Wikipedia says: “The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.”
So who was this Lord Balfour? Obviously, a man of high integrity and stern moral principle.
Simon Kuper writes in his superb 2022 book Chums: How A Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over The UK:
Lord Curzon (Eton and Oxford, where he was president of the Union) [critiqued] Arthur Balfour (Eton and Cambridge), Britain’s foreign secretary after 1916. Curzon describes “the lamentable ignorance, indifference and levity of [Balfour’s] regime. He never studied his papers, he never knew the facts, at the Cabinet he had seldom read the morning’s Foreign Office telegrams, and he never looked ahead. He trusted to his unequalled powers of improvisation to take him through any trouble and enable him to leap lightly from one crisis to another.”
Curzon (chancellor of Oxford University when he wrote this, and Balfour’s future successor as foreign secretary) is also, of course, describing Boris Johnson.
