Nick True was until recently leader of the House of Lords and Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. His Toryism hails from an earlier and better age, but still has modern relevance.
Recorded June 4, 2024
Andrew Roberts:
Lord True, Nick True is the leader of the House of Lords and the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. Nick, tell us about Slob Peters.
Nick True:
Well, how do you know about him? Yeah, Slob Peters was my history teacher at Nottingham High School. He also taught, actually David Frost, who's the Brexit negotiator. He was an old-fashioned history teacher who wore rather untidy clothes and occasionally dribbled a little bit, hence the slob. But he took his pupils through sequentially the great story of British history, and along the way taught us about the importance of governance and civics, and a leftist. He was a severe man, but kindly often you were discovered later that he was a kindly man. And he left, I think, all his pupils with an abiding love of history, and a sense of its essential and constant importance.
Andrew Roberts:
And you didn't get there for what we call now, Henry to Hitler, where you jumped from the Tudors to the Second World War.
Nick True:
No, none of that. None of that. We went right through it.
Andrew Roberts:
Yes. Perfect. Exactly. So, you have a sense therefore, when you look at history, which obviously plays an important part of your job holding well, one cabinet's post that goes back to 1387, a sense of history. And that must be important in your job as leader of the House of Lords as well, because the House of Lords, every brick exudes history in the House of Lords.
Nick True:
It does indeed, even though it was burnt down and rebuilt. It does, yes. And funny enough, I said the other day, and maybe one of my last speeches as leader, that I know every part of the house really from having crawled around as a youngster, stapling together bits of paper in the age before email to standing at the dispatch box there where Churchill delivered some of the greatest war speeches is when the House of Commons had been destroyed by the Nazis. Yes, the House of the Lords speaks of something which is incredibly important in all constitutions and all constitutional politics, which is the dignity and honor of government, and the grande of the place matters a lot, provide it doesn't get too over weaning. Because the House of Lords is what I describe as the moon in the British parliamentary Constitution to the gleaming son of the Commons. But yes, it's a remarkable privilege to be there.
Andrew Roberts:
I was going to come on this later, but now that you've started with such an arresting image as the sun and the moon, we can't leave it there. Let's go into that a little bit more deeply. Not all of my listeners will be familiar with the minutiae of the British Constitution, so why don't you explain a little about really what the House of Lords does?
Nick True:
Okay, well perhaps I can go back a bit, a few centuries maybe. That might be helpful. Magna Carter seems quite relevant at the moment in the modern world. The House of Lords really was the original element of the British Parliament, and it emerged out of the efforts of the baronial and clerical forces to control the powers of the king, something which most Americans we're familiar with in the circumstances five centuries later. And conventionally we say in 1265, the first Parliament was formed, which actually was the barons and the clerics, and the House of Commons only came into being in the 14th Century. So, it's 75 odd years later when people came to parliament to petition, commoners originally came to petition the crown for things for their communities. So, we then emerged this bicameral system of commons and lords and with the monarch, the king in parliament. And those three elements have to approve any bill. You cannot make law in this country even today without it being approved by the Commons, the Lords and the King.
And for many centuries, the House of Lords, which obviously embraced hereditary power or ecclesiastical power, represented the grand interests of the country and was a place where the grand interest of the country mediated royal power. In the 17th Century, we had a period of revolution and upheaval, challenge to monarchical power of complex process, which I don't have time to talk about, but it obviously finished in Civil War, the decapitation of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords by the House of Commons military dictatorship and all manner of constitutional innovations. And it was curious that in that period, Britain went through in a tiny period of time the extraordinary evolution that we see happening in so many countries of the world of the battle between dictatorial power on power and so on and so forth. After that at 1660, with the restoration in the House of Lords formed itself again and then called the House of Commons back into being. We since then had two centuries of bicameral government and power gradually shifted from the Lords to the Commons. And in the late 17th Century, I hope this isn't too long, [inaudible 00:06:13]-
Andrew Roberts:
I'm enjoying every minute of it. No. It reminds me of school and university, so good, let's get back.
