Diary – 18 January 2003

When the Crimean war began in 1854, the prime minister was Lord Aberdeen, who carried a deep burden of guilt. Years later he was asked to pay for the rebuilding of a church on his estate, and pleaded King David’s unworthiness: ‘But the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Thou hast shed blood abundantly and has made great war: thou shalt not build an house unto my name.’ When the Boer war began in 1899, the prime minister was Lord Salisbury, who felt intense misgivings: ‘We have to act upon a moral field prepared for us by Milner and his Jingo supporters …and all for people whom we despise and for territory that will bring no profit and no power to England.’ And when the Iraq war begins in 2003? Tony Blair may be as consciously pious as Aberdeen or Salisbury, but he seems to have neither the one’s sense of the horror of war nor the other’s appreciation of its unintended consequences. But we have always known that the Prime Minister has absolutely no historical sense at all. If he did, he might apprehend that Iraq could yet make the Crimean and Boer wars look miracles of humanity and statecraft by comparison.

Although I shan’t be contributing to the forthcoming three-volume anthology A Legend in His Lunchtime, I liked Roy Jenkins, enjoyed reading his books, and approved of him as chancellor of Oxford. The idea that his successor at my old university might be William Clinton is so obviously horrible that it must have been proposed from ulterior motives, maybe as a tactical ruse to make Baroness Williams of Crosby seem more plausible. But then why should she be chancellor either? Her reputation is one of the mysteries of the age. She had what Lord Jenkins of Hillhead might have called a rather secondary political career, and not in truth a very successful one.