Lord Glasman delivered a speech at the inaugural Frank Field Memorial lecture last week. Here is an edited transcript of the speech:
I am honoured by your invitation to give this Frank Field inaugural lecture, more than I can say. And that is because I loved and admired Frank Field, more than I can say. I rarely to say of a person that they meant the world to me, but this is true of Frank.
One of my favourite stories from the Bible is at the beginning of Genesis when Abraham is visited by the three Angels, they are not the Magi, yet, with the news that his wife Sarah, who was 98, would give birth to a son who would be inheritor of the eternal covenant. Isaac. As he says goodbye to them, on their way to take out Sodom and Gomorrah, God is heard mulling over whether to tell Abraham about his plans. He reasons that as Abraham is going to be the founder of a holy nation characterised by righteousness and justice, kindness and truth, the first of its kind, and as the leader of that nation, the patriarchal pioneer so to speak, God should share his plans with Abraham in order to show him how its done. These days we would call such a relationship ‘mentoring’.
God says to Abraham, concerning Sodom and Gomorrah, that the smell of iniquity had reached his nostrils, and this smell of iniquity was violence, and mob violence, (death, death, death) it was lying, cheating and stealing, the vile treatment of strangers and giving false witness. This bothered him every bit as much as the sexual abomination that tends to be stressed in some accounts. And Abraham commences Jewish History by negotiating with God.
He says ‘I thought you were a righteous, just, kind and merciful God but now you’re going to destroy two entire cities, the wicked and the innocent both. No disrespect’, says Abe, ‘but that does not sound very righteous or just to me’. And Abraham makes an offer. ‘If I can find 50 righteous men will you save the city?’ God unhesitatingly says yes. And then there is a pause, very reminiscent of a Labour Party organiser who has overcommitted the numbers he can turn out for canvassing, and Abraham then says, well, what about 45? 40? 30? 20? 10? and God says yes to all of these in turn and then silently quits the scene leaving Abraham alone. God appeared and then disappeared and He never consulted Abraham again. From then on God told Abraham what was going to happen. Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed be fire.
Kindness and truth have to be equally balanced, Frank believed that, and evidently, so does God. God did not say he was a God of kindness or truth, he said kindness and truth. That, in a way, is the credo of Frank Field and he never lost sight of either.
The reason I tell this story is that during the time of Brexit and Theresa May and the inability of Parliament to make any decisions, where I went down to the Commons Terrace and the MPs were drunk, and no-one knew what they were doing or what they were talking about, I was worried that God would revoke his 900 year blessing and abandon our Kingdom. Why not? I couldn’t offer 10 righteous men, all I could offer was one, and that was Frank. He held his integrity and dignity in the darkest of moments and he retained his soul. He certainly saved me from despair at 11 p.m., on the Commons terrace, waiting for yet another vote, when it felt like a House Party was going on all around us. ‘It feels like Liverpool City centre on a Saturday night’, he said to me while explaining the details of pension fund reform while he was being deselected by his local party for supporting Theresa May’s Brexit Deal. I said it was like Sodom and Gomorrah. He looked at the dark ripples on the Thames and said that ‘sometimes it was hard to tell the difference’.
The Parliamentary life reveals an intense combination of human emotions and actions but love is seldom one of them. Love, the specific intensity of care and admiration for another person, is rarely expressed. Hate, certainly, has its place and so does disdain, contempt and resentment. It sometimes feels, in Bob Dylan’s words, that ‘lust and greed, and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is’, and yet love endures in the House and it cannot be extirpated. The demand for nobility is not so easily vanquished. It lingers over the Commons, along the corridors, in the tea rooms and the Lords library where I find respite from the demands of the world in a sanctuary of silence and sleep. There is grace yet in the Palace. Frank embodied all that and the House was elevated by his presence and diminished by his loss. It became a darker place.
This Parliament feels like death. The legalisation of nine month abortion, the incentivisation of children to urge their parents to suicide, its general preference for terminating life is a recurring theme. I’ve never seen anything like it. I now avoid any conversation with God about the Covenant, I just say, ‘I’m busy, give me time, give me time’. Even as His thunderous silence echoes in my head, I still say, ‘God, just give me time’. And now you know why I said that Frank meant the world to me. When I say that he is a saint, I say it with complete conviction. He saved us all.