Nick True:
In the later 17th Century, after the restoration of the monarchy and leading up to we call the glorious revolution, which was the further assertion of parliamentary sovereignty, when we put out a king, sent him abroad, packed him off rather than decapitating him, there was a period of great struggle between the two houses for ascendancy. And this really revolved around the claim of the House of Commons to control finance, the purse strings which everyone in America will know theoretically the fundamental power of Congress. And this led to great conflict between the two houses in 1669, for example, there wasn't a single act of Parliament passed because there were so many conflicts between the two houses. They were battling over privilege. And this settled down ultimately with a deal that was done not logically, but by the evolution of history, where the commons asserted and was allowed primacy over finance.
And the House of Lords was allowed primacy over the law as a supreme court of the land. And that was a settlement effectively endured until Tony Blair abolished the legal role of the House of Lords in the beginning of the first part of this century. And so, the real power through finance went to the Commons, but the House of Lords remained a major advisory force until last thing I'll say, and then people attention span can be revived. There was a huge conflict between the two houses in 1908 to 11 when the conservative party in opposition sought to use the unelected House of Lords as the laws have never been elected to reject the budget of an elected government. And this led to a further reduction until that point, the House of Lords was theoretically co-equal in power to the Commons. After that, the Commons bled on as the Sun and the Constitution and the House of Lords retained great power still has to pass legislation that can ultimately be overridden by the House of Commons.
Andrew Roberts:
And how often does that happen? How often? It's called the Parliament Act of 1911, isn't it, that established this primacy of the commons over the Lord? How often is it invoked in real life as it were in order to pass legislation that the House of Lords continues to reject?
Nick True:
Very rarely because it's like many things which are blunder. Buses should not be fired very often because they can blow people's heads off. And the column act is so set up, but it takes about 13 months to have in effect because of the various technicalities of the law. So rather than wait, politicians are always in a hurry. They only have if they're elected a small span, the mouse's life. So, they're in a hurry to get things done. So usually there is a negotiation and usually the House of Lords, because of its sense of being the moon rather than the Sun will defer to the House of Commons after a certain time. So the actual blowing off of the Lords take place, but rarely 4, 5, 6 times in a hundred years.
Andrew Roberts:
And can you explain the Salisbury Convention, which is all to do with this as well, isn't it?
Nick True:
Yes, it is because after the Second World War and Churchill was some early dismissed by the British people, one of the great historical acts of gratitude, but a wonderful humbling experience Labor government came in, which was elected with a substantial majority with grand plans for socializing and nationalizing tremendous parts of the economy, obviously a legacy which remains to this day we remain a greatly socialized economy and institutional institutionalized. The Labor Party had the majority in the Commons, but they were outnumbered 10 to one in the House of Lords because frankly, labor were threatening to abolish the hereditary peerage. So they weren't getting many friends among hereditary peers.
So there was a deal done, it's all done by deals and it has to be, it's the only way the House of Lords can be governed by understanding between the two parties. There was an understanding between Lord Salisbury or Lord Cranborne as he then was the leader of the Conservatives and via Count Addison, the labor leader, that the House of Lords would not seek to reject a bill which had been in the manifesto of the elector party. And that's broadly remained the position to this day, though I think it needs some revival and some refreshing.
Andrew Roberts:
Well, it made sense then when there were 10 times more Torry peers than there were labor peers. But that's no longer the case, is it? We now, in the last Parliament where we both sit on the conservative benches, we lost many more divisions' votes as we call them, divisions, than we won. And that's partly because the crossbenchers who we'll come onto in a minute and the Bishops and the Green Party and the liberal Democrats joined the Labor Party and defeated the Conservatives in the House of Commons. So, to what extent should the Salisbury Convention still exist in circumstances that are so different from the ones that pertained in 1945 with regard to numbers on each side?
Nick True:
Well, my contention is it should remain. I think the House of Lords has got rather lazy in remembering that it's the moon and getting a bit above itself. I'd like to see the Salisbury Convention given a little bit more breath. For example, one of the things that we've been seeing, Andrew, is the House of Lords including so-called independence, lining up to reject a bill from the Commons. Not once but twice, but three times, but four times. How often does the elected house have to say, "This is what we want to do," before the unelected house defers? So, I think there are some problems there.
