Arise, Sir Roger! - the award of a knighthood to Roger Scruton shines out like a good deed in a naughty world

Sir Roger Scruton

I suffered a moment of confusion while scanning the knighthood recipients in the Queen's 90th. Birthday Honours list when I saw the name of Angus Deaton among them. The coke-sniffing, two-at-a-time sex romping former Have I Got News for You? presenter? Had he, I wondered, done a Profumo by devoting himself to good works in order to atone for past transgressions? He might very well have done, but it turned out to be a professor at Princeton, whose name is spelled slightly differently.  Anyway, my friend David Moss reminded me - in a comment on a post I'd written about our old university supervisor, Roger Scruton, in 2011 - that I'd concluded it with a bold (some might say rash) promise. Responding to Scruton's claim that "it’s still possible to gain a vision, to stand on a little peak - perhaps not the peak on which Spinoza stood, or Plato, but a peak of one’s own -  and look across at all this sea of ignorance and confusion and hysteria… and smile at it", I wrote:

"I try to smile gently as I stand on my tiny little "peak" and survey the stupidity and ignorance of what passes for modern civilisation - but I'm afraid I too often let my old tutor down by spitting with rage instead. I will stop doing so the day  Roger Scruton is awarded a knighthood for his unique contribution to the intellectual life of this country."

Well, I'll do my best - even though I'm in a distinctly spitty mood these days, and I find the occasional wave of rage rather energising. Nevertheless, the award of a knighthood to the finest British philosopher of his era, and one of the most - perhaps the most - lucid, thoughtful and convincing proponents of the fundamental principles of conservatism since Edmund Burke, is a cause for joy and celebration. It feels as if justice has finally been done.

I don't think I can improve on what I wrote here about Sir Roger, so I will simply (once again) point anyone who's interested in reading more about the great man to this truly excellent profile by Tim Adams, which appeared in The Observer last October. Scruton's treatment at the hands of Britain's monolithic left-liberal academic establishment has been predictably vindictive - unforgivably so, considering the obvious brilliance of his thinking, the evident range, quality and originality of his writings, and the fact that, unlike most of his colleagues, he quietly and unshowily put himself in harm's way to help spread the conservative message behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, when most British academics continued along the safe path to tenure and peer approval by turning a blind eye to the horrors being perpetrated by Communist regimes, while loudly denouncing the wickedness of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. ( Scruton, being more interested in truth than preferment, was no Thatcherite lapdog either - he admired her enormously, especially her courage, but was never a huge fan of unrestrained free market economic policies, which he saw as in some ways antithetical to true conservatism.)

I was very, very lucky to be taught by Roger Scruton (when I think of the dreary leftists I could have ended up being misled by, I shudder), and conservatives around the globe are fortunate to have had him as an intellectual guide for so many years. Congratulations, teach! And thank you.

(There was another very pleasing knighthood on the same list for Larry Siedentop, emeritus fellow, Keble College, Oxford, for services to political science. I wrote last year about his utterly marvellous book, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, in which he convincingly argues that, far from Christianity being the enemy of modern Western-style liberal democracy - it was in fact directly responsible for its developments and for the freedoms enjoyed by those of us fortunate enough to live under it. I bet that one had leftist academics spraying coffee over their Guardian when they read such heresy.)