Red Queen: The Authorised Biography of Barbara Castle by Anne Perkins

As with the Lib Dem conference, so now with Labour’s. If we do get word of a snap General Election, I’m well prepared with book reviews tangentially related to that subject, too.

Red Queen: The Authorised Biography of Barbara Castle by Anne Perkins

‘Authorised biography’…it’s a phrase that’s often a turn-off to any potential reader. The fact that the biography is ‘authorised’ by its subject suggests that the author has had to pull his or her punches in dealing with the less pleasant aspects of the subject’s life. After all, it’s a rare individual who would be willing to have a biographer dig through and publish all the really sordid and/or private bits of his or her past, or point out a truly breathtaking blunder and declare, ‘Why yes, So-and-so really did mess up there, and wasn’t it just awful?’ Reading an authorised biography can often be like eating a low-calorie snack when you really want the regular kind — before you start you can pretend that you’re about to enjoy the real thing, but the taste is the first giveaway and it doesn’t get much better form there.

That said, I think that Anne Perkins did a spectacular job in giving a warts-and-all presentation of the life of one of Old Labour’s most high-prolife figures. Barbara Castle was at one time thought to be the most likely woman to become the first leader of a major British political party (an honour that would go to Margaret Thatcher shortly before the end of Castle’s time as a Minister). In Red Queen, Perkins draws a neat sketch of her subject’s early life that contains many parallels to Margaret Thatcher’s own upbringing. Barbara Betts, as she then was, was born into a middle-class family that was very politically active, headed by a dominant father whom Barbara spent much of her young life trying to please. The autobiographical detail is very good, pulling in information that doesn’t necessarily find its way into a political autobiography — specifically, some of the hints of Barbara’s early sex life and her longstanding affair with a married man (which happened before she met her husband Ted). From the well-rounded picture of young Barbara, it’s a bit of a jolt when Perkins goes into detail about the intricacies of Labour politics in the mid-1950s and early 1960s. (So much detail, in fact, that she occasionally loses sight of the biography proper.) But Perkins speaks quite readily of Barbara Castle’s successes and failures, her personal faults and her obsession with her looks, ‘In Place of Strife’ and its aftermath, her dependence on Harold Wilson for her political position and her abrupt sacking shortly after Wilson’s resignation in 1976…it’s all there, and very well organised and fluently told.

Perkins does play upon the pathos of Castle’s later life. It’s hard not to be affected by the swift progression of personal tragedies: the death of her husband and mother in the space of a few weeks’ time (over the Christmas/New Year’s holidays, no less), the bout with breast cancer that led to her mastectomy (an incident which was not very well known until after her death), and the solitary existence that Castle led until her death in 2002 (she died after a nasty fall down the stairs in her home). Rather abruptly, the autobiography ends there, without the usual general ’summing up’ chapter to analyse Barbara Castle on the whole. Perhaps Perkins felt that there was no need for summing up, in the end. I’m inclined to agree, because the book really does speak for itself…and lets Castle speak for herself in a way that feels more honest than the carefully selected entries in her published diaries.

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control by John Marks

I first picked up this book after taking a class on the culture of the Cold War, which also had a film component. The Manchurian Candidate was one of the films featured and discussed in the class, and I happen to be working on a review of a more recent book about The Manchurian Candidate for a film studies journal. Perhaps posting this review will give me the impetus I need to finish the last 500 words of the other book review?

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control by John Marks

If you’ve never seen The Manchurian Candidate, a brief summary will suffice. The original 1962 film version stars Laurence Harvey as the ‘Manchurian candidate’ — Sergeant Raymond Shaw, an American soldier who was captured while serving in Korea and brainwashed by the Communists to become the perfect assassin. Under the influence of hypnosis, he would take orders to kill people and then would have no memory of who gave those orders or what those orders were. Angela Lansbury also stars in a chilling role as the soldier’s manipulative mother, the wife of a Joseph McCarthy-type senator who is running for the vice-presidency but is greedy for higher office. The film seems a little on the campy side if you try to treat it as a straight-up espionage thriller, but it’s a fascinating film to watch from the perspective of a Cold War historian.