What has happened obviously is the House of Lords, I think since the expulsion of most of the hereditary peers in 1999 by Tony Blair, there is this new card of people, and you and I are among these, so-called life peers, who preen ourselves that we are such splendid people because we have been the selector's eye of the Prime Minister of the day has lit upon us and sent us to the House of Lords and nobody can touch us. And we have an authority, which hereditary peers who of course shouldn't be there, because we don't believe in hereditary, do we, except when we want to do something for our children. They have more justification in challenging the House of Commons. And I think that the mental attitude of many peers in the House of Lords has changed.
The reality is that the numbers still don't count because the conservative government now has a big majority over the Labor Party, too big in my view, in the House of Lords, but still as you say, losers. Because the fundamental thing is that in an unelected house, a government shouldn't really have a majority and it is a cooling force in the Constitution. But the fact that we've lost so many votes shows that the Labor Party hasn't always understood the necessity to defer. And I think we need to reestablish that and we would certainly need to have that if there were a labor government again with a smaller number than the conservatives now have. It's about a hundred advantage that conservatives have effectively over Labor.
Andrew Roberts:
Which is why The Times claims that Starmer has plans to make a hundred new labor peers. What effect would that have on the House of Lords?
Nick True:
Well, it wouldn't really, I think it debases the coinage. I think that the more you create, whether it's dollars or peers, the less they have value. It doesn't change the fundamental equation of a thing. Even if you had a hundred extra labor peers, if the Conservative Party voted, the [inaudible 00:15:01] opposition, the party voted against the government's legislation in the House of Lords and could bring in other raggle-taggle forces, which you might or might not want to talk about, then the government cannot pass its business. A hundred labor peers wouldn't make a difference to that basic arithmetic. The House of Lords only can manage on, as I say, the historic understanding between the government and the main opposition party, that a fundamental principle of the British Constitution must override everything. And that is that the King's government must be carried on, and it is not for the opposition, and certainly an unelected opposition, to prevent the elected government in the day having its legislation.
Andrew Roberts:
One of the things that the Labor Party is very likely to have at its manifesto, which is going to be published any day now, is the abolition of the hereditary element in the House of Lords that's presently still there, some 92 peers. It's sometimes difficult to explain to non-British people why there should be hereditary members of a legislative body. How would you defend the concept of hereditary peers?
Nick True:
Well, there are two ways really. One is the romantic conservative. Venetian once said to me when he heard about Tony Blair's plan to get rid of the hereditary peers. He said, "[foreign language 00:16:40]." The last remnant of an aristocratic constitution. And they're there really because it's a prescriptive part, it's a continuing part of how parliament came into being. In a sense, they have always been there without ever asking to be there. Once you do away with that prescriptive element, then you have a parliament that is created, created by statute. And therefore, effectively we have had that in 1999, because the House of Lords exists as it is including hereditary since an act of parliament was passed, constituting as it now is.
But as that prescriptive ancestral constitution dies away, then you come into territory where new constitutions can be written from time to time. You can have your second House of Lords, your third House of Lords, your fourth House of Lords. So, it's not a great argument. That is a reason why they're there, because in this sense like Mount Everest, they've always been there and then they were allowed to remain in 1999. And why they were allowed to remain in 1999 was because of a deal that was done with another Lord Salisbury, confusing. But the grandson of the Lord Salisbury I was talking about before, did a deal with the Labor Party who were frightened the House of Lords would foul up their legislation in Blair's first parliament, which they wouldn't have done, but they were bluffed into thinking it might happen.
And so, the deal was that the 92 would remain until there was a final settlement between the parties about what the future of the House of Lords should be. Now, comes onto the second point. If labor remove the 92 hereditary peers, then without actually saying it or avowing it, they are creating a new form of Parliament, House of Parliament, which is an entirely selected House of Parliament, a selectorate chosen by the passing prime ministers of the day with the British people still having no voice in it.
Now, I know many people recoil from the idea of having a second elected chamber. For my own part, if all the cards are thrown up in the air, I find it hard to believe if you were coming down from Mars and designing a constitution in the 21st Century, you wouldn't say that both houses should be elected. But the removal of hereditary peers by a labor government coming in would be a deliberate act of creation of a totally appointed house plus the bishops. And this is a very big constitutional thing to do, and it's something arguably about which the British people should have a choice. So, that was why they remained, to ensure that when the fully elect, fully appointed House of Lords. Life peers were only created in 1958, it's not such a sort of sacred thing, that it should not happen without a deliberate choice by the electorate.
