The journal, The Round Table, originally the public face of the secret Round Table network, has reappeared after folding in the late 1970s. It’s new editorial board includes MPs Donald Anderson, Guy Barnett, Robert Jackson, Robert Rhodes-James, and Cabinet Minister Timothy Raison. Other well-known names about London’s elite circles involved are D.C. Watt and Alexander McCloud of the BBC.
I don’t know what the significance of this is yet: I haven’t seen a copy. But Jackson, both a Euro MP as well as the Westminster variety, who was the Round Table’s last editor, was the author of a series of articles in The Guardian recently. In one he finished with this section on Britain’s relationship with Europe, which may tell us something about the present orientation of a group which used to be devoted to the propagation of (first) the Empire and then the Commonwealth.
“In the longer sweep of history we have to understand that the basic supposition of our national policy towards the European mainland has been transformed since 1945. For four centuries we secured our independence by playing off the European powers against each other, and by forming combinations to stop any one of them establishing an hegemony by force. But since the war we have faced a new phenomenon: the voluntary union of the West European states and peoples. This is something we cannot beat – and so, finally, we must join.” (emphasis added)
One of the Round Table’s editorial board in its previous incarnation was Douglas Hurd, now Minister for Northern Ireland. It would be interesting to know if this Round Table connection has anything to do with his promotion within the contemporary Conservative Party despite his role as Heath’s private secretary and apologist. A profile of Hurd in the Sunday Telegraph (16 September 1984) contains a good deal of that peculiar coded language so typical of the Conservative Party (and British State) politics. We are told that Hurd’s career in the Foreign Office included a ‘period as private secretary to the Permanent Under Secretary, “a sure sign of a coming man”; that when he wanted to move into politics “a place was found for him in the Conservative Research Department”; that he entered Parliament in 1974 with the reputation of “an alpha-grade high flier”; and that he is expected to go on to fulfil the “predictions made long ago that he will end up as Foreign Secretary.” Finally we are informed that his mentors have been their Lordships Carrington and Whitelaw. (Fronting for whom?)
Hurd’s position at the Northern Ireland office comes at a time when, despite the Provisional IRA’s recent attempts to remove the British Cabinet, the British State is doing its best to find a way of ditching Northern Ireland. That Telegraph profile refers to the “dismay” felt by Northern Ireland’s Unionist circles at Hurd’s appointment, who distrust his “Foreign Office-Eton-Arabist background.” Some details of Hurd’s ‘Arabist’ inclinations in dealings with the Helen Smith enquiry/cover-up are included in a profile of Hurd in Private Eye (21 September 1984).
Such liberal internationalists trace their historical roots back to the formation of the Round Table network at the beginning of the century, and if Carroll Quigley’s analysis is accurate, that network “were largely responsible for… the partition of Ireland.”
There would be nice ironical overtones to the Northern Irish story if one of the Round Table network’s current off-spring were to oversee the reunification of Ireland.
Another current (and past) member of the Round Table’s editorial board is D.C. Watt, or plain David Watt as he is known in the new populist Times where he has been writing a column on Fridays. (The Times, it will be recalled, was, on Quigley’s account, an integral part of the Round Table network for the first half of this century.)
Watt’s column is sporadically interesting, chiefly for the occasional glimpses of the attitudes of the old elite/managers to the new barbarians running the Conservative Party and the know-nothings in charge in Washington. Watt is no dummy, though, and his books are always worth reading. In his latest, Succeeding John Bull (Cambridge University Press 1984), a collection of essays loosely centred on the transition from British Empire to American Empire after WW2, he offers a very interesting defence of what used to be called ‘diplomatic history’ and is now known variously as ‘international history’ or ‘international relations’. Watt defines such historians’ interest as:
“Understanding why, at given moments in time, identifiable individuals in positions of power, authority or influence, chose, recommended or advocated one course of action rather than another.” (p3)
This is based on a view of history as:
“happening… in the experiences and memories not of statistically or conceptually identifiable abstractions, but of individual identifiable persons.”
This, I suspect, is a view of history which most readers of The Lobster would share. The difficulty with someone like Watt is that he excludes so much. He will attempt to tell you who was thinking what at any given juncture, but won’t tell you on the boards of which companies that individual was sitting, or which financial interest was his political sponsor, or which companies he held shares in. (Or, for that matter, which secret society he was a member of). In Succeeding John Bull, for example – in an essay on the foreign policy-making elites of Britain and America, conspicuous by their absence are the Round Table and its various fronts, CFR, RIIA. Yet this can hardly be because Watt is unaware of their significance for in an earlier book, Personalities and Politics (London 1965) various members of the Round Table group were discussed at some length. Watt certainly knows something of the group’s role in 20th century history, and their omission in this new book may reflect what Quigley perceived as a conspiracy of silence on the group’s activities.