John Marks’ book draws on the image of the ‘Manchurian candidate’ as an appropriate description of an often-ignored aspect of Cold War history in America. The Central Intelligence Agency apparently spent much of the 1950s and 1960s trying to determine if such a scenario was possible — if a man could actually be brainwashed to become a ‘Manchurian candidate’ who could be programmed to kill, or if certain combinations of drugs could be used as ‘truth drugs’ or other useful chemical weapons in the intelligence officer’s arsenal. Marks shares stories of how CIA researchers experimented on each other with mind-altering drugs like LSD, even to the point of slipping chemicals in each other’s coffee or cigarettes and waiting to see what kind of reaction the drugs would produce. Researchers and field agents went to disturbing lengths in their attempts to produce some sort of truth serum or indeed any substance that would dramatically change an individual’s behaviour.

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate also postulates an intriguing theory about the CIA’s influence on the growth of the drug counterculture in America in the 1960s. Vaguely, the theory is that the CIA latched onto Sandoz, a Swiss pharmaceutical firm that had first synthesised LSD, because the drug’s potential use for intelligence activities was of great interest to behavioural researchers. So in order to test the properties of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, the CIA distributed LSD prototypes and synthetic chemicals to scientists and research professors at major universities, who passed it on to graduate students and student volunteers, who then passed it on to undergraduate students, who brought it into the mainstream of college life…and so on. With teachers influencing their students and upperclassmen doing the same to underclassmen, the drug spread around the country — but someone had to influence the teachers first. By this theory, the CIA was at the top of the LSD distribution system and of the ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ counterculture of the 1960s.

Even if you’re willing to dismiss Marks’ theory as conspiracy claptrap, his book nonetheless provides a different perspective on the darker side of American espionage during the Cold War. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate is sometimes funny and sometimes unsettling, but it’s certainly informative.

In Confidence by Anatoly Dobrynin

Politicians’ memoirs usually aren’t the easiest books to carry around and read. They’re often only available in heavy and bulky hardback editions, and they tend to require a more consistent focus than some other history books — not the sort of thing you can put down and pick up again at random. But occasionally there are memoirs that I’d be more than willing to lug around, and today’s review happens to focus on one of them.

In Confidence by Anatoly Dobrynin

Anatoly Dobrynin, born in 1919, served as Soviet ambassador to the United States from 1962 to 1986 — which I believe makes him the longest-serving ambassador in Russian history. In those twenty-four years, he went through the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon (and Kissinger), Ford (and Kissinger), Carter, and Reagan administrations…and on the other side, the Krushchev, Brezhnev (and Kosygin), Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev years. Ambassador Dobrynin outlasted any number of lesser diplomats, and his unbroken record of service and his status as an outsider makes him an interesting choice to report on the history of US/Soviet relations during the tempestuous years of the Cold War.

And report he does. At nearly 700 pages long, In Confidence covers Dobrynin’s entire career. He began, interestingly enough, as an engineer who had never considered himself to be a political person. He was selected for the diplomatic corps during World War II almost against his will, and spent a good deal of time studying American history and working in Moscow before he was sent to the embassy in Washington DC as a foreign affairs attache in the early 1950s. By 1962, he had risen to become ambassador, and his long career as the Soviet government’s representative in America began.

Dobrynin’s memoirs are probably not a good starting point for anyone who isn’t at least familiar with basic Cold War history, particularly the Ford and Carter years where American foreign policy tended to be muddled and contradictory. But there is a wealth of information about how Soviet leaders viewed their American counterparts, much of which comes from Dobrynin’s firsthand experiences and conversations; he spoke fairly fluent English, so on many occasions he was the only translator during talks between Soviet and American higher-ups. Dobrynin’s impressions of different political figures and their attitudes toward US/Soviet relations are rather fascinating — he’s not kind to Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford, for example, and even though he does seem to respect Henry Kissinger’s attempts at detente he quietly slams Kissinger for being inconsistent on how detente was put into practice. One remarkable passage that sticks out in my memory was Dobrynin’s account of Richard Nixon’s final days in office before the resignation…and how Leonid Brezhnev sent Nixon a personal message of support, saying that even though he did not fully understand the nature of the domestic political problems that Nixon was facing, he believed that Nixon’s attempts to improve US/Soviet relations were what his country would truly remember from his presidency. I actually got a little choked up at that part — the thought that possibly the only kind words Nixon had during his final days as President came from the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union appeals to my sense of bittersweet irony. And Dobrynin manages to capture this incident and many more without being too quick to blame one side or the other for the policy failures and setbacks.

