‘A perfect knight’: Remembering Roger Scruton

Daniel Hannan

Roger Scruton changed the course of my life. He addressed my school’s philosophy society when I was 16, speaking so compellingly about Wittgenstein and language that, when he finished, no one wanted to ask the first question. So, more to fill an awkward silence than anything else, I stuck my hand up and asked him what he saw as the role of a conservative thinker. ‘The role of a conservative thinker,’ he replied, in his charmingly diffident manner, ‘is to reassure the people that their prejudices are true.’

That beautiful aperçu never left me. It animated my career in politics, not least during the Brexit referendum. I spent part of my gap year in what we then still called Eastern Europe, observing the end of communism. Roger had given me various materials to carry to his dissident friends, so I watched the revolutions through Scrutonian eyes. Although it is nowadays fashionable to portray 1989 as a ‘return to Europe’, it was clear at the time that people mainly wanted an end to foreign occupation and a return to national sovereignty. Roger used to call it ‘the politics of the first person plural’: the need for a shared sense of identity in an open society. He was spot on. He always was.

Timothy Garton Ash

‘There’s this very interesting Hungarian called, er, I think, Soros,’ said Roger, sitting in the bohemian book- and music-strewn thicket of his Notting Hill flat. This was sometime in the mid-1980s, and our shared desire to support dissidents in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary had brought us together. Incredible though it may sound, no one had then heard of George Soros.

Our conspiratorial missions behind the Iron Curtain were, let’s be honest, also huge fun, but what needs to be remembered is the amount of hard, thankless charitable administration that Roger undertook, between writing his 50 or so books.