What is positive in Watt’s perspective is the focus on the role of concrete individuals. When Ross, in his book on the Tory Party (see reviews in this issue) makes a great point of “economic and social forces as the driving forces of politics” (p65), the point is, surely, that as Watt suggests, political/diplomatic decisions are made by “identifiable individuals”. Parapolitics, if it’s anything, is the attempt to identify such individuals more closely. In a sense individuals may be said to be the representatives of “economic and social forces”, but without knowing which ones, and then which organisations embodying such “forces”, any account is going to be partial at best. In this American researchers like Peter Dale Scott have much to teach us.
The difficulty with the view of history as “forces” is actually pinning down how such “forces” end up in particular shapes. One obvious current example in this country is the recent resurgence of popular interest in ‘things Imperial’ – the endless TV dramas set in India, the Falklands episode, Sir Keith Joseph’s talk of instituting a ‘patriotic’ history curriculum in secondary schools, and, arguably, the reappearance of The Round Table. All have taken place since the Thatcher Government removed exchange controls and allowed the current flood of UK capital abroad to take place. (About £60 billion has gone since 1979.) As the core of the British Empire was the exportation of British capital, it is tempting to see the present capital exports and all this Imperiana as linked. But how are they linked? How does a decision to adapt a Paul Scott novel about the British Raj connect to another decision to asset-strip this country once more? Anything resembling a decent quasi-causal picture of this series of events will have to start with economic interests (perhaps with ‘forces’ then working on to specific interests) and then down, through the layers of perception formation in a culture like ours to the individual BBC executive who makes the decision to go ahead with Paul Scott. The extreme difficulty of such a job is indicative of how much of our political and historical analysis is mere surface scratching; and the E.H pieces on MacGregor show just how intricate going beneath the surface has to be.
SDP’s David Owen’s membership of the Trilateral Commission is rarely mentioned in this country, but there he is, writing on the Commission’s future, in International Herald Tribune (14 April). In a profile of Owen in the Sunday Times Magazine (16 September) Owen, sounding off about Britain’s economic problems, gives indications of seeing himself as some kind of future British ‘strong man’.
“What I fear is when North Sea oil revenues are totally blown we’ll suddenly realise that we’re in absolute decline and at that time this country is going to require a degree of leadership which will have to tell people some pretty unpalatable truths.”
Owen as the Oswald Moseley of the 1990s? The parallels are quite interesting. Both quit the Labour Party with a ‘solution’ the party as a whole wouldn’t accept; both formed a new party; both talked of ‘leadership’ and ‘unpalatable truths’. Maybe the British left, obsessed with theoretical and historical considerations which lead them to expect a dictatorship of the right as the outcome of the present crisis, may yet discover that in the classic British manner, it is a dictatorship of the middle that we end up with – a technocratic, meritocratic authoritarian state. And where better to learn such moves that in the Trilateral Commission?
Turner, the ‘heir apparent’ to Pierre Trudeau in Canada, who lost the election in September, is another Rhodes Scholar. A story in The Times (15 June 1984) on Turner headlined ‘Raised to be the nation’s ruler’. John Flint in his biography of Cecil Rhodes described the Rhodes Scholar network in Canada as a “recognisable elite”.
On Rhodes Scholars an interesting remark in The Economist (3 March 1984) that the ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK “is rooted not just in past history, shared language and Rhodes Scholarships.” I’ve never seen a more explicit reference to the Round Table-initiated Rhodes Scholarship’s role in the UK/US relationship in any mainstream journal.
A minor example of that network was given in the Times obituary (14 July 1984) of one M.J. Davies, born in South Africa, a Rhodes Scholar, who had a career in British colonial administration between 1940 and 1962.
In a profile of Lord Rothschild (he of ‘Think Tank’ fame) by Peter Hennessy (Times 22 May 1984) Rothschild is described as “a modern-day version of Lord Milner, the charismatic imperialist whose proteges ran large chunks of the Empire in the first half of this century.”
Substitute the Round Table network for Milner’s ‘charisma’ – one thing he plainly didn’t have, as his various biographers make clear – and you have Quigley’s thesis about the Round Table.
And the Times obituary of Lord Astor notes that he succeeded his father as Chairman of the Commonwealth Press Union (CPU). The father, the first Lord Astor, was a member of the Round Table’s inner group, and this CPU, new to me, sounds like another piece in the network. (see Times 29 June 1984)
Is it my imagination or are we seeing more and more of the detritus of the Round Table’s activities in public view?
RR