In contrast, I’m a sinner, so I can recognise a saint when I see one, especially in Parliament, but I could not help but apprehend Frank as a very English saint, almost a saint in a Carry-On film. As the epitome of one particular type of eternal English Christian, I viewed him more in the tradition of Kenneth Williams than Rowan Williams. More like Thomas Becket than Thomas Cromwell, the one who was slain at the altar rather than the one who ordered it done. His form is uniquely English and completely eternal.
I could see him as a teacher of the Bible in a grammar school for poor boys in Birmingham in the 1890s. A single man, devoted to his students, to his country and to God who expressed himself in the divine prose of the King James Bible, which was the only book he ever read. And although he read it every day and night, at the age of 57 he still had not finished reading it. ‘Have you read the book of Kings?’ he would ask me. The bit with the story about David and Bathsheba, the replacement of Saul, the rebellion of David’s sons. Sex, power, fratricide, prophesy and plotting. ‘Fascinating’, he said with saucy aplomb. ‘It’s all there you know. All of life’. Frank was moral but he was not moralistic. He took a scandalised delight in the foibles of others.
His communication of disappointed censure without speaking was of an eternal English form. His eyebrows and lips did all the work. There was an archness to his disapproval, and his response to scandal spoke of the Victorian music hall. Ooh Mrs. His pin-striped double breasted suits were immaculate, a triangle of handkerchief in his top pocket, and he always walked through Parliament with two impeccably dressed young men carrying reports and petitions ranging from child slavery, to burial poverty to contributory welfare reforms. Ultimately, however, Frank walked alone. He had the authority and assuredness of a prophet and the Labour Party and Parliament more generally, was a wilderness, full of savage beasts who would attack you in the desert at night. ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death’ was what it was like for Frank to go to work every day. He was instructed to think the unthinkable and was then sent into exile for doing so.
‘He worked in an unbroken tradition of King, Parliament, Church and State that bound the dead, the living and unborn to an eternal community of fate.’
And yet he was the most gracious of men. He was the only MP to welcome me into Parliament. He told me about early day motions, matters of urgent concern, how long to sit in the Chamber, the library. It is how our friendship began. I did not go looking for Frank, he chose me and I am forever grateful for that.
When I saw him walk through Parliament with his young men there was almost something of the Mormon about him, of the latter day saints walking through this fallen world unblemished. But politics, is by definition, not something you can do alone, or something that can be done well, without sin. Politics, as Aristotle, Machiavelli, Aquinas, and the writer of the book of Kings have all pointed out, is something else. Certainly not something that should ever be done by human rights lawyers who think the only thing that matters is words and laws. Or by saints. We need our angels but also our demons. It is a world where virtue and vice meet as complements. It is not heaven, the body politic and the body are alive in this world. It is life.
Frank was also a martyr. He was crucified by progressives as a reactionary racist sadist whose life’s work was to punish the poor. Blue Labour campaigned against the deselection of Frank and you can read the relentless energy of hate that came our way. The only good thing Freud ever said was that every accusation is a confession. They said he was an enemy of the poor when the truth was he devoted his entire life, with a monastic dedication, to the elevation of the poor. Their dignity and responsibility were at the core of his calling. His life was the very opposite of their callous spite.
I was actively involved in only one small part of this. It was during the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote. He found me in the new smoking area at the back of the bike-sheds on the edge of the Estate. He was beside himself with indignation. ‘Do you know what I saw this weekend in my constituency?’ His eyebrows reached virtually to heaven and his eyes could find no resting place. He could not sit down. He told me that one of his constituents, her baby had died and she could not afford a funeral and so she had put her dead baby in the freezer until she could save enough money for the funeral. He enunciated each of these words with righteous indignation. ‘A dead baby, in the freezer next to the chicken nuggets and the fish fingers. It’s unconscionable’. All I could say was Jesus Christ. ‘What’s he got to do with it? The poor have no support at all. The only choice’, and contempt filled him at that word ‘is between the paupers grave and the fridge freezer. And the poor woman lost her baby. People don’t belong to anything anymore and they are abandoned to their grief alone’. Oh man and I sang, ‘Baby in the freezer, I know I know, it’s serious’. ‘It is serious’ said Frank ‘and I have an appointment with Mrs May tomorrow afternoon to discuss this issue’ and discuss it they did and the ‘Children’s Funeral Costs Fund’ was established which entitled every child under the age of 18 to an immediate ‘simple burial’ with the limit set at £300. The conclusive Frank Field touch was that it included a burial for still-born children after 24 weeks, for they too are human and their death is to be properly mourned. That was Frank, the campaigner, in action. He urged me to show respect and affection to Theresa May, and I followed his request.
