Coalition: The Politics and Personalities of Coalition Governments Since 1850 by Mark Oaten

I suppose I ought to make the obligatory joke about a well-hung parliament, but considering that I’m about to take out the knives for this review, perhaps naughty humour isn’t entirely suitable for the situation.

Coalition: The Politics and Personalities of Coalition Governments Since 1850 by Mark Oaten

Ever since the British political system began to settle into the particular alignment of factions and interests that we now recognise as the forerunners of modern political parties, voters have come to expect that a specific political party will be able to win a majority of seats and form a government. On the rare occasions when no one party has an outright majority — most often known as a ‘hung parliament’ — politicians and political parties have to scramble to find a solution and settle on an agreement that will be acceptable to the denizens of the Westminster village and (to a lesser exent) to the country as a whole. In other countries, this agreement takes the form of coalition governments, often given catchy names based on the identifying colours of the political parties involved — ‘traffic light coalition’ (from the German Ampelkoalition) or ‘purple coalition’ (the social-democrat-and-liberal coalition that governed the Netherlands throughout most of the 1990s). Yet coalitions are a rarity in British political history, found only in times of extreme stress on the existing political system. As Benjamin Disraeli’s observed, back in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘This too I know, that England does not love coalitions‘. With that statement in mind, Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten has taken it upon himself to examine the history of flawed and failed coalitions in British politics, attempting to determine whether Britain can embrace coalition government as an alternative to the ‘Punch and Judy’ tactics of combative government that have steadily lost favour in the polls.

Here, this review must pause for a moment, and attempt to separate the opinions of the copyeditor from the opinions of the political historian. All questions of content and analysis aside, I have never seen a professionally published book contain so many glaring punctuation, stylistic, and contextual errors. If I had left so many mistakes in a text that had passed through my hands, I would go to my supervisor and ask to be fired on the spot. There are simply no good or even mediocre excuses for some of the errors in this text. On the first page, readers are informed that the Corn Laws were repealed in 1946 (a full century off), and later on in the book a reference is made to the July 2004 London bombings (a year too early). There are sentences that simply do not make sense with the words given, as if someone was working from a taped transcription without bothering to actually check the text for context and word use. My copy of the book is the standard Harriman House hardback edition — not even a first printing or a proof copy, in which these mistakes might be understandable if not forgivable. But even without trying to look deeper into the text, readers first have to fight to actually read it from start to finish without becoming mired down in the words on the page.

That said, the analysis in itself is seems superficial at times. True, the history is there, but it wavers between being too simplistic for those who know the politics of various coalition governments and being too obscure for those who have never studied the subject before. More than a few conclusions are drawn without much of a solid argument to support them. Case in point, and symptomatic of a broader trend: Oaten believes that the established convention of hung parliaments that allows the ruling Prime Minister to attempt to form a government should be scrapped in favour of automatically giving the leader of the largest political party in the House the first crack at government-forming — he claims that existing conventions are not ‘fair’ to the party that wins the most seats. Setting aside the question of fairness in politics, the arithmetic of seats and votes do not always add up to make that the most advantageous choice for maintaining a stable government after an election, and he seldom brings in other opinions to back up his own.

Among the good aspects of Coalition are the brief chapter on the semi-successful coalition in the Scottish Parliament and the number of personal interviews which Oaten conducted and from which he was able to quote to illustrate the thinking of those who participated in two of the most recent attempts at coalition government in Britain: the Lib-Lab pact of the mid-1970s and the Joint Cabinet Committee between Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the late 1990s. The quotes included provide some interesting insight into recent political history. Yet even this recently published book has been overtaken by events — the structure of the last chapter hangs very heavily on how Sir Menzies Campbell might react as Liberal Democrat leader in a hung parliament, yet that task will fall to Nick Clegg now (or to whoever is Lib Dem leader at the time of the next election). In general, Oaten seems to conclude that a coalition government would be ever-so lovely but probably not that feasible, and that the Liberal Democrats will decide the balance of power at the next General Election. Disraeli could have told him the first, and the second is not nearly as cut-and-dried as the honourable member for Winchester might like to think.

Playing to the Gallery: Parliamentary Sketches from Blair Year Zero by Simon Hoggart

A quick review this Sunday, since I’m sort of in the middle of travelling at the moment.

