Blame Barry Doyle for this idea…
110 years ago British voters were offered a choice between the status quo and a radically different vision of Britain’s place in the world…and resoundingly rejected it. Joseph Chamberlain’s attempt to reshape Britain as a nation surrounded by a wall of protectionist trade tariffs ultimately failed to convince the British public and, although the dice are still up in the air, it looks on balance as if the Brexit campaign will likewise fail to achieve its aim of a EU-free Britain.
Both campaigns were led by significant political figures of the day, both focused on the cost of living, and both saw massive internal soul-searching on the part of the Conservative Party. Here I want to examine the two leaders, think about how they compare, and see if there are any insights on the Brexit campaign to be gleaned from the Tariff Reform Movement.
‘The Men who make the weather?’
“Boris is a Celebrity” is the verdict of Andrew Gimson, former colleague of Johnson at the Spectator and semi-official biographer of the former Mayor and MP. (Gimson, Boris: the Rise of Boris Johnson). Sonia Purnell, more acid tongued in her Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition is likewise forced to admit that, whatever else you can say about the man, he is much more charismatic than David Cameron.
Joseph Chamberlain, the orchid-wearing Birmingham Liberal, likewise caught the public imagination even before running for Parliament in 1876. Dubbed, by a young Winston Churchill as a man who “made the [political] weather” Chamberlain came to dominate the landscape of late Victorian politics.
In many ways both men seem to have had similar trajectories, albeit from very different origins. Chamberlain came from relatively humble, although far from proletarian, origins; his father was a successful shoe-maker and Chamberlain himself went into an apprenticeship scheme at the age of sixteen before establishing a screw manufacturing business. Boris, on the other hand, has been described by the ever-unhelpful Toby Young as ‘lower-upper-middle class’ – a phrase almost designed to cause the eyes of class historians to twitch uncontrollably. But it does sum up the unusual background of a man who has never, his various biographers make clear, fitted entirely well into the traditional Tory milieu. Both men, ultimately, gained public attention through successful careers as urban Mayor (Johnson in London 2008-now and Chamberlain in Birmingham 1873-1876).
But does Boris, to borrow Churchill’s phrase, “make the weather”? Arguably since emerging into the public eye as Mayor of London (his tenure as MP for Henley 2001-2008 is so-often overlooked) Boris has been an obsession of the national media and his recent hemming over the Brexit issue sent the news into a frenzy of anticipatory fervor. If Boris does not make the weather he is certainly well-positioned at the eye of the storm.
Pure Ambition
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself,
And falls on th’other. . . .
Perhaps the most obvious point of comparison, though, is how the two men have been seen as using national campaigns to propel themselves into Downing Street at the expense of party and principle.
Chamberlain’s turn to Tariff Reform, stemming from his time as Colonial Secretary, began in 1902-1903 and has often received short-shrift from historians. Travis Crosby, his most recent biographer, saw it simply as representing Chamberlain’s ‘own need to maintain and pursue additional avenues of power.’[i] Peter Marsh, meanwhile, was more sympathetic but judged it the impulsive passions of a man who could see the clock running out on his political life.[ii] Chamberlain’s passion for the Premiership has always, for many historians, eclipsed any other issue in the Tariff Reform campaign.
Johnson’s support for Brexit, not helped by his seeming indecision over which side to take, has roused similar skepticism. A number of former colleagues, Conservative politicians, and media commentators have dubbed Johnson as fraud. From Matthew Parris’s observation that Johnson is typified by his ‘dishonesty and recklessness’ [iii] to the more aggravated tone of former Conservative MP Jerry Hayes:
“Boris is a Copper Bottomed, Double Dealing, Hypocritical Little Shit. The Press will Destroy Him.”
or the Spectator’s Nick Cohen:
“As Mayor of London Johnson has never called emergency conferences on the alleged EU tyranny, which surely must have fettered him, if it was as oppressive as he is now claiming…the subject was of no interest to him – until he returned to Parliament to concentrate on the sole subject that does interest him: the leadership of the Conservative Party.”
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/boris-johnson-everything-phoney/
the implication is clear – this is no Damascene conversion but rather the cynicism of an experienced and ambitious political power-player.
Cost of Living
Regardless of the motivations of either men, the other striking similarity between the two wider campaigns is how the debate about complex international trade and politics has devolved so quickly into a tit-for-tat about the cost of living. Compare, for instance, these two widely circulated Twitter images:
one claiming that the cost of living would fall (deploying a motif of fact and myth),
the other juxtaposing its claims with a picture of a petrol pump to hammer home the message visually. Although 21st century Britain is used to the Cost of Living debate this back-and-forth trading of everyday costs, and associated accusations of statistical misuse on both sides, is a direct legacy of the Tariff Reform campaign. In a recent piece I argued that Chamberlain’s pro-Tariff campaign was the first to utilize these motifs on a national level, the Liberal opposition following on soon after, drawing on the wider Condition of England anxiety that had obsessed the public from the 1890s onwards.