He was deselected at the peak of the Corbyn Travesty and his successor has already been expelled from the Party. No one remembers his name. His haters leave in their trail nothing but unrepentant disgrace, corruption and slander. Frank Field, in contrast leaves behind the glow of kindness and truth, righteousness and justice on this earth. Their lives will fall into the anonymous darkness of disdain while Frank’s light still shines, like the eternal tall lighthouse in the port of Birkenhead. The people of Birkenhead, he often told me, were his greatest teachers. The Bible and Birkenhead were the two most enduring pillars of Frank’s life. He was a blessing to them and they were an even greater blessing to him. He is buried there, with his people. May all their names be blessed.
His persecutors tried to turn right order upside down; men are women, right is wrong, good is bad, death is life, animated by a demonic desire to desecrate all that is holy and true and more than any other Labour politician of his time Frank stood resolute against this. Family, Church, the King James Bible, Parliament, the common law and the nation were all a sacred inheritance to be treasured and passed on to the next generation. This is what bound us together in love and this is what makes him a covenantal figure. When I say I loved him more than words can say, I mean that he loved our country more than I can say, with a clean heart and with great devotion. Armed with nothing but the King James Bible and his beautiful words he defied their sacrilege.
Blue Labour can be defined as a remorseless ideological onslaught against all those who hated Frank and crucified him. Frank said ‘forgive them for they know not what they do’ but I took a different view. ‘Only if they show genuine signs of repentance’, was my reply. The Jew and the Christian chewing it over one more time. And Blue Labour is full of amity to anyone who wishes to join us in this war.
Alone and abandoned you may have been Frank but it is your name that will endure through the generations and now the world is on the turn and as you told me many times, ‘our time will come’. And it has come. This new era is about borders, sovereignty, order, honour and nations. And yes Frank it is about the honour of the working class. It is not coming, it is here. Glory be to God. Look how the mighty are fallen. False prophets do not endure but Frank, you were true. You give everlasting light. You were crucified but your resurrection is assured. I believe.
That was Frank’s courage, to stand alone defying the self-images of his age. This was his calling and his fate. He was out of time because he was eternal.
And there was one other story that epitomised the courage of Frank’s commitment to kindness and truth. The way he told it to me was that Margaret Thatcher, or Mrs T as he referred to her, slipped on the steps of Tiananmen Square while talking to Deng Xiao Ping and this triggered an insurrection among Tory MPs in Westminster. A butterfly flaps its wings. The poll tax and the polls were a side issue. While she was dining in the Forbidden City, no doubt transferring the final remnants of our industry to the care of the Chinese Communists, she lost control of her Parliamentary Party. She flew back to London bewildered by the speed of her defenestration. While John Major was at the dentist there was a leadership election contested by Michael Heseltine which she barely won, and a further vote was required. Holed up alone in her study at Number 10, the men in grey suits were heading her way. These were indeed, the end days.
She made only one phone call and that was to Frank Field, asking him to come and see her and within seconds special branch arrived and bundled Frank into a black windowed car and then smuggled him through the secret bat entrance at the back of Downing Street and escorted him to her study where he sat on a chair outside the door. The men in grey suits had already arrived and as he told it, he heard less and less of Margaret and more and more of them. They left without meeting Frank’s eye and then he was summoned to her presence.
She offered him a chair but he stood. As Frank recounted it to me he said, ‘You have lost the confidence of the House and it is time for you to go.’ How did she respond? I asked. ‘Well’ he said, ‘tears were rolling down her cheeks and onto the blotter on her desk’. ‘So what did you do?’ and he said, ‘I offered her my handkerchief’. What an intimate civility at such a brutal moment, an eternal moment of English politics. But he hadn’t finished. He then said to her, ‘I suggest you resign in a dignified manner and recommend John Major as your successor, otherwise Tarzan will be king of the jungle.’ And with that he left and that is indeed what happened. I asked him if he ever got his handkerchief back and he gave me an offended ‘no’, but added that he did wonder what happened to it. ‘It had my initials on you see.’ I would consider that handkerchief a holy relic. I would sleep with it under my pillow at night.
