Coffee House Wall Interview – Mr. Alexander Boot

I met Mr. Alexander Boot outside the Wigmore Hall in London. He had been kind enough to give up an afternoon to sit and talk with me, when he could have been working on his next book. We wandered around Marylebone for a while, talking about the resignation of Petraeus and whether or not personal infidelity was a proper justification for removal from high office. I tended to think it might be. Mr. Boot said “I think Petraeus should’ve been sacked — but not for having an affair qua affair, boys will be boys and all that. It’s the staggering stupidity that he displayed in the process that’s a sacking offence. We can’t expect politicians to adhere rigidly to the Decalogue or the Sermon on the Mount — they never have. But he must expect good judgment”.

The streets had been blocked off for some sort of parade and concert. A man in a shocking pink suit was doing a sound check and there were lots of people wearing yellow hi-vis vests with the name of an organisation on them. It looked like it would be getting noisy so we kept walking until we found an Italian cafe in a quieter street. We spent a couple of hours talking and it was getting dark and cold by the time we left each other on Oxford Street. It is always a pleasure to spend time with Mr. Boot. Our conversation had ranged over the Christian faith, Russian literature and of course the political and social condition of the West.I had planned to record Mr. Boot’s words and report them verbatim. But it is impossible to remain disengaged when listening to him speak. But I will try to report the sense of what he said, as I remember his words and as they have influenced me.

I asked him why it was that we seem to have a political class which is so lacking in ability? He didn’t deny it and agreed that in our own times the political elite were particulary lacking. But he quoted a French author from the 19th century, assuming I was as well read as himself. I guess I take the view that we should not imagine that many, or indeed any, politicians of the modern West have been very different to those governing us today. What is politics about, if it is not about personal power, wealth and influence. It has never been about ability as the electorate would understand it. Mr. Boot had said, “Tocqueville (in his Democracy in America, 1835) did say that good people wouldn’t seek political office, and he said that at the time of Adams, Madison and Jefferson, not of Obama. But looking back, one can never say that things haven’t changed for the worse. Yes, politicians have always sought power: without it, they would couldn’t have done anything they wanted to do. But only in the conditions of unchecked democracy do politicians seek nothing but power and personal aggrandisement. When unchecked, democracy morphs into spivocracy, and it only really became unchecked in the 20th century. At that point politicians stopped serving their countries and began to serve themselves only”.

Someone on the Coffee House Wall had asked who Mr. Boot might prefer as leader of the Conservative Party. I had asked him this myself on previous meetings. He shakes his head. There is no-one who would be better. What about John Redwood, Norman Tebbit, Liam Fox, Zak Goldsmith? he shakes his head again. John Redwood has sold out for an easy life. Norman Tebbit is not the man he was before the Brighton Bombing. Liam Fox, do we know everything we need to about him? And Zak Goldsmith? Just part of the recent intake of career politicians. In a previous conversation Mr. Boot had said that he felt there was a certain emptiness within the politicians he had met, a blankness behind the eyes. They were, in some sense, the living dead. Living in a virtual world, attending to virtual priorities, playing by virtual rules.

What about Nigel Farage and UKIP? He was not as enthusiastic as many here would have hoped. What does it matter if he is a big man on the European Parliamentary stage? He remains almost unknown and without influence where it would make a difference, and UKIP continues to present itself too much as a one issue pressure group. It has certainly not positioned itself as British conservative party. I have to say that Mr. Boot was not entirely positive about the likely influence of the many other small groups that exist to promote conservative principles. They are small groups of generally elderly people busy exchanging leaflets, and the programme for the future is to exchange even more leaflets!

Since there are so many little groups all plugging away in independence and even isolation, it was natural to ask Mr. Boot why the conservative front was so atomised and fragmented. His opinion was that one of the main differences between socialists and conservatives is that those on the left are quite happy to reduce their programmes to soundbites and slogan, while conservatives tend to have much more complex proposals and are trying to avoid an extremist and populist approach. A crowd of public sector workers can be encouraged to simply shout ‘No more cuts!’, but a reasonable, intelligent conservative wants to explain in some detail why present levels of public spending cannot be maintained. It doesn’t make for a good slogan, and simply adopting the opposite view to socialists, such as ‘Cut everything now!’ is not necessarily conservative either.

