Beware of political activists

In the fashionable spirit of openness, I have a confession to make: I dislike revolutions – and especially revolutionaries. And I’m always wary of single-issue activists, even if I happen to agree with the single issue.

For example, although I despise the EU, opposed joining it and did what I could to help us leave it, even in the heyday of the Leave campaign I shunned those who hung their entire worldview on the peg of that one issue.

This is in no way to denigrate good people whose energy promotes good causes. It’s just that there’s usually something about them that strikes me as off-centre and therefore unbalanced.

Such people’s efforts are essential to achieving immediate objectives, but, however worthy the goals, their unsmiling vulgarity can cause lasting damage. That’s why a conservative activist is an oxymoron: conservatism presupposes prudence, taste and an ability to see things in interconnection.

Activists possess an undepletable reservoir of bubbling energy that needs a constant outlet. Once they get what they want, the energy seeks another cause to animate.

Alas, even if the original cause might have been worthy, or at least widely perceived as such, the next one may be less so. That may explain the fate of those who perpetrated both the French and the Russian revolutions, for all their original, if short-lived, popularity.

The activists’ demonic ardour was essential to the success of their cause. However, once the revolutions triumphed, the revolutionaries’ erstwhile comrades put them down like rabid dogs.

Robespierre and Trotsky, Saint-Just and Zinoviev, Danton and Bukharin – all of them were killed by their colleagues. My guess is that, if syphilis hadn’t got Lenin, Stalin would have killed him too.

By way of illustration, take MeToo and modern feminism in general. Its roots go back to the militant suffragette movement of the early 20^th century, which, as the name suggests, championed women’s rights, especially the one to vote.

That I have a dim view of that cause is irrelevant to my theme here. However, the key personalities involved do elucidate my point nicely.

Mary Richardson (d.1961), Mary Allen (d. 1964) and Norah Elam (d. 1961) were all close associates of Emmeline Pankhurst and as such participated in the militant activities of the movement she had founded. Together with their disfranchised sisters, they smashed windows, tossed bombs and assaulted police officers.

While Pankhurst was in prison, Richardson slashed Velasquez’s painting known as the Rokeby Venus, in the National Gallery.

“I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history,” she explained, “as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.” Opinions on that designation were, and still are, divided.

Mary Allen also made a career of smashing windows and then going on hunger strikes in prison. Some of the windows she smashed belonged to the Inland Revenue, which must have brought a smile on the face of many a respectable squire.

Norah Elam, a prominent member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, was thrice imprisoned for terrorist offensives inspired by her commitment to a wider suffrage. Like the other two, she presaged today’s obsession with dieting by going on hunger strikes. Unlike today’s dieters, she was sometimes force-fed.

To illustrate my point, the three ladies didn’t settle to a quiet life somewhere in the shires once women got their coveted vote. They transferred their red-hot consciences to the good offices of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and reached prominence within its ranks.

They admired Hitler, and Mary Allen even got the chance to discuss feminism with the führer in person. Since Hitler’s attitude to women was rather agricultural, similar to the feelings cow breeders have for pedigreed heifers, Allen’s enthusiasm might have seemed hard to explain.

Or would be, if we forgot that, whatever their pronounced aims, revolutionaries are energumens who reach out for any source of demonic energy, however sinister. Feminism yesterday, fascism today, animal rights tomorrow – it really doesn’t matter.

Thus, once the fascist cause was defeated, the three ladies in question (actually, Allen was indeed a questionable lady: she always wore men’s uniforms and liked to be known as ‘Robert’) became animal rights activists and militant anti-vivisectionists. If they were alive today, they’d doubtless be cheering the draconian sentence Harvey Weinstein received in a travesty of justice.

Having reached an age at which one can get away with offering avuncular advice, here’s mine: however you feel about a cause, beware of its fervent champions.