Llewellyn Woodward, writing in 1934, gave the avowals on which the preceding chapters rest:

What people have tried to do, and have failed to do, I add by way of amendment. Part of the value of education is to show pupils what they are no good at. ‘Failure is an important and valuable experience’, the philosopher and Labour MP Bryan Magee knew. ‘Failure sharpens people’s awareness of their own fallibility, their own common humanity, and deepens their understanding of those in others.’ Failures teach the thoughtful conservative more than successes do.

We live in an injudicious epoch. False names are given to people and ideas. English nativism has empowered people who call themselves conservatives, but are too imprudent to conserve and too unsubtle to learn from failure. They neither admit their mistakes nor try to learn from them. They treat blunders and derelictions as successes, and defy any suggestion that events have gone awry. Meritocracy, as traditionally understood in All Souls, is a disgraced process because it discerns the differences and dissimilarities between people, distinguishes between individuals of different abilities, and has the tang of exclusivity. Instead, inadequacy is rewarded and promoted. A Foreign Secretary who has proven the clumsiest practitioner of international relations since Ethelred the Unready is made Deputy Prime Minister. His replacement as Foreign Secretary had previously been covered in ignominy by her stint as Secretary of State for Justice. The army officers who had military responsibility for the worst reverses in Afghanistan rise to the highest levels of the Ministry of Defence. The Commissioner of Metropolitan Police who presided over the fiascos of Operation Yewtree, Operation Midland, and Plebgate is honoured with a peerage. The spirit of the times is encapsulated by the motto chosen by Lewis Namier for his coat-of-arms, malgré tout.