Word: bagehot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although forbidden by custom to intervene in partisan politics, she has fully exercised the rights of the monarchy that the 19th century historian Walter Bagehot described in his classic The English Constitution: "The right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn...
...rapid self-enrichers seem to be motivated by greed. It seems more likely that they recognize "money, pur et simple," in Bagehot's phrase, as the shortest, speediest route to public recognition, self-esteem and power-or, simply, security in a threatening world...
Times and thrones have changed since Walter Bagehot, the 19th century British political analyst, said of royalty: "In its mystery is its life. We must not let daylight in upon magic." Royal houses, which once saw outside light only when their occupants were wedded, beheaded, deported or deposed, today are almost constantly floodlit. Queen Elizabeth's younger sister Margaret is squired by a swinger 17 years her junior, and the princess's rift with Photographer-Husband-Antony-Armstrong-Jones-the-Earl-of-Snowdon reigns supreme on front pages and TV for days on end. Princess Anne, 25, the Queen...
...Anthony Eden (a Conservative) worked out plans for Suez without informing his Cabinet of them, much less getting their approval. In both cases the Cabinet Ministers were bound--by the Catch-22 called collective responsibility--to support decisions in which they had no part. Britain had moved from Bagehot's Cabinet government to what Crossman called Prime Ministerial government...
Crossman saw himself, quite correctly, as performing the role of a modern Bagehot, seeking to expose the "disguised" elements of the British constitution and analyzing power as it is, not how we think it is. Crossman learned--by experience in academics, journalism, and in the Cabinet--"That there is a gap between the literary legend, the paper description of politics, and the reality. It is a gap which begins with the description given by journalists who are describing it from outside, and then confirmed by the academics who read journalists' articles and regard them as accounts of what really happened...