. You become a kindly, harmless old gentleman. I am old and I can be a gentleman, but I’m not harmless.”
Bogdanor has written an incisive and absorbing account of these seminal British figures. He has added the color of the past to the monochrome of the present. Making the Weather will interest all those who want an insight into British politics. ■
MAKING THE WEATHER
SIX POLITICIANS WHO CHANGED MODERN BRITAIN
By Vernon Bogdanor
Haus Publishing
368 pages; $17.50
English (US) ·