Word: palmerstonism
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...fact, the Foreign Office was a Whitehall elephant almost from the day it opened in 1868. It was modeled on a Venetian palazzo, after Architect Sir Gilbert Scott's original Gothic façade was indignantly rejected by Prime Minister Lord Palmerston as "admirable for a monastery." (It later made an admirable Gothic railway station.) From a pompous exterior decked with 63 allegorical statues to regal suites designed more for la dolce vita than diplomacy, the building was so wildly inappropriate that within ten years after completion it was roundly condemned by a parliamentary commission...
...monopoly with China and, with the aid of a heavily armed clipper fleet, won for themselves 25% of the illegal but vastly profitable opium trade. In 1839, when the Manchu Emperor seized 20,000 chests of smuggled British opium, it was William Jardine who convinced British Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston that this was an indignity to which Britain could not submit. The result was the three-year Opium War, which ended in 1842 with permanent Chinese cession of Hong Kong to Britain...
...Strand." Booze-hating Sir Wilfrid Lawson: "The pigeons have dealt most unkindly [with him]." Poet Robert Burns: "[His] slight defacement merely has the effect of giving him a tearful left eye." The situation in Parliament Square: "Disraeli, Peel and Derby, with the treetops above them, suffer more than Palmerston and Smuts in the open. Yet Lincoln, behind Disraeli (who is worst afflicted of all), seems avoided by the birds in spite of being near a tree...
When Queen Victoria ruled the waves, Lord Palmerston sent the fleet to blockade the port of Athens simply to collect damages for a Gibraltar-born Jewish Briton whose house had been destroyed by a Greek mob. "A British subject in whatever land he may be," proclaimed the Queen's Foreign Secretary, "shall feel that the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong...
...World Bank President Eugene Black, who was most responsible for working out the Egyptian-British settlement in the first place (TIME, Jan. 19). Black agreed to return to Cairo to try "to remove the remaining points of conflict" without which Her Majesty's government-in the spirit of Palmerston, if not his manner-will not sign the agreement with Nasser...