Kemper
Lectures
No power will make me lift hand, or foot, or voice for the Tories, just as no power would make me join the other side... I expect I have made great mistakes; but there has been no consideration, no indulgence, no memory of gratitude - nothing but spite, malice and abuse. I am quite tired and dead-sick of it all, and will not continue political life any longer.
At about this time he copied out for himself Dryden's lines: ‘Not Heaven itself over the past hath power; But what has been has been, and I have had my hour.’
Lord Randolph was Chancellor of the Exchequer for a few months in 1886, resigning before he even produced a budget. Many people believed that he was the morning star of the Tory Party, its future leader and Prime Minister. But the actual Prime Minister, Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, took a different view. He regarded Lord Randolph as an insufferable colleague. When he offered his resignation on an issue of not great importance, with the object of asserting his personal indispensability, Lord Salisbury at once accepted it. Well-wishers tried to reconcile him. Lord Salisbury replied: ‘Have you ever heard of a man having a carbuncle on his neck wanting it to return?’
Lord Randolph’s treatment by the Conservative hierarchy always rankled with Winston. I remember a conversation I had with Lord Salisbury’s grandson, the 5th Marquess, who held high office in various Coalition or Conservative governments in the 1940s and 1950. He told me that he was once dining with Churchill in September 1940 at the height of the Battle of Britain. Churchill, as he sometimes did, sank into a silent and somber reverie. Then he suddenly turned to Lord Salisbury and said a propos of nothing: “I always consider that your grandfather treated my father disgracefully.” Lord Salisbury was taken aback. He murmured some emollient comment. The conversation trickled into the sand and the dinner party reverted to the rather more important question of bombers and fighters, and Hitler and Goering.