In Confidence, like many political memoirs worth reading, is not the kind of book that can be read straight through in one sitting. But it’s a refreshing perspective on a strange and often nerve-wracking era in history, and Dobrynin is articulate and possessed of a dry wit that crackles through the pages and makes his anecdotes all the more intriguing.

Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter

I wrote this review quite a while ago, more than three years ago by now. It definitely needed a good bit of editing before I felt comfortable posting it here, which I suppose shows that I’ve made some improvement in my reviewing style since I first started writing reviews of books I’d recently read.

Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter

The World War II Cambridge spy ring is an intriguing subject for espionage historians, and a subject on which a great deal of variable quality material has been written. When you think about it, it’s not surprising that the whole set-up of the ring is perfect fodder for an espionage buff. A group of middle- and upper-middle class young men with leftist leanings, who had attended Cambridge University, had jobs in British intelligence services during the war, used their positions to send a torrent of intelligence information to the Soviet Union, and were not discovered until after the war’s end — really, they were the Soviets’ proverbial ace in the hole for almost a decade. In fact, they were so good at passing information that at times the KGB thought they were a clever counterintelligence plot to feed false information to the informal Soviet network in Britain. Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean were the first to escape Britain for the USSR, having fled in 1951 just before they could be rounded up. Harold ‘Kim’ Philby worked his way even higher in the intelligence hierarcy than Burgess or MacLean, and by the time he managed to defect he’d been responsible for revealing any number of confidential secrets to the Soviet Union. At the time of Philby’s defection, there were speculations about a ‘fourth man’ in this spy ring, but it wasn’t until 1979 that a name was truly confirmed. The ‘fourth man’ was Sir Anthony Blunt.

Blunt’s exposure came as shock to the Establishment, particularly the art world, because he was not only a respected art critic and historian, but he had been the director of the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art for almost three decades and had even been given a knighthood for his service to the Crown’s collection of artwork. But Blunt had confessed his spying career in the mid-1960s, shortly after Philby’s defection, and it remained an official secret until his secret was revealed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher shortly after she took office. When the news came to light, a whole host of inquiries were made into his life and conduct — particularly the open secret of his homosexuality.

That bit of history aside, Miranda Carter’s book about Blunt and his ‘lives’ is positively stunning. It’s incredibly comprehensive, delving all the way down to his childhood and pre-Cambridge school days to find hints of what shaped Blunt’s character in his youth. And she treats Blunt’s art career with as much depth and detail as she does his espionage work; this isn’t a book that tries to turn Blunt and the others into dashing Ian Fleming characters or sinister John le Carré types. It’s not an openly sympathetic portrayal, but it does try to open up possible explanations for his motives and the reasoning behind why he chose to work for the NKVD during wartime. Carter makes much of the fact that Blunt was an emotionally compartmentalised type of person, who not only strove to keep different aspects of his life and his emotions under tight control but who also seemed to take pleasure in doing so — and this might have fuelled his fascination with his secret lives. Espionage relies so heavily on human psychology that understanding Blunt’s character is key to understand why he did what he did…and why he wanted out, at the end.

(One thing that bothered me a little about this book (and perhaps it’s just an odd reaction of mine rather than anything the writer consciously happened to do) was that Carter tended to link espionage and homosexuality in a way that made spying sound rather like a sexually transmitted disease, or the unfortunate consequence of a one-night stand. As if saying that So-and-so slept with Guy Burgess, and soon enough he came down with a nasty case of passing confidential MI5 files to the Soviets. But I digress.)

I really can’t do this book justice in a single review — it’s far too complex and twisting to really summarise here. It’s also about 500 pages long, and not the kind of thing you can sit down and read straight through. But for all its density, it’s extremely filling and satisfying, and Miranda Carter is able to give Blunt a sound biography that neither tries to apologise for his actions nor attempts to paint him as an evil communist mastermind.

Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress by C. Northcote Parkinson

Today’s review happens to be a classic of 1950s organisational management that still holds quite true nearly half a century later.

Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress by C. Northcote Parkinson

Parkinson’s Law is one of the truisms of the modern workplace — it’s usually given as ‘work expands to fill the time available’, but it was initially set out as ‘bureaucracy expands over time’. It’s given as the reason why some particularly inept managers seek to improve their appearances by hiring subordinates to make themselves look more important. It’s given as the reason why people work faster (though not always better) under strict deadlines. And it’s given as the reason why those deadlines always seem to creep up on you when you were certain that you had plenty of time beforehand. So perhaps it’s only fitting that the original book by C. Northcote Parkinson, based on the satirical essay he wrote for the Economist in 1955, is written with a sense of humour so dry that it practically leaves a sandy taste in your mouth.

Like any good statistician, Parkinson provides useful formulae for calculating his Law in mathematical terms. To calculate the staff increase in ‘any public administrative department not actually at war’:

x = (2k^m + l)/n

where k is the number of staff seeking promotion through the appointment of subordinates; l represents the difference between the ages of appointment and retirement; m is the number of man-hours devoted to answering minutes within the department; and n is the number of effective units being administered — x will be the number of new staff members needed every year. Now, Parkinson does not say if this is a good or bad thing. He merely suggests, ‘Those who hold that this growth is essential to gain full employment are fully entitled to their opinion. Those who doubt the stability of an economy based on reading each other’s minutes are equally entitled to theirs.’

Parkinson discuss several other aspects of bureaucratic and office life, as well as various principles he and ‘other researchers’ have observed in the course of their examinations. He calculates the general age at which people should retire, as well as how to get someone to retire when they don’t wnt to — his suggestion involves exhaustive travel that is made to feel as if it is a great honour instead of a gruelling punishment. He discusses how the selection of individuals for a job tends to follow either the British (who you know/are related to) system or the Chinese (competitive examination ad nauseam) system. There’s a fascinating section on the ‘Point of Vanishing Interest’, which says that the time spent on any item of an agenda is inversely proportional to the sum of money involved. (I’ve observed this firsthand on any number of occasions, both in the corporate world and in academia.) Parkinson’s Law may be a slim volume, but there are any number of little gems within it that are worth chuckling over.

(One point I should mention, though — there is one section that would probably strike a modern-day reader as dodgy, if not openly racist. It happens to be a section about how the living conditions among individual Chinese ‘coolies’ serves as an indication of their gradiations of wealth and wealth potential. Considering that the book was written in the late 1950s, Parkinson’s attitude and tone might be understood if not forgiven. Were it not for that one chapter, I would really have nothing to complain about.)

The Stories of English by David Crystal

A quick note for readers who happen to come across this post in future — don’t hesitate to leave a comment on my reviews, even if you happen to be coming across a review some time after I originally posted it. I do like hearing what other people think of my book reviews…if for no other reason than the fact that it helps me learn how I can write better ones. Thanks for reading!

The Stories of English by David Crystal

The old joke about the ‘purity’ of the English language is that it is anything but pure — it has a distinct tendency to not only borrow words from other languages, but also on occasion to chase other languages down dark alleys, club them unconscious, and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. English is a constantly changing, constantly mutating language, and unlike many other languages there are certain facets of English spelling and grammar that make next to no sense to anyone attemping to learn the language. Forget about the irregular verb conjugations and peculiar plurals; students of English have to wrap their heads around the fact that enough, bough, through, and thorough can look very similar but sound entirely different. Sooner or later, the question tends to arise: how and why did the English language get so weird?

David Crystal’s The Stories of English makes a masterful attempt to answer that question, and in the process provides a history of English that is more engaging and fascinating than the history of a language almost has any right to be. He traces the history of English back through the history of the British Isles and weaves together the stories of the many groups of people who have left their mark on English over the centuries. The native Celtic languages; vernacular Latin and church Latin; the Saxon, Norse, Danish, and French of various invaders; the different tongues of the tradesmen who carried goods back and forth across the Channel, the independent development of native dialects and spellings — all of these affected the formation of English and left marks on the spoken and written forms of the language. And as English-speakers left the islands and travelled across the oceans, the language went with them and took on new dimensions: examples Crystal uses include American English, Australian English, and South African English. Crystal’s book is packed full of anecdotes and interludes that embellish his longer narrative, dipping into such wide-ranging topics as the creation of pat phrases like ‘last will and testament’, precisely what happened to the distinction between the formal and informal you (which many other languages have and English does not), and the classification of accents and speech markers as indications of good breeding. Even tricky explanations of complicated grammar patterns and nonstandard spellings are clear and straightforward (in plain English, even), and the chapters are short enough to make them easy to go back and reread them if you feel that you haven’t quite grasped his point or understood his meaning as well as you’d like.

