Politics & Power Quote by Douglas Hurd

Hurd’s sentence is doing two things at once: practicing the courtly modesty of a veteran politician ("I may be wrong") while quietly drawing a bright constitutional line around the use of force. The disclaimer is less uncertainty than insulation. It signals reasonableness, invites dissent, and preempts the charge of warmongering. Then he pivots to what matters: not the answers, but "putting the questions". That phrase makes scrutiny itself the democratic act, implying that the real danger isn’t a bad decision so much as an unasked one.

The key move is his distinction between "unanimous" and "general" support. He’s acknowledging pluralism without surrendering legitimacy. Unanimity is framed as unrealistic, even faintly authoritarian in its demand; "general support" is the workable threshold for a modern state. Subtext: dissenters are expected, even healthy, but the government cannot be held hostage by them when national security is at stake. It’s a defense of executive action that still pays lip service to consent.

Contextually, this belongs to the late-20th-century British argument about war powers, parliamentary debate, and public opinion in the shadow of contested interventions (think the Falklands as a rallying point, later Iraq as a fracture). Hurd’s rhetoric tries to stabilize the middle ground: ask hard questions, accept disagreement, then act. It’s democratic realism with a steel core - a reminder that legitimacy in wartime is not purity, but sufficient consent to bear the costs.