Politics don't change

At an Arts Club dinner recently, a fellow diner recommented Lynne Olson's book, Troublesome Young Men, about Winston Churchill (a not-so-young man at the time) and other Conservatives who opposed the appeasement policies of  Neville Chamberlain, their own prime minister, before World War II. I have found the book enlightening for many reasons, but one is that it reminds me that politics don't change with time and place. Right after the Munich meeting Chamberlain was exceptionally popular for keeping the peace. Convinced he had saved the nation, he was so enraged by the anti-appeasers that he employed tactics  the author likened to Richard Nixon and his operatives' Watergate tactics. In addition to spies who reported conversations, pressure placed on local Conservative groups  to bar anti-appeasers from the ballot and stories placed in newspapers, Chamberlain's operatives tapped the phones of Churchill, other anti-appeasers, government staffers and journalists considered anti-Chamberlain. Chamberlain exulted in writing to his sister that he had "complete knowledge of their doings & sayings."