Andrew Roberts:
And one of the reasons why the electorate might not choose that in say a referendum would be that it's a recipe, isn't it, having two elected chambers for perpetual logjam between them. One looks sometimes at the American constitution where you see struggles between the houses, the elected houses, certainly in other countries that happens. Wouldn't this be a recipe for a logjam in Britain?
Nick True:
Well, not necessarily. You could argue that logjams create uni parties, which are possibly not equally unattractive. I believe as Morris Cowling once said, "One needs a lot of negative bloodiness sometimes in constitutions." I don't believe that logjam is inevitable, and in any case, the House of Lords would still have to defer to the commons under the Parliament Act system.
Andrew Roberts:
Would there be a-
Nick True:
And it wouldn't have financial power, although it would seek it if it were elected.
Andrew Roberts:
It would also, the abolition of the hereditary element would also leave the monarchy as the only hereditary area of our national life. Do you think that might put pressure on the monarchy? Do you think that might be [inaudible 00:21:09]-
Nick True:
I don't think that, no, I don't buy that argument. Though it's one that's often used. Personally, I don't think it's a truthful argument. The monarchy lives for itself in a prescriptive manner. But equally, even if I did think it was the case, I wouldn't think it was a good argument to use.
Andrew Roberts:
What about the quality of debate? What do you think would happen to that? It strikes me that the quality of debate in the House of Lords is far higher than in the House of Commons. Whenever I go to the House of Commons, all the shouting and the yelling is very different from the much more sedate discussion that we have in the House of Lords.
Nick True:
Well, that is true, but you may say that's because we're all such a genius people, which we're not necessarily. That's because there isn't a teacher in the room. Now, when Slob Peters was in the room, we were silent because we were nervous. But the speaker is the teacher who shouts. They go on as much as they can until this teacher tells them to stop. The many extraordinary things about the House of Lords, so I think it's the only chamber in the world that doesn't have a presiding officer. We don't have points of order with nobody in the chair who can tell us what to do. So, this requires something, which as I said earlier in this interview, I think is tremendously important, dignity and courtesy and political dialogue. Because if you all shout at each other, then nothing can be done. So in effect, paradoxically, the absence of a speaker, the absence of a chair, requires us to have the civil discourse that we do. I don't see many other chambers in the world trying that experiment, but I think it works very well for the House of Lords.
Andrew Roberts:
It certainly does. Let's talk about Maurice Cowling who taught you at Peter House Cambridge. He had an overarching theory of politics, not just British politics, but politics in general. Would you like to explain what it was, and then we'll talk about how accurate you think it is?
Nick True:
Well, I think he did two things really. He had many things. Morris in a sense created a new way of looking at history, which grew out of a name me right vision. But he basically argued that politics was about a dance between a limited number of great people at any given time in politics. And he also unashamedly said that hatred was an important part of that. I remember him saying to me once, "Never underestimate hate."
Andrew Roberts:
Well, you certainly couldn't on high table at Peterhouse, could you? There was a good deal of hatred that went backwards and forwards there.
Nick True:
That's true. So it was a shock really to those because you arrive at university with this idealistic view that these great forces and principles and philosophies, but actually it's all about people. And I'm going to do that bastard down. Am I allowed to use that language?
Andrew Roberts:
You most certainly can. Yes, absolutely.
Nick True:
And so that was one thing, a concept of looking at it, which of course is absolutely truthful.
Andrew Roberts:
Now, you're a cabinet minister. You have seen yourself therefore that it is an accurate thing, that the clash between relatively small groups of people in a eye pressured environment is really the driving force of politics.
Nick True:
Well, it's certainly a major driving force. Yes, it would be demeaning my life to say that one didn't have principles and objectives and ideas. Of course one does. But if it comes from that fellow, you're not going to let it happen, are you?
Andrew Roberts:
So, the dance of the few is the key.
