Don Camillo for Tory leader! Lessons for conservatives

The Conservative Party needs Don Camillo as leader, someone prepared to act, prepared to do the right thing, and prepared to kick doors down to make that right thing happen

I have given the matter some considerable thought. Not to the extent of lying awake at night staring into the dark, but definitely some considerable thought. Firstly there is no doubt that the thorough drubbing visited upon the Conservative Party on 4th July was entirely deserved. And secondly that, in choosing a new leader the Party requires some skills and virtues that are in short supply.

In the years after the war Giovannini Guareschi created a world in which those skills and virtues were placed front and centre. In that world - a little world, ‘mondo piccolo’ - there is plenty of politics and often aggressive, confrontational politics too. But as we hear from the start, the world is characterised by love of place, respect for others and appreciation of the ancient and the noble.

“...all I did was put words into their mouths. The river country of The Little Word created them; I crossed their path, linked their arms with mine and made them run through the alphabet, from one end to the other.”

And we might find something we have lost:

“...you will easily come to know the village priest, Don Camillo, and his adversary, Peppone, the Communist Mayor. You will not be surprised that Christ watches the goings-on from a big cross in the village church and not infrequently talks, and that one man beats the other over the head, but fairly - that is, without hatred - and that in the end the two enemies find they agree about essentials.”

Those essentials are what matter and are, I feel, the things we have lost sight of in our modern politics. We have replaced innocent passion driven by love and curiosity with a cruel passion made by hatred and loathing. We have forgotten that we share a place with others and that all of us - left, right and centre - want the best for that place. We know that others - children, animals, the old and the ill - are innocent and should not be made to suffer in the cause of politics.

When, in July 1946, the Italian Communists - including, obviously, Comrade Peppone in the Little World - staged a general strike, what happened in that Little World is a lesson. The beasts on a farm, with no workers, were starving and dying of thirst so, as we read, Don Camillo sets out to help them, to break the strike. The priest has some help:

“A tommy-gun is no laughing matter, but what is even more frightening is the face of the man who bears it, which reveals from the start whether he intended to use it…the strike breakers remained on the job for 12 days, until it was all over…

…No one ever knew exactly who the strike breakers were.”

We, as readers though, know the identity of those strike-breakers. We know that Peppone and his Reds stacked the hay, milked the cows and gave them water. Because the survival of those beasts mattered more than the revolution - not merely out of compassion for innocent animals but so the people of the Little World could have milk, cheese and meat to eat.

Giving priority to essentials arises again and again as priest and mayor, in between fisticuffs, struggle with the realities of post-WW2 Italy. People are literally starving but the food parcels paid for with American money and distributed via the churches were off bounds. One Red takes a parcel and a visiting Party bigwig snatches the food from in front of the guilty Red’s child. Peppone, in the end, gets the essentials right:

“Straziami was sitting in front of the fire reading the paper, with his little boy crouched beside him. Peppone walked in, put the parcel on the table and untied it.  “This is for you,” he said to the boy, “straight from the almighty.”

These essentials - looking out for neighbours, compassion for the needy, caring for our place - are what conservatives should mean when they talk about ‘doing the right thing’. It doesn’t matter why Straziami’s child is hungry, our first thought should be giving him food not overthrowing capitalism. Peppone, a communist, understood this in the way the Party bigwig didn’t: what matters right now is that the boy has “...the first square meal he’s seen for some time…”.

Sadly ‘doing the right thing’ too often doesn’t mean neighbourliness, compassion and care but becomes a sort of condemnation of others who, we proclaim, didn’t do the right thing. Terms like ‘scrounger’, ‘illegal immigrant’ and worse are levelled at people who, like everyone, deserve compassion and care. Disraeli, in Sybil and Coningsby as well as in his political speeches, makes a distinction between conservatives and liberals saying that only the former are truly concerned with making people’s lives better. “This is not a sewage policy” says Disraeli to the Tory Party but a question of life and death. And that liberals, in their passion for progress, lack compassion and care even when they litter their rhetoric with compassioante and caring words.

Nothing has changed. Today’s progressive liberals, socialists and communists behave like the party bigwig who denied Straziami’s son a square meal because it came from the wrong place. We hear hollow words about homelessness and drug addiction from the great and the good of progressive California, yet despite them controlling all of that state’s government, there are still 180,000 homeless and destitute people sleeping on that state’s streets. Meanwhile in square, conservative Texas, homeless numbers are less than a fifth of California’s.

Places run by liberals and socialists fail in the essentials in others ways - they have more crime, less safe roads, poorer health outcomes, worse schools and more poverty. We are told, usually by socialists and liberals, that they are smarter with higher IQs and better education but somehow all this brain power doesn’t result in better lives for ordinary people. Instead we are given the sort of lecture the Party bigwig gave Peppone and the cruelty of ideology. As Straziami tells Peppone:

“To think that we have the face to call other people hypocrites! So long Peppone. I’m sorry that you’ll have to consider me your enemy when I’ll still look on you as a friend.”

Conservatives and the Conservative Party took a wrong turn. It wasn’t just that the British Conservative Party governed badly. Nor was it down to ‘no true conservative’. The wrong turn was to stop talking like conservatives, to adopt the language and rhetoric of liberals and socialists. Worse this wrong turn didn’t merely make conservatives sound like progressives but it began to make them act like progressives. The Party wanted to do conservative things and to promote conservative values but ended up trying to please those progressives while allowing Straziami’s child to go hungry. Conservatives failed because they fooled themselves that the way forward was to try and manage progressive policies - policies that mostly won’t work - better than liberals and socialists.

There’s an old, oft-quoted adage that “great minds discuss ideas” attributed to just about every self-appointed great mind in history - from Socrates to Eleanor Roosevelt. This little saw is the epitome of liberal and progressive thinking especially since the Roosevelt version finishes with “small minds discuss people”. When Peppone, seeking to blame the problem with Straziami and the Party bigwig on Don Camillo, storms into the presbytery, the priest tells him he is talking about people, not the great ideas that gave rise to Italy’s problems and the socialist solutions promoted by that Party grandee.

“I haven’t speculated on anybody’s starvation. I have food parcels to distribute and I haven’t denied them to anyone. I am interested in poor people’s hunger, not their votes…Straziami’s boy and the children of your other poor comrades who haven’t had the courage to come for food parcels don’t know that they come from America. These children don’t even know there is such a place. All they know is that you are cheating them of the food they need.”

Because those progressives, liberals and socialists just want to talk about people in the abstract, a conservative leader needs to do what conservative leaders in Texas have done and actually do something to make people’s lives better. Homelessness in Texas is a fifth of the level in California because the governments there did something about it - built more houses so rents were lower, provided hostels and temporary accommodation, directed healthcare support for the homeless and co-ordinated their work across the state. Then didn’t brag about how good they were because there were still 20,000 homeless and that’s 20,000 too many.

The Conservative Party needs Don Camillo, or at least someone with that priest’s outlook, as leader, someone prepared to act, prepared to do the right thing, and prepared to kick doors down to make that right thing happen:

“Don Camillo could not remember the details of his arrival. They told him that he charged in with a child in his arms, took the hospital doorman by the neck, thrust a door open with one shoulder and threatened to strangle a doctor. The ‘flying squad’ went home leaving Peppone's boy in the hospital to recover. Don Camillo returned to the village blowing his horn like the last trump, and covered with glorious mud.”