There is a real late-1930s feeling hanging in the air at the moment, a feeling we are sleepwalking into something cataclysmic that is just around the corner.
Political and other leaders in the 1930s were accused of allowing events to pass them by, leaving it too late to prevent the tragedy that was the Second World War.
Amongst those whose reputation took a pounding in the 1930s was one with strong links to Northern Ireland, Lord Londonderry.
Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the seventh Marquess of Londonderry, is well known in Ireland for his opposition to Home Rule and as Northern Ireland’s first Minister for Education.
He is more widely known further afield for his links to Nazi Germany through his promotion of a close relationship between Britain and Germany in the 1930s, including supporting an appeasement policy.
Lord Londonderry served as British Secretary of State for Air from 1931 before being fired by Stanley Baldwin in 1935, mainly for gravely underestimating Nazi Germany’s air strength at the time.
After his dismissal, he embarked on a diplomatic quest to forge closer ties between Britain and Germany.
Unlike his ancestor Lord Castlereagh, whom he aped, Lord Londonderry was not a skilled negotiator, and his clumsy and naïve befriending of senior Nazis was used by them to legitimise their regime to the British public, just as they wooed other members of the British aristocracy at the time, including senior members of the royal family.
Mainly through Joachim von Ribbentrop, German ambassador to the UK before later becoming German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Londonderry met senior Nazi figures in Germany from 1936, including Hitler.
Londonderry described Hitler as a “kindly man with a receding chin and an impressive face”.
His wife Edith was more effusive, saying she “beheld a man of arresting personality – a man with wonderful farseeing eyes” and felt that she “was in the presence of one truly great”.
“He is simple, dignified, humble. He is a leader of men.”
Lord Londonderry also went on hunting trips with Hermann Goring and hosted Ribbentrop at his Mount Stewart estate in Co Down in 1936.
Ribbentrop caused a scene as his swastika-laden airplane arrived at Newtownards airfield for a four-day trip to Mount Stewart. He was accompanied by a “noisy gang of SS men”.
He presented Londonderry with a figurine of an SS stormtrooper which decades later provided inspiration to Ian Kershaw, on a visit to the estate, to write his book on Londonderry’s relationship with Nazi Germany, ‘Making Friends with Hitler’.
Londonderry was dubbed “the Londonderry Herr” for his association with Ribbentrop.
Ever fearful of returning to the horrors of the First World War, he supported the undoing of much of the Treaty of Versailles which he, like many others, believed was too harsh on Germany.
Londonderry supported an anti-communist pact between Britain and Germany, and after that goal was spurned, he advocated for a conference of the great powers to secure peace in Europe, like the Congress of Vienna his ancestor Castlereagh had been centrally involved in, in 1814-15.
While not a part of the negotiations, he was in Munich when Neville Chamberlain secured “peace for our time” with Hitler in September 1938.
The sham of an agreement was laid bare just weeks later as Jews and their properties were savagely attacked throughout Germany on Kristallnacht, November 9/10 1938.
With Israel’s closure of its embassy in Dublin in recent weeks, there has been much comment about Éamon de Valera’s offering of condolences on the death of Hitler to the German Minister in Dublin, Eduard Hempel, seen by some as a sign of the Irish state’s deep-seated anti-semitism.
De Valera was no anti-semite. While he was enshrining religious freedom for Jews in the Irish constitution in 1937, Lord Londonderry and many others who formed the British aristocracy were concerned with the excessive influence of Jews more so than with the anti-semitism rife in Nazi Germany.
Writing to Ribbentrop in 1936 about Nazi Germany’s “internal policy in relation to Jews”, Londonderry said: “I have no great affection for the Jews. It is possible to trace their participation in most of those international disturbances which have created so much havoc in different countries.”
While quick to laud Hitler’s foreign policy successes, it took a month for Londonderry to publicly condemn the horrors that unfolded on Kristallnacht.
The months following the Munich Agreement and Kristallnacht saw Chamberlain’s appeasement policy lying in tatters as Hitler continued his aggressive expansionist policies.
Londonderry still sought an agreement with Germany, even offering to meet Hitler again. As one who epitomised appeasement more than most, his reputation was ruined as the inevitable war broke out in September 1939, with rumours even circulating in the press that he and his family would be interned.
Just as Londonderry and others normalised Hitler in the 1930s, much of the media and politicians around the world have normalised the behaviour of the convicted felon Donald Trump since he entered politics.
Incredibly, on the fourth anniversary of the January 6 riots, instead of Trump answering the charges for his alleged instigating of those riots, a nervous world is preparing for his second term as president.
It is still baffling to me that his political career did not come to a shuddering end after he mocked a disabled reporter in November 2015.
After Trump’s recent win, many were quick to condemn the Democrats for losing the campaign instead of mentioning that Trump was more fascist-like and deranged in the 2024 election campaign than he was in the previous two.
As the CNN’s Van Jones said during the campaign: “He gets to be lawless. She (Kamala Harris) has to be flawless.”
Now that he has won again and controls both Houses of Congress (as well as the Supreme Court), the shackles are off this time round.
Gone will be the restraints (if they can be called that) of his first term, as evidenced by his recent cabinet nominees made up solely of loyalist sycophants.
His election win in 2016 did untold damage to America and the world, emboldening liars and would-be-dictators everywhere.
His election win in 2024 is far scarier, with democracy in America and elsewhere now firmly on the back foot.
The least we can do is learn from the mistakes of Lord Londonderry and others from the 1930s, and not fawn over or normalise the lies, the bullying and the hatred that inevitably comes with everything Trump touches.