Nick True:
Yes, that is one thing. The other thing of course, is that Maurice very early taught that when people saw it as a struggle between Marxism, and Marxism and conservative forces and the broadest way left and right, communism, et cetera, the whole intellectual construct of the Cold War, he really identified that what is the fundamental problem that so many nations have, which is a loss of identity and a loss of.... He mourned the decline of the old Anglican religion and the arrival of a overweening high liberal, which he ascribed originally to the great book Mill and Liberalism, which is one of his first works in 1963, that there was this, he prophesied that there would be, and he saw that there already was really this international force of people who think that we know better than others, and we actually need to impose, he foresaw the metamorphosis of liberalism into illiberalism, which is one of the great things that we're living with in almost every country of the world at the moment.
Andrew Roberts:
One of the forces that you see in the House of Lords personifying that are the other bishops in the Lords where you have 26 of them having the right to vote on legislation, but all of them Anglicans, of course. No chief rabbi, no cardinals, no imams, just Anglicans. How long do you think that can survive as a concept in our constitution?
Nick True:
I think it becomes very difficult to defend increasingly. It is a prescriptive part. There used to be, originally in the medieval house of laws that I referred to earlier, there was a rough equilibrium in numbers between the secular and the religious arm. Then the first great purge of the House of Lords was done by Henry VIII when he destroyed the Abbotts, destroyed the monasteries. And so all the Abbots were expelled from the House of Lords leaving this rump of bishops who historically became 26. And they were partly a prescriptive part of the house or an ancestral part of the house, but they were also supposed to contribute a spiritual element of council to our discussions. But of course, as you know, they simply don't do that. Again, Cowling obviously saw this happening. They have become people who rush to close the churches at the first instance that COVID arrives.
I was surprised once, a bishop when I quoted the Bible at him when he was quoting the minutia of some social security benefit at me. And I think we had once a day when there was a great debate on welfare or other. Some typical topic that the clerics take an interest in. And there were several of them there voting against the government. And the next debate was on whether abortion should be imposed on Northern Ireland without any vote by the people of Northern Ireland, because Stormont was suspended. And all those surfaces quietly swelled away and the bishops withdrew, and we came to discuss a question which touches profoundly on faith, and therefore I question whether they have a useful role.
Andrew Roberts:
And also they do vote against the conservatives [inaudible 00:29:05]-
Nick True:
93% of the time against this government. Yes, the days when the Anglican church has said to be the conservative party at prayer, long gone. I think it's now the Labor Party not at prayer.
Andrew Roberts:
Let's consider the possibility, the terrible, tiny outside possibility that we're going to need a Tory revival after the next election. You were in the conservative research department from 1975 when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister all the way up to 1982, which was exactly when the philosophy of modern conservatism of that right conservatism came to the fore and of course was tremendously successful. It was a juggernaut intellectually. How do Tory revivals happen? You were at the heart of one of them. Tell us about them.
Nick True:
Well, I think heavy defeat is obviously a great-
Speaker 3:
Catalyst.
Nick True:
Catalyst, yes, but also disillusion and despondency. One of the disastrous aspects of the heath government in 19 70, 74 was that heath came to power in 1970 on basically a traditionalist conservative prospectus. And then halfway through shifted all his policies and started introduce income control policies, dividend control policies, status policies. So, the conservative then went out on a difficult election with a massive battle going on with the trade unions, disillusioned with where the party had gone to. So, I think a double purging is unfortunately a start of it. I never commend. Opposition is a terrible place to be. It's being in the Antarctic blizzard without a compass when you start off, but you have to build from fundamentals. And I think the greatness of Keith Joseph, and Margaret of course, came from that background. Keith Joseph challenged what he called the socialist ratchet, that the way that policy was, the liberal leftist agenda always pushes to the left. The conservatives tend to accommodate.
And we find ourselves, for example, in this parliament talking and defending things which are absolutely absurd. We have members of the government who actually say that can't say to a woman as a woman. Conservatives, this is ridiculous, small example. But it happens in a broad range of policies. So Joseph said, "We have to refine the common ground, forget the center ground." And I think that is where revivals begin, because ultimately everything comes down to liberty. And personal liberty, family, freedom to do so, exercise for responsibility, which comes from a shared code of behavior and a shared understanding of what the nation is and should be, which is challenged at the moment. And I think that's the way you rebuild. What policies really affect people?