What is remarkable to me about that story is that the only person that Margaret Thatcher trusted in all of politics was a Labour MP from Liverpool. She was a sinner but she recognised that he was a righteous man who would tell her the truth without fear or favour. He saved us all.
One of the most painful aspect of the death of someone you love is that when they die they also rise in glory. It is suddenly clear who they were and what they did and because this is a new and deeper understanding there are loads of things you want to ask, that you can no longer know. I had Frank down as a low-church Puritan who would have been a Whig after the Restoration, and in Victorian times hewn of stern Evangelical stone like Shaftsbury or Wilberforce, dissenting to the point of dissidence, when in fact it was only when I attended his memorial service at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square that I realised he was a high church Tory all along.
How could I have missed it? Everything made sense. I only got to really know Frank after he died. A whole new understanding opened up. He was a Royalist, High Church, Tory. I could barely see the coffin for the purple and blue smoke that smeared the lenses of my spectacles. Whatever was in the incense certainly cleared my sinuses. That was Frank, it was obvious and it was exactly those qualities that made him an exemplary socialist. He rose in glory. He was not contractual, he was covenantal. Archbishop Laude opposed the enclosures and they chopped his head off. He too is a saint and a martyr. He too, guides our path. Frank is in good company.
Frank held that there were things sacred in this world that were worth defending from the frenzied march of the market and the worship of money alone. He was also sceptical of the power of the procedural state to administer love in this fallen world. He saw people as social beings profoundly formed by their relationships and institutions; family, church and school. He was in a Labour tradition of Clement Attlee, (who worked for many years here at Toynbee Hall and was my Dad’s MP in Limehouse) William Temple and R.H. Tawney. He viewed diversity as a fact of nature, but solidarity was a sublime political achievement that Labour could only achieve if it were truly conservative. A common good, a common life, the common decencies. ‘Very important’ as Frank would say. How he hated bad manners. Frank was covenantal. He worked in an unbroken tradition of King, Parliament, Church and State that bound the dead, the living and unborn to an eternal community of fate. He was one of the very few Labour MPs who supported me in the Brexit referendum and his line was, ‘I think it very important that we govern ourselves. I think we have the tools.’ I said, ‘Frank, its about preserving our inheritance’ and he said, ‘that is what I meant’.
I spent the Ed Miliband leadership years (2011-15) talking extensively to Frank and I still consider that a more productive use of my time than engaging with the leaders office. These were the golden years of our friendship. We both had time, and it was our time.
We sat at my table on the Lords terrace when we were still allowed to smoke and the river flowed beside us. He sat, perfectly still, like a mannequin or a ventriloquist’s dummy, decrying the fact that he was forced to drink tea from a mug rather than a china cup. “I thought this was supposed to be the Lords” and then he would begin.
‘Do they not understand that welfare will become a source of division if the poor don’t give and the rich don’t use it. If those who work subsidise those who won’t.’ All I could say was ‘quite’. Then his gaze would fall upon me and he was silent, and his look was stern. And then I said, ‘you are right’. ‘Good’, he would say, the matter resolved, ‘it is time to work and prepare’. And he did prepare.
He and his magnificent, but ever changing cast of young men, produced reports and hosted events. I spoke at least ten of them. ‘There can be no welfare reform without economic reform. Work, and the dignity of labour must be at the foundation of the system. We shared visions of the restoration of guilds, of a vocational system, of closing half the universities and turning them into vocational colleges, of strong private sector trade unions and collective bargaining. We could see the return of burial societies and mutual insurance clubs. ‘There is no substitute for subs’ he used to say. He saw ways of rebuilding solidarity, local assemblies, mutuals. ‘Friendships Maurice, we must encourage friendship.’ The resurrection of dead institutions, the benevolent societies, the ‘Independent Order of Odd Fellows’ of which he was the eternal patron saint. ‘There are two meanings of labour’, the miracle of birth and the transformation of the world through co-operative effort. Family and dignified work are the foundation of the system we wish to see. ‘You mean the Kingdom’ I asked. ‘I always mean the Kingdom’ he replied.
