Whigging out

A toast to the Whigs, once the life of the party, "brilliant conversationalists and controversialists" notorious for "gambling, loose living, drinking and wit."

They figure in the colorful assortment of 1790s political cartoons by British caricaturist James Gillray at the magnificent site Giornale Nuovo.

* * *

Reviewer John Charmley writes of Roy Jenkins' life of Churchill:

Very Whig of very Whig, begotten not made, would not be a bad summary…

[P]erhaps it was the Tory party that failed to understand Churchill. He remained, to the end, essentially a Whig. He believed in the duty of a benevolent upper class to lead the nation in the direction of progress, and it was only when his faith in that concept wavered, in the 1930s, that he threw his lot in with the Tory avatars. He was essentially a liberal Conservative in the Disraelian mode, a Tory Democrat who, unlike his father, had an idea of what such a concept meant.

* * *

The Whig tradition is raised by Daniel Johnson in an essay for Commentary on "Britain's Neoconservative Moment":

If US-style neoconservatism has proved to be an unwelcome guest on the British Left, it has scarcely found a more comfortable political and ideological home on the British Right. The Anglo-American principles that the United States inherited and that neoconservatives so energetically promote—republican self-government, liberty under the law, bourgeois rectitude and industry—are associated, historically, not with the reactionary Tories but with their more liberal opponents, the Whigs. Beginning with John Locke, Whiggism has been the default position of American politics for over two centuries.

The British statesmen who admire, and are admired in, the United States have almost always been Whigs. Though his father was a maverick Tory, Winston Churchill came from a distinguished Whig family, switched parties several times, and was at his best as leader of a wartime unity government. Margaret Thatcher, who was despised by the Tory grandees for reasons as much snobbish as ideological, cordially returned their contempt, preferring free-market Whigs like Friedrich Hayek.