Politics & Power Quote by Robert Peel

Peel’s line lands with the weariness of a man who spent his career trying to turn government into something like an accountable instrument, only to find it behaves more like weather. “Very few facts” isn’t anti-intellectualism; it’s a warning about the kind of certainty politics performs. The parenthetical “at least ascertainable facts” is doing the real work: he concedes there may be truths out there, but the political arena is a lousy laboratory. Evidence arrives late, distorted by interest, and instantly repurposed as ammunition.

That restraint is also a power move. Peel speaks as a historical leader who built his brand on administrative competence and pragmatic reform (from modern policing to the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws). Admitting politics’ epistemic limits lets him claim a higher standard without pretending he can fully meet it. It frames policy not as revelation but as judgment under pressure: choosing with incomplete information, accepting second-order consequences, and living with hostile reinterpretation.

The subtext has bite: politics is less about discovering what’s true than about deciding what will be treated as true long enough to govern. “Ascertainable” hints at measurement and verification, yet Peel knows political “facts” are entangled with values and with who gets to define the question. In an era of expanding newspapers, party machinery, and mass agitation, he’s acknowledging a modern condition: public life runs on narratives, and the statesman’s task is to act responsibly inside that haze, not to pretend it isn’t there.