The goal of welfare was to strengthen solidarity, to enhance the relationships necessary for the dignity of the person and for it to be a practice of mutual care at the most local level. Relationships were at the centre of this. Catholic Social Thought. ‘People used to look after each other, and now they can’t look after themselves’. Eight year old children still in nappies, everyone on the phone, television on, eating crisps for dinner. Nobody speaking. Frank could bear witness that kindness without truth was cruelty.
Contribution was one aspect but he wanted ownership, accountability, participation, association, friendship; he wanted love in the system. The biggest lie was that you could do it on your own. It required the sharing of the burdens in this harsh and merciless life. Association was key. Frank was a socialist because he was a conservative, and he was both because he was a Christian. His life had meaning and we can learn from it.
Frank and I would both doff our cap to the memory of Ernest Bevin. He is our patron saint. ‘What would Ernie think if he could see Len McCluskey as General Secretary of his Union’? He asked with a face of aghast horror. ‘I’m glad he didn’t live to see it’ I replied. Frank was indignant. ‘He is spinning in his grave, I can assure you of that’. I apologised for my superficiality. He believed that the dead live if we incline our ear to hear them. He could hear and see the spinning body of our beloved Ernie. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was cremated.
Frank believed it was better to give than to receive, but best of all was give and take. Reciprocity was what it was all about. Cain made a big mistake. I am my brother’s keeper. We all are. And Frank was the protector of the eternal covenant, of this, our nation. Many are cold but few are frozen was not Frank’s idea of the Kingdom. The desiccated utilitarian administration of relentless pain was his enemy. Christ is King. It is better to give than to receive. Fellowship is life. Love thy neighbour. Labour was once a biblical party, and must become one, once more. Frank was faithful to the Labour Tradition. He rang me after his deselection to tell me that he had brought the naming rights and ownership of the ‘Independent Labour Party’. ‘I own the ILP’, he said. Even after his abandonment, he still longed to belong.
And it is Frank the Pariah, Frank the prophet who leads the way back to sanity and life for my Party, and for this Labour Government. We are a Conservative nation and Labour must be the standard bearer for that. Order, decency, sacrifice. Family, honour, obligation. Common Law, that greatest repository of national wisdom must be restored to its ancient place within a system of sovereign Parliamentary democracy. Indeed we must restore the Ancient Constitution as the institutional balance of power and clip the wing of Laws Empire. We want the rule of law not the rule of lawyers. We want democratically leaders to make the decisive judgements, not the judges.
Men are not women, women are not men. Why did such an obvious truth have to go to Court to be decided? Our Prime Minister, or our Home Secretary, should have stood before Parliament and said that they have never heard anything more stupid in their entire life and that anyone who obliges a woman to take off her clothes in front of a man should be immediately imprisoned. And yet our educational system, our universities and national health service remain merciless enforcers of this idiocy. Corporate capital succumbed to their moronic demands. It is dominant and it is systematic. Nobody is innocent. We are all sinners.
The Conservative Party, a great political party is effectively dead. They are like ghosts, they speak to us but we cannot hear, they live amongst us but we cannot see them. They were born to resist the market and ended up as its butler, ‘all that was holy is profaned, everything solid melts into air’ to quote another great Conservative thinker. Nothing is sacred. The big crumbling factories turned out to be their mausoleum.
‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’ is the first line of holy scripture, but Conservatives now think God made a design mistake and should have privatised it first. That seems to be where the Conservative Party have got to theologically. Fiscal responsibility will not raise the dead to a restored Kingdom.
It is no coincidence that the traditional source of Tory power, the Church of England, is equally theologically bereft and ignored. They rose and they fell together and are now estranged twins whose shared fate is a slow and painful death, unreconciled. As I have said many times, it’s the last thing you want to hear when you go the doctor, ‘it’s progressive’. It really is a virus that affects your brain and body and ends in death. It’s a progressive palsy that renders action illegal as well as impossible. The Conservative Party was colonised by economic liberalism and political liberalism is poisoning the roots of the Church of England. This is where we are now, in England.