One of the nicest features of The Stories of English, in my opinion, is that Crystal helpfully provides his readers with links to other, related sections of the book. If he happens to be discussing something that is related to a topic he has already covered or even has yet to mention, there will often be a parenthetical link to the appropriate page right there in the text. In a book that covers as vast and as complex a topic as the growth and development of the English language, these parenthetical links are an absolute godsend. Plus, they also offer a perfectly good excuse for skipping ahead if you really want to finish Crystal’s train of thought, or going back if you want to refresh your memory about a part you’ve already read.

The Stories of English isn’t just a book for linguists or literary historians. Anyone with even the most basic interest in why English is the way it is could benefit from flipping through the pages and seeing what’s inside. I constantly found myself stopping and shaking my head in wonder as I followed the different twists and turns in the development of the language. And best of all, I have to say, is the knowledge that the book doesn’t really end when you finish the last page. The stories of English are still being told, still changing and developing as more and more people use English as their primary language of communication. If you’re reading this book review on a computer screen, then you too are part of the newest chapter of one of the many stories…and best of all, no one really knows if or how these stories will ever end.

Nice Work by David Lodge

A change from the usual nonfiction selection — one of David Lodge’s ‘campus’ novels.

Nice Work by David Lodge

It’s the mid-1980s, and the staff of Rummidge University (located in the city of Rummidge, a spot in the industrial Midlands that might, if you squint at it, look remarkably like Birmingham) are feeling the pressure of Margaret Thatcher’s cuts to education funding. The industrial and technical businesses that make up the mainstay of Rummidge’s economy are also suffering under the weight of the general economic downturn. So when the government decides that outside intervention is needed to foster a sense of mutual understanding between academia and industry, a ’shadow scheme’ is set up to allow an academic to follow an industrial manager around and learn a bit more about the world outside the ivory tower. Rummidge University sends fledgling (and all-too temporary) English literature professor Robyn Penrose to shadow Vic Wilcox, the managing director of a local manufacturing company — and at the outset, it seems that two more incompatible people could not have been chosen. Robyn is an ardent feminist, born and bred in academia and devoted to her studies of repressed women in the Victorian industrial novel. Vic is an industrial middle manager who has no time for books and no patience for the woolly thinking of people who (he believes) wouldn’t know an honest day’s work if it crept up and bit them. As the Shadow Scheme lurches along, Robyn and Vic constantly challenge each other’s perspectives on life and work and personal values. Every squabble only seems to confirm the fact that they come from completely different worlds — but at the same time, every squabble pushes Robyn and Vic closer to some kind of understanding and a re-valuation of the jobs and lifestyles they had all but taken for granted.

I should say a word about the characters first before I talk about the book itself. Robyn and Vic are not likeable characters at first or even at second glance. I think I spent at least the first quarter of the book actively disliking both of them. It isn’t until they’ve interacted more and Robyn and Vic have started to influence one another that they become even marginally tolerable. Most of the supporting cast are not much more enjoyable, though since Nice Work is meant to be a comic novel I suppose it’s only fitting that the characters tend towards the stereotypical: Vic’s Valium-addled wife, crudely chauvinist co-workers, and airheaded secretaries stack up fairly well against Robyn’s bland on-again-off-again boyfriend, wet fellow professors, and Thatcherite younger brother. Having read Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, perhaps the first well-known campus novel, I have to wonder if there isn’t some requirement that comic campus novels must be peopled with only the most unpleasant caricatures available for each character ‘type’. The reader clearly isn’t supposed to like them, at least not at the outset.

That said, moving swiftly on. Nice Work, according to various other reviews I’ve read, is somewhat based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial novel North and South (written in 1854); it’s the story of a man and a woman from two vastly different social backgrounds who are thrown together and spend most of the book attempting to bash out their personal differences. And in the standard tradition of the industrial novel, the ending is more than a little contrived to produce the best possible solution for the two main characters: there’s a windfall inheritance involved and a well-timed visit by an American deus ex machina (who is actually a character from Changing Places, one of Lodge’s earlier novels). The pastiche is fairly effective, though, perhaps because of the contrived ending. Nice Work provides an interesting snapshot of the Thatcher years as seen through the eyes of two vastly different individuals, and the plot’s resolution is satisfactory enough to make the story on the whole worthwhile.