Politics is actually simple. You should have lower taxes because high tax, nationalized choice and lower taxes, personalized choice. You should have decent schools because people want their children to learn. You have to have strong defense and safe streets. You have to have a pension system which is sustainable and secure, good health... And you have to have a minimal state that guarantees the safe arc. It's not too difficult to do those things if you focus on the essentials. So I think again, for revival, you have to pare down to the fundamentals and you have to use what I referred to earlier negative bloodiness towards some of the stupid accretions that have come on to one's political philosophy or so-called philosophy in a long period of government.
Andrew Roberts:
Especially as those accretions have turned out to be tremendously expensive.
Nick True:
Yes. It is dismaying to me to see the conservatives and labor vowing, vying in which one can spend more of the public's hand earn money. This is not what politics is about.
Andrew Roberts:
[inaudible 00:33:22]. Conservatism [inaudible 00:33:23]-
Nick True:
Neither Gladstone, nor Thatcher would've agreed with that.
Andrew Roberts:
No. And do you think the House of Lords will have an important role to play if the Conservative Party in the House of Commons is given a serious bloody nose?
Nick True:
Well, I think it obviously has a role and a responsibility. The role doesn't change, but it needs to be exercised with due care. It mustn't allow itself to be used as the House of Lords was used by a shadow cabinet in 1908 to bludgeon the government, but it can reflect the light of the silvery moon on some of the no doubt silly things that the labor government would try to do, and illumine some of those dark places. You see the countryside, I spend a lot of time in deep countryside where the moon is a great thing and one knows the phases of the moon as well as the seasons. And the countryside will always save us from urban revolution and the malevolence of the [inaudible 00:34:32] elite. And the House of Lords is the constitutional countryside that we have.
Andrew Roberts:
John Major said in his memoirs that you were his favorite speech writer. I can see why. You conjure images very powerfully. What are the tricks of the trade to being a speech writer? Is that the most important one to conjure images?
Nick True:
That's something. You have to make people laugh. You have to know what you're writing about, what you want to say. You also know it's the reverse of writing a play really. You have to know your actor. When you are a playwright, you know the actors have well got to be able to [inaudible 00:35:13] what you say. But there's no point trying to write a speech unless you know the cadences of the way someone speaks and the way somebody thinks. So, I always used to say somebody, I was trying to just talk into a microphone, 30 seconds if need be, saying three or four important things, you then get the cadence and take it from there.
Andrew Roberts:
As well as being leader of the House of Lords, you're also Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, so you were... Or at least your predecessors were responsible for the King's private seal as opposed to the public one. And as I mentioned earlier, this came into a being in 1307. And apart from the interregnum period that you mentioned, the Civil War in the mid 17th Century, it's been in existence ever since. I was looking it up earlier today, I noticed nine prime ministers since Israeli have held this place, and also one holder of it. The second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, whose name was Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, one of the most fabulous aristocratic names of-
Nick True:
Yes, good way to disguise an enormous fortune, which you now [inaudible 00:36:33]-
Andrew Roberts:
Yes. No one absolutely, through an awful lot of intermarriage, one wonders. Look, I always ask about the weight of history on the shoulders of my guests. It's quite a weight that, isn't it, over 800 years?
Nick True:
It is, yes, of course one's enormously sensible of the honor that is done to one by being able to carry out the dignity and duty of public service. But yes, I have this large seal, actually it's a large silver seal, weighs two and a half pounds, I think. And because the King doesn't have a privy seal anymore, it was all dealt with. And now we have the Crown estates and the arrangement with the money. It's never been changed, and it's actually Queen Victoria's silver seal. So, it is a rather marvelous thing to have. And you think that those Victorian politicians would actually have held it, whereas many of the other seals have been redone. And you feel the weight of history in funny ways. And actually when I was given this seal, it's in an old leather box, which is tied up with a funny piece of string, which you might think is rather like the British Constitution, which by the way should never ever be written down by rationalists. Despite my respect for the founding fathers, he can only do that trick once.
It's tied up with this funny piece of string. So here I am, the King says, "Well, be careful how you hold it." And the lid wants to come off and it's tied on by this piece of string. And I think to myself, can I have this leather case repaired without telling my king? And I plan to do, or I thought I would do for the King to have this repaired so it would actually lock and do properly. But such as one's respect for the ancient office, I thought, "Well, maybe I'm breaking a piece of history by breaking that piece of string. I don't know who actually tied the piece of string around it, but it probably should remain. It's very discolored and very old.