The ‘graffiti art’ installation at Canterbury Cathedral felt like a renunciation of vocation, an abdication of responsibility, a desecration. Murder in the Cathedral was a political killing, ordered by the King. The blood was on his hands. In this case, however, the desecration is self-ordained, it reads like a suicide note. The graffiti art was the suicide note, the body is the Church of England, lying still on the alter. If T.S. Eliot were alive today I would urge him to write ‘Suicide in the Cathedral’.
They could have done an art installation of T.S Eliot’s poems. The Ballad of J. Alfred Prufrock, ‘do not ask what is it? Let us go and make a visit’. Of the Wasteland, ‘April is the cruellest month’ or the Journey of the Magi. ‘A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year’.
Beautiful, mystical and mundane these poems are the highest modern expression of the magical glory of our language and of England. But that is not the installation the Church of England wanted. In our most ancient and holy site of Christianity they wilfully desecrated the space. Bad art, bad culture, bad faith. I prefer now to talk of the English Church, Catholic and Reformed, as the Church of England should be, but isn’t.
The English Church is a glory of our nation it gave us charity, law and government, the parish map of 1513 is still how we imagine our country. Who cares for Medway and the Combined Authorities. We need its strength and clarity more than ever now. The Church of England must be the only church in history to renounce the Cross. And this is happening now, in England. Tommy Robinson cannot be allowed to claim the Kingdom. Or the cross.
Progressives know nothing of redemption and vocation, sin and resurrection, of the Common Good and the Kingdom. Least of all this blessed Kingdom, in which we live. Frank held fast to the idea that our country was sacred. He spent a great deal of time promoting the King James Bible, ‘it’s the foundation of everything really’, he said often. He wanted one in every home. And his words were beautiful, his cadences sublime. Like Kenneth Williams, there was poetry on his lips. An enormity of stifled love.
The logic of my judgement is brutal. I trust the English Catholic Church to uphold the sanctity of our ancient churches more than I do the Church of England. If the Conservative Party has died from an overdose of economic liberalism then the Church of England has been colonised by political liberalism and it always ends this way. Bad art, bad culture, bad faith. Bad. Diversity before solidarity, process before action, choice before tradition and its energy is only really found in acts of desecration. The rules are clear, repentance must precede redemption, but we are all obliged to pray for its resurrection. The good news, in that sense, is that it is dead. We await the next act with prayer and expectation. ‘Thy Kingdom Come, thy will be done. On earth as it is in heaven.’ The Church of England needs an exorcism. It is a logical, but extreme conclusion.
Maybe the Church of England could renew its covenantal vows by leading us in national repentance for our collective stupidity. That would be my strategic advice if they ever asked me. And beatify Frank Field. Two simple requests. Not a huge ask.
Reason leads us to God and rationality drives us to destruction. That is a sentence that Frank liked very much and would ask me to repeat, and it is only because of him that I remember it.
Frank killed no-one, but he was ready to die for his faith. He was a saint and he was a martyr but he was never a politician. He could not be. We all loved and respected him, but no-one actually did what he spent his whole life preparing, which was a systematic reform of the State. He was a minister for three weeks. And then he wasn’t. He had admirers but not followers. He was not a leader. He was an activist and a campaigner but organising was not his strength.
He was a courtier, with a preference for Queens over Kings. He always thought it was his time but it never was. Maybe because he was eternal he had no idea about time but because he is eternal he will see his work fulfilled. Frank, this is your time. That is what I meant when I said I believed with perfect faith in his resurrection. The lighthouse in Birkenhead guides us into the future. In his lifetime there was only confusion and disappointment. In the world to come his presence will be profound.
There was an innocence to his bewilderment. ‘I voted for Ed Miliband’ he said to me ‘and now he never answers my calls’. Oh Frank. ‘David Cameron made me the chair of his Welfare Commission and he didn’t do any of it’. Oh Frank. ‘I signed Jeremy Corbyn’s nomination papers and now he wants to expel me from the Party’. Oh Frank. Honestly. He was hurt and perplexed by the ingratitude of their ways. He was the sweet child in the playground who couldn’t work out why he was standing alone or why the girls were attracted to the wrong sorts of boys. It was at those moments, broken and baffled, that I loved Frank most. If I had not been terrified of his reaction I would have put my hand on his and kept it there. He was Frank Spencer as much as he was Kenneth Williams. Politics remained a mystery to him until his death.
May he be remembered forever as one of the righteous of this land.
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