Mr. Boot said, “It’s really not a conservative thing to have an ‘agenda’. A conservative is defined by what he is, not what he does or even thinks. His actions, thoughts and tastes are derivatives of his nature. And one’s nature doesn’t change because circumstances do. So it’s as possible to be a conservative now as it ever was — it’s just hard to influence the circumstances of our life in accordance with one’s conservative intuition”. I don’t entirely agree and think thta perhaps it is not possible to be a conservative any more, because that which would have been conserved has already been lost. To that extent I asked if we should consider ourselves ‘revolutionaries’. Mr. Boot didn’t disagree. But what sort of revolutionaries are we? It is not clear. And this is perhaps another reason for the fragmentation of the conservative front. We don’t have one consistent agenda or goal. It’s easy to keep things as they are, but when everything has been destroyed or corrupted it is necessary to know what is to be rebuilt and why.

Is it possible in any case to reverse the decline we are experiencing? I asked Mr. Boot and he was not confident that it could be. He suggested that the West was like a rock rolling and tumbling down a steep hill. The rock will accelerate down the hill and will become increasingly difficult, even impossible to stop. Perhaps we have to reach the bottom before we can start climbing again? Perhaps having reached the bottom of the hill our civilization will be so smashed to pieces that there will be no prospect of immediate recovery. Mr. Boot seemed to allow that the rate of decline could be slowed if action were taken, but anyone who has read his books will know that he believes that the necessary foundations of Western Judeo-Christian civilization have been undermined, and there is no quick fix.

Mr. Boot described how a society takes the shape of the philosophy which it is built upon, and in the West the underlying world view has changed, and continues to change in a direction which is subverting those principles important to conservatives. Socialist materalism produces THIS sort of society. In his own words, he said, “It would be more accurate to say that unchecked democracy inexorably gravitates towards social democracy, which then shapes our society. Socialism didn’t appear out of nowhere”. There is a conspiracy, or rather things are conspiring against us. but there is no secret group of shadowy figures sitting around a table while their leader strokes a white cat. There are certainly many lower level conspiracies of people and organisations working out the socialist materialistic worldview to their own advantage, but the great conspiracy is of the natural social forces which work out in practice the kind of society that people believe in. We do indeed get the Government and the society that we deserve. Too many people have believed the credit card adverts which say, “Why wait? Have it all now!”. And this worldview is constructing a new Western society that is increasingly uncivil and uncivilized. Why be surprised that politicans want it all and want it now? Why be surprised that the client population of the materialistic state is satisfied with a life on benefits, and each of those individuals and families who do not work and don’t want to work also want it all and want it now. Our society is increasingly and entirely expectedly reflecting the philosophy which underpins it. Mr. Boot doesn’t entirely agree with this terminology, and said, “‘Conspiracy’ is your word, not mine. I know what you mean, but I’m not sure it’s a good term, and its PR value is hugely negative. My fundamental point is that Christendom, aka Western civilisation, has been dismantled steadily for the last 500-600 years, and there is an accelerator built into that process. At some juncture a point of no return was reached, and the very nature of the West changed irrevocably. The West became a purely geographical, not cultural, notion. The house is still there, but the tenants are entirely different. ‘Conspiracy’ is an inadequate term to describe this cosmic shift”.

I wondered whether Islam, as a religio-political philosophy had something positive to contribute to the problems facing the West, but Mr. Boot explained that both socialism and islam were hostile ideologies which were equally inimicable to the Judeo-Christian civilization which has developed in the West and has been slowly dismantled over hundreds of years with ever increasing speed.

What do we do? Mr. Boot does not have a grand plan. But he does, convincingly, describe how we have reached this point. The way ahead does not look good. But understanding what it happening is the first and necessary step towards taking action. He says, “A Christian can’t be without hope, and I do think that things can improve. I just don’t believe we can do much to effect a substantial improvement. However, God can. It’s true that by nature I’m not a political activist but a political philosopher — someone has to be, if only not to let the bastards have the field all to themselves”. I shall meet Mr. Boot again I hope, and continue to be challenged to think the worst, and work and hope for the best.