Andrew Roberts:
The metaphor is so powerful that of course you can't do anything about it, Nick. Let the incoming next Lord Privy Seal-
Nick True:
I'm sure they'll modernize it there from the darker forces. Spare me. Spare me that.
Andrew Roberts:
What history book or biography are you reading at the moment?
Nick True:
Well, funny enough, I'm a byzantinist by training. So, I actually have got Anthony Kaldellis' history, is called New Roman Empire, I think. I like his writing. He actually challenges, or he goes to basic conception about Byzantium, but it was the continuing Roman Empire. But because of the enlightenment and rejection of the Orthodox East, that aspect of Byzantium has been neglected. So, I'm enjoying reading that. But I'm also reading Nick Lloyd's new book on the Eastern Front in the First World War.
Andrew Roberts:
Yes, that's a fabulous book, isn't it?
Nick True:
I'm fascinated by the First World War, always have been. And Norman Stone, who I met when he fell down the stairs, in PeterHouse, and landed in the drunken stupor outside my room stairs-
Andrew Roberts:
He taught me at Cambridge.
Nick True:
He did a book on the Eastern Front, but there hasn't been one since. And that colossal conflict, which was really the destruction of Europe, although we're still living through the embers of that conflict, is fascinating.
Andrew Roberts:
And your what if, your counterfactual?
Nick True:
Oh, gosh. Well, I suppose as a bad Byzantine, I would have to choose one, wouldn't I? Well, what if the Byzantine army had won the Battle of the Yarmuk in 636 when the Arabs... After a period of global cooling, the Arabian Peninsula became more fertile, the Arabic population expanded, and there was this great force of propelled also by the teachings of Mohammed, came bursting out of the Arabian Peninsula. And there was a great battle in 636 when the forces of Byzantium were overwhelmed. And this opened up the Arab conquest of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, and ultimately North Africa. Had that battle gone the other way, which it actually should have, a council at a very sketchy, then the advance of Islam and the Arabs west of the Mesopotamia could well have been arrested. For a long time they would never have secured the riches of Egypt. Egypt as a absolute clue, this key state in world history and will always be so.
And they probably would've vouched as they eventually did the conquest of Iran and Persia, and may well have settled on the Iranian plateau. And that would've been, there is this constant millennial divide between the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia in the West, which is reflected in the division between Shiite and Sunni Islam. And you might've heard Islam sitting up there on the Iranian plateau. And as we're seeing today, although they're trying, it's very hard to dominate Egypt's area and Palestine from the Iranian plateau. So, I think that might've been an interesting counterfactual.
Andrew Roberts:
Very good. 637. One last question. Byzantine, it's used as an adjective to mean oversubtle and complex, and sometimes untrustworthy. Is that fair?
Nick True:
I don't think so. It's fair to the extent that human nature is human nature, and doubtless that there have been some very untrustworthy characters sitting around in the court of Constantinople. The label, that attachment, they never call themselves Byzantine in anyway, or Byzantine, as you say, in the state, because of they call themselves Romans. But the enlightenment, Voltaire, Montesquieu and others, despised and Gibbon, despised this lower empire as being something inferior. And so, all sorts of adverse qualities were put on this extraordinary Christian polity that actually lasted for a thousand years, 1,100 years from the foundation of Constantinople to the fall of Constantinople, 1,123 years and the 21 days, I think, something like that.
And that only survived over that period. [inaudible 00:43:28] does not survive that long transforming itself as it did along the way without a core identity, without a self-belief. And actually in this case, obviously with the fundamental binding force of the Orthodox Christian faith. And none of those things adequately understood or explained in Western Europe because the papacy, the putative, new empires of the West, they wanted to establish themselves as the real heirs of Rome, and put the actual heirs of Rome on it in a lower place. So, I think that's where the scorn for Byzantium comes from rather than the actuality, which probably was, there were some crooks around in the palace.
Andrew Roberts:
Nick True, leader of the House of Lords, and Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, thank you very much for coming on Secrets of Statecraft.
Nick True:
Well, thank you very much. It was great honor to be asked.
Speaker 5:
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