History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward

More of what I tend to call ‘metahistory’, in this book review.

History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward

The history you learn in school is the history that tends to stick with you when you’re older. For most citizens of a country, the history taught by teachers and textbooks is all the history they will ever really study and all the history they will remember in the future — the foundation for a sense of national identity based on a common past. So naturally, governments tend to take a great interest in the history that ends up in schools. Some countries have national review boards that vet history textbooks for use in schools, or publish a specific list of approved books that must be used by teachers. Other countries simply cut out the middlemen and write the history textbooks themselves. So understandably, there are times when the teaching of history is an extremely touchy subject. It’s the basis of the ongoing Japanese history textbook controversy, and the concern that’s been aired in books such as James Lowen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me. The history that most Americans would consider purely ‘American History’ did not happen in a vacuum…so how do other countries view events that end up being taught in American classrooms?

In History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History, the editors have examined a slew of history textbooks from different countries and pulled passages that show different perspectives on historical events frequently found in American history books. In what context do British (and Canadian) textbooks place the American Revolution? Do children in other countries learn anything about the American Civil War? What is included or carefully omitted in different accounts of incidents surrounding the Boxer Rebellion or the beginning of World War I? And what passes for history in countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea, where the government control over textbook publication is stricter than most anywhere else in the world? All of these historical events and many more are spread out across the pages of History Lessons, with multiple perspectives (where available) for each historical event or time period.

Comparative history fascinates me on so many levels, so I picked up this book expecting both entertainment and enlightenment — and that’s essentially what History Lessons provided. Nothing exactly earth-shattering, but certainly nothing boring or unworthy of note. (It would take too much room to post large chunks of the quotations that interested me most, but if anyone reading this is interested in specific events then I’m more than willing to do a little transcribing in comments.) Looking at how different countries write their history is an intriguing sliver of insight into someone else’s way of thinking. Something that might warrant an entire chapter in one history book gets only part of a paragraph in another book. It definitely prompted me to think back on the history I learned in school, and how I felt when I first learned that the things my teachers said were only a tiny (and blurry) part of a far greater picture. But even so, there were some passages that made me rather thankful that I didn’t grow up learning a history that had a very specific government agenda — History Lessons includes some extremely disturbing passages from actual North Korean junior and senior high school textbooks. (When the history textbooks actually use ‘bastards’ as the term most often employed when speaking of Americans and other enemies of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea…well, that takes revisionist history to an entirely new level.)

History Lessons doesn’t preach, really. It certainly doesn’t claim that all American history texts should be consigned to the shredder, or that other countries have a ‘better’ perspective on history that’s more worthy of study. But I would really like to see this book assigned to upper-level students in the United States, those taking high school or even introductory college level history classes. It’s a book I’d assign, if I ever taught a survey US history course. Even a handful of different perspectives can be worth any number of classroom hours slogging through names and dates and vocabulary lists. What’s the point of learning history if you don’t learn that your view of history is not necessarily the ‘right’ one?

The Strange Death of Tory England by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Today’s review is posted in remembrance of the late Ian Gilmour. A little less than a year ago, he wrote an interesting article about the Profumo affair for the London Review of Books — it’s worth reading, if you have a few minutes to spare.

The Strange Death of Tory England by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

When you consider that Britain’s Conservative Party won the majority of elections in the 20th century, and from 1922 until 1997 there was no Conservative Party leader who had not ended up as Prime Minister at some point in his or her career, the electoral difficulties and the revolving-door changeover of Party leaders in the last decade or so is intriguing to say the least. Now that the Party is trying to reinvent itself yet again under the leadership of David Cameron, the question presents itself: what on earth happened to the Tories?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft explores that question in The Strange Death of Tory England, a book whose title is a clear reference to George Dangerfield’s 1935 work The Strange Death of Liberal England. Dangerfield’s book was an attempt to understand what had happened to the Liberal Party, which in 1907 had won with a landslide unmatched until the victory of New Labour ninety years later but which by the 1930s had fallen into Labour’s long shadow. Wheatcroft, in turn, explores the history of the concept of a ‘Tory’, its role in the formation of the modern Conservative Party, and the shifts in the electorate and changes in politics that either put the Tories in power (Churchill in 1951, Thatcher in 1979) or drove them from it (Heath in 1974, Major in 1997).

