Irvine Express and North Ayrshire Post. — 1885-08-07 (Irvine, Strathclyde, Scotland)

TORY CONDEMNATION OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL.  (Standard.)  It is time to speak plainly. Lord Randolph Churchill has been puffed by his friends in the daily and weekly press with admirable assiduity. He has dined with them, and they have dined with him, and the well-organised claque are ready to cry " Prodigious !" whenever he opens his mouth. But it is all in vain. We no longer live in days when the public can be gulled by such arts, and the decisive action of the members for Liverpool shows the extent of the alarm which Lord Randolph's blundering and blustering tactics have inspired in the bosom of his party. We say, without the least hesitation, that it would he a thousand times better that the Conservative party were once more its Opposition—strongly though we ourselves recommended them to •take office—rather than that we should again be exposed to the humiliation of such a speech as that which Lord Randolph delivered on Monday evening. Lord Hartington had the couraze  and the manliness to tell the Parnellites that their " whining " complaints would meet with no sympathy from him or his colleagues ; and it was reserved for Lord Randolph Churchill to dishonour the high-minded, historic, and honourable party with which 63 is casually connected by a feeble attempt to show that the Irish members were in the right, that Lord Spencer had connived at judicial murders, and that Mr Parnell is much misunderstood. We have had enough of this. The truth is, that Lord Randolph Churchill is a much overrated man. He is now verging upon middle age, and has reached a time of life when even flighty minds ought to sober down. But that is what he cannot do. His almost incredible ignorance of affairs, his boyish delight in offering the crudest insults to men who have been fifty years in the service of the State, his pranks, his blunders, are ceasing to amuse. It is true that he is possessed of some political abilities, and a turn for public speaking which, under Parliamentary institutions, often raises men considerably above their real merits ; and that he has taken advantage of the peculiar situation of the Conservative party to acquire a predominance with which hi knowledge of affairs and experience of public life are by no means commensurate. Instead of his being broken in by his colleagues, his colleagues have been broken in by him, and he has been able to make them adopt, as the deliberate and well-digested convictions of sagacious and practical Englishmen, the crude conceits of a political neophyte, which his own little Senate labour had to represent as the language of a new Tory gospel. If these pranks are endured much longer, Lord Randolph will break up the Government, and will break up the Conservative party. We will follow Lord Salisbury, but we will not be governed by a sort of over-grown schoolboy, who thinks he is witty when he is only impudent, and who really does not seem to possess sufficient knowledge even to fathom the depths of his own ignorance of everything worthy of the name of statesmanship But it is with Lord Salisbury that the responsibility rests. It is useless for him to shut his eyes to notorious facts. In foreign affairs he has already done wonderfully well. But by its domestic policy the Government is already deeply discredited. It is a common saying that Lord Randolph Churchill, like his brother, the Duke of Marlborough, is at heart a greater Radical than Mr Chamberlain himself, and we are inclined to think that the popular estimation of him is not far wrong. But be this as it may, it is certain that since he took office he has done the Conservative party almost irreparable harm.  AN