Trajectories of Failure: Neil Hamilton, Sebastian Haffner, and the Campaign against Welsh Democracy

In his book, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, the journalist Sebastian Haffner, then a refugee in London from Adolf Hitler’s Germany, reminds us of Hitler’s inglorious beginnings and gradual descent into crime. First, he says, Hitler was an artist; having failed as an artist, he worked as a painter and decorator; having failed as a painter and decorator, he lived in a doss-house; not content with this, he became a snitch for the police; and then he became, first a member, then a functionary, and at last the leader of the Nazi party, thus continuing downward on the trajectory of his failure until he was Führer of the Third Reich.¹

Neil Hamilton is no Hitler, of course, yet Haffner’s rhetoric seems applicable in his case. For having been a Member of Parliament, he was branded a liar and a cheat;² having been branded a liar and a cheat, he became, as he himself might put it, a media whore;³ and having become a media whore, he sought to become a member of the European Parliament, for the purpose of campaigning against the European Parliament.⁴ Having failed to become a member of the European Parliament, he became a member of the Parliament of Wales,⁵ who now seeks to abolish the Parliament of Wales,⁶ even though this consigns him to utter irrelevance,⁷ and the country he supposedly loves⁸ to extinction.⁹ Those who genuinely wish to contribute or create will do so, and will find at least some fulfilment. But those whose motivations are selfish can never be fulfilled, for selfishness seeks not to create or nurture anything external to the self, but only to aggrandise and perpetuate the self. Hence UKIP greeted the referendum victory that completed their campaign, not with satisfaction or joy, but with gloating and self-pity,¹⁰ with thuggishness and brutality,¹¹ and now they look for something else to destroy.

For Eric Hoffer, politics reveal character. The selfish, the bored and the over-ambitious are drawn to take part in populist mass movements,¹² while for José Ortega, it is the self-appointed ‘masses,’ not defined by class, but drawn from all walks of life, and defined by their materialism, their rejection of knowledge, and their indifference to the life of the mind, who embrace authoritarianism.¹³ Tacitus said of the barbarians that they confused the material comforts of civilisation with civilisation itself, and the word implies a respect for the human personality in its potential that makes personal freedom, comfort and leisure meaningful and purposeful.¹⁴ Neil Hamilton is no Hitler. Yet he has a history of involvement with the Far Right.¹⁵ His political career has disgraced, coarsened,¹⁶ cheapened¹⁷ and degraded¹⁸ democracy. And in his campaign to abolish the democracy of Wales he has found a cause worthy of his stature.