From Country Life
By Clive Aslet
Overseas statesmen and a freezing British
public alike came to pay their respects at Sir Winston Churchill's
funeral, 50 years ago this month.
It was television’s finest hour. The
broadcast of Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral, which took place on
January 30, 1965, united the nation, just as the Coronation had done 12
years before. Many readers will remember the grainy pictures on small
screens, accompanied by Richard Dimbleby’s voice, as resonant as a
funeral bell. Others will have been at the event itself. It was
remarkable how many young people could be seen among the crowd lining
the route from Westminster Hall to St Paul’s, in, as Dimbleby put it,
the new haircuts, fashions and styles.
The Iowa Freedom Summit marked the de facto start of the 2016 GOP presidential primaries. Some big names contenders were conspicuous by their absence, including Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, and Rand Paul. However, around ten prominent potential Republican presidential candidates attended the event. While the weekend will probably best be remembered for Sarah Palin’s incomprehensibly bizarre 35-minute rambling spiel, the most consequential speech of the weekend may have been Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s address to the crowd.
Scott Walker is a candidate the Democrats need to be concerned about. While hard-line conservatives may be drawn to right-wing firebrands like Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Sarah Palin, they are not viable candidates. Walker, on the other hand, has already proven his mettle, time and again, as a gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin, a Midwest swing state. Walker’s policies are every bit as right wing as those proposed by the likes of Cruz and Palin. The problem for Democrats, however, is that unlike those carnival barkers, Walker cannot be easily dismissed. He doesn’t just talk about right-wing ideas, he enacts them. This makes him a dangerous candidate, rather than just an ideologically driven circus sideshow, like many of his competitors.