Wheatcroft is a very good writer for this kind of historical survey and examination, turning from gossip to critical analysis to anecdote to introspection without breaking the flow of the narrative. He seems to have enough distance from the subject to avoid falling into apologetics or angry defensiveness, but the distance is not so distant that it loses any of the passion. There are a few points where he could go a little deeper into his analysis and possibly produce a firmer conclusion, but he does touch on a number of critical points, particularly when he highlights the history of the ‘Tory maverick’ (a figure that appears to have faded out in the last decade or so, if the current party roster is anything to go by) who on occasion was not afraid to buck the party’s traditions and put principle before politics. And as Wheatcroft concludes, after musing on the outcome of the 2005 General Election:

Conservatives have sat around for some years saying to themselves that they will get back one day, but there is no necessary reason why this should be so. No law of history says that any political party has to survive. In 1906, the Liberals won the greatest of landslide elections, and within ten years they had lost office as a party, never to hold power again. Whether the Tories are destined to follow them may depend on humility and capacity to learn from error.

The Strange Death of Tory England is not kind to the Tories on the whole, but there is at least a modicum of sympathetic interest in the successes and failings of a political party which is an integral part of modern British history.

A Life at the Centre by Roy Jenkins

Closing out the last day of this year’s Lib Dem conference with an appropriate political memoir.

A Life at the Centre by Roy Jenkins

Roy Jenkins (1920-2003) spent a long and varied career in British and European politics. During his time as a Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Harold Wilson’s governments, he was the embodiment of Britain in Europe, an advocate of British entry to the EU at a time when the Labour Party seemed generally determined to stick its fingers in its ears and sing very loudly to itself to drown out any thought of possibly joining the European Community. His support of Europe was ‘rewarded’ (I use quotation marks here only because some might consider it a rather dubious reward) by the invitation he received to become a European Commissioner in 1976 — right at a time when it seemed fairly certain that he no longer had any chance of becoming leader of the Labour Party and thereby a potential candidate for prime minister. He served as President of the European Commission during his time in Brussels. But in the late 1970s, he and three other renegade Labour MPs got together and created the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a reaction against both the rise of Thatcherism and the increasingly militant left-wing stance of the Labour Party. Roy Jenkins ended his political career as the leader of the Liberal Democrats (the combined SDP and Liberal Party) in the House of Lords, and wrote several massive biographies about dominating figures in British political history: Churchill, Gladstone, and Asquith, to name a few. In A Life at the Centre, Jenkins switches from political biography to political autobiography as he looks back on his origins, his opinions, and his political career.

A Life at the Centre is not immune to the autobiography’s tendency to drag and meander in sections, particularly at the beginning. Probably the best reason to read this memoir is for the parts where Jenkins discusses (not without a hint of bitterness, I might add) just how divisive a subject the European question was to the Labour Party. Granted, the squabbling over Europe really had its roots in inner-party divisions that had existed inside Labour since the early 1950s, and many commentators have suggested that Harold Wilson’s resignation in 1976 was timed to coincide with a period when Jenkins’ Europeanist stance made him an unacceptable choice for the party rank and file. (It’s a time-honoured tradition with Labour leaders, apparently, if the Clement Attlee-Herbert Morrison example and the more recent Tony Blair-Gordon Brown relations are considered.) But Jenkins resists the temptation to turn to vitriol, both over Europe and over the tensions that marked the uneasy Alliance between the SDP and the Liberals in the 1980s. In an autobiography, that’s worthy of note.

A comprehensive biography of Roy Jenkins hasn’t yet been published. There’s a 1983 biography that has obviously been overtaken by events, and Giles Radice’s Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey does quite a bit to fill in the gaps but only focuses on the connections between its three title subjects. Until someone brings out a biography that tackles both the Jenkins papers and the papers in the National Archives (which are now available through the end of Jenkins’ time in the Labour Party), A Life at the Centre is possibly the best choice for anyone interested in looking at a history of Roy Jenkins’ life and for a notable perspective on the social democratic tradition in postwar British political history.