Compare, for example, these two posters from the 1906 campaign:
an anti-tariff poster featuring Chamberlain as an under-stocked shopkeeper,
and a pro-tariff depiction of a working-class home laid waste by free trade.
Already the two campaigns are talking in a language of everyday needs. Chamberlain ended up touting two loaves of bread around the country, after a speech in Birmingham where he held aloft two identical loaves to confound Liberal accusations that the increased cost of food would hammer poorer families. So far Johnson has spoken in more general terms about the cost of living but both he (think Prawn Cocktail Crisps in 1993 [iv]) and the Conservative euro-spectics more generally (as artfully parodied in the Party Games special episode of Yes Minister with the faux-issue of the “eurosausage”) have form on this issue.
Comparisons?
I won’t put “lessons from history” in deference to my former PhD supervisor. Richard Bessel had, for many years, a press cutting on his wall of a public panel he and other historians of the Nazi regime had done in Germany where an exasperated audience member had stood up and asked what advise these eminent historians could give modern 21st century Germans on avoiding political extremism. Richard, never one to miss an opportunity for amused cynicism, declared “Wir Habben Keine Rezepte” (we have no recipes). His point was that the biggest lie in history is that the past repeats itself in the present – as historians we can compare and suggest but not divine.
So, leaving aside animal entrails and mysterious cloud formations, here are some comparisons with Chamberlain and Tariff Reform that might shed light on the 57 remaining days of Brexit and Boris.
The Usefulness of an Urban Power Base:
David Lloyd George almost died in 1901 when speaking in Birmingham because he lambasted Chamberlain’s support for the Boer War as angry crowds mobbed him. He was forced to escape disguised as a Policeman. Even in the landslide defeat of the Unionist Government that followed in the 1906 election, Chamberlain and his supporters held firm in their Birmingham fiefdom. Johnson has certainly built up a base in the city – Purnell has pointed to his brother’s election in Orpington and his sister’s use of the Lady offices as a campaign base despite the magazine’s 125 year history of non-partisan positions -but it seems unlikely that this will directly translate into widespread urban support. The recent 2015 election results and the current polls in the mayoral election suggest that Johnson, by contrast, may not carry London with him as a bastion of pro-Brexit votes.
The Importance of Feeling
Both votes relied on not just rational economic arguments but a more passionate appeal to the feelings of voters.
Many voices in 1906, I have pointed out, were not actually hostile to Tariff Reform. London business-men, trade unionists, South London constituency members, and political journalists were all interested in Chamberlain’s proposal. But the key problem was that they didn’t understand them. The status quo was easier to defend in 1906 than Chamberlain’s promise of a brave new protectionist world.
The traditional view of this subdued response has been to ascribe the failure to convince to the strong free-trade conviction of the Victorian age, but I am not so sure. Looking at the campaign in the context of the 1900s, a decade riven by social and economic dispute, it is clear that many voters were searching for a new vision for society. Chamberlain’s problem was that he failed to articulate why his program of reform should be that vision.
So far Pro-Leave groups have nibbled around the edges of the positives of Brexit but, as yet, have failed to captivate the general public with their offer.
Splitter!
Perhaps the most significant legacy of Chamberlain when considering Johnson was his ability to split first the Liberals in 1885 over Home Rule for Ireland and then the Unionists in the 1900s over Tariff Reform. So far media speculation has somewhat avoided the idea of a Conservative Party split, an idea which received considerable attention pre-2015 election with defections to UKIP, but as Richard argued history does not provide a roadmap.
Chamberlain split the Liberals in the aftermath of the Home Rule vote not before. Might Boris do the same? The map of pro- and anti- EU Conservative MPs indicates a serious patchwork of conflicting allegiances:
Coloured maps are, of course, no indication of political ambition or party loyalty, but Chamberlain was at his most dangerous when it looked like tariff reform was on the ropes. In late 1905 he lashed out at the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, in a speech at Bristol, dubbing him ‘the lamest man…[to]…govern the march of an army’. Whilst Cameron has proved more resolute than Balfour, who never really made his mind up on the tariff question, and campaigned for the Remain camp passionately, the fissures opened up in 1906 not only ended his tenure at Downing Street but haunted the Conservative Party well into the 1930s. Whatever the outcome of the referendum, Johnson will be at his most interesting in the post-vote period. Here he might well, at least for the Conservative Party, truly “make the weather”.
[i] Travis L. Crosby, Joseph Chamberlain: A Most Radical Imperialist, London: I.B. Taurus, 2011, 164.
[ii] Peter T. Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, 563
[iii] http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4721862.ece
[iv] http://www.politico.eu/article/the-eu-is-a-lobster-boris-johnson-best-moments-europe-reporting/
edwardian social history 