Playing to the Gallery: Parliamentary Sketches from Blair Year Zero by Simon Hoggart

The craft of writing parliamentary sketches is a fairly longstanding tradition in the history of modern journalism. Charles Dickens even tried his hand at it, back in the day when several pages of the quality press were devoted to reporting the ins and outs of whatever had happened that day in the Commons and the Lords. But now that Hansard is available online, viewers can watch debates through BBC Parliament, and most newspapers have cut down the column inches devoted to parliamentary coverage, parliamentary sketches might well seem to be on the way out as well. But the art of capturing memorable moments in the alternating frenzy and dullness of the Westminster village is not easily acquired — and it would be a shame if some of the cleverest sketches of the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart were to be lost to the maze of microfilm and Internet archives without being collected somewhere for quick, easy reading.

Playing to the Gallery is a collection of Simon Hoggart’s sketches, a selection of the ‘best bits’ as collected works are so often touted. The sketches are not merely from 1997; the selected sketches begin with the pre-election coverage of April 1997 and run until well into 2002, giving a full range of the first five years of the Blair government. Plenty of familiar faces grace the pages, and some mostly forgotten faces crop up now and then, including perennial stalking horse Michael Heseltine, the ageing and now deceased rake Alan Clark, and the former Madam Speaker Betty Boothroyd. The index, for that matter, is one of the best parts of the book; the entries are pithy summaries that are almost complete sketches in and of themselves. The entries for Tony Blair include ‘helps William Hague into heffalump trap, 169-71‘ and ‘treats Parliament like late-night radio call-in, 107-9‘. Ken Livingstone, as it happens, ‘launches campaign for London mayor with high-pitched whining noise, 154-5‘. One of John Prescott’s many notable moments includes an incident in which he ‘blames Tories for rain, 188-90‘. There’s just enough truth to the exaggerations to make for fine and accurate parody.

Hoggart is quite skilled at deciphering the often unintelligible proclamations of John Prescott, and he takes pleasure in finding and holding up for ridicule some of the most vapid examples of New Labour prose — he actively points out how the New Labour speech style all but abandons verbs in its attempt to make promises without actually promising anything. I spent most of my reading time alternating between chuckling and wincing, for beneath the humour lies a certain amount of wry bitterness, a little voice that says, ‘Is this really what we’ve managed to dig up, push past the post, and stuff into that faux-Gothic monstrosity in SW1A?’ Playing to the Gallery is a collection made for politicos and political junkies, true, but it’s a sad trueism that no history is forgotten quite so easily as that of the recent past. Even those who are less than fond of the state of political reporting in this day and age would be able to spend a few worthwhile moments looking at one or two of the sketches compiled in this book.

Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005 edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge

I picked up this book from the sale table at The Strand bookshop in New York City a few weeks ago, gleefully carrying it off for nearly a quarter of its regular retail price. An excellent find, I must say.

Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005 edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge

The UK General Election of May 2005 was, in the observant words of Labour MP Tony Wright (Cannock Chase), ‘the election that nobody really wanted to have — not the politicians, not the media, and certainly not the electorate’. People knew that it was coming, and for the most part there was sense of resignation at what the expected outcome would be. The Labour Party would get a sharp kick in the polls (so to speak), but not really enough to completely wipe out its majority. Some seats would change hands, some MPs (almost certainly including John Prescott) would say or do things that would come back to haunt them at some point down the line, one or two constituencies would have particularly nasty campaign battles that would dominate the national news for the better part of the run-up to the election itself. And though all of these things certainly did happen, the ‘expected events’ seemed to blur together — which meant that some of the more interesting (from a political historian’s perspective) aspects of the 2005 election often happened to be overlooked.

Election synopsis books are becoming increasingly popular in the publishing business; for the 2005 General Election, I can think of at least three books I might turn to for analysis of the parties, the polls, the campaigns, and the final results. Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005 would probably not have been the first book I’d have thought of, but after reading it there’s no doubt that it is a worthy addition to include with longstanding publications such as Dennis Kavanagh and David Butler’s British General Election series. The contributing authors have provided a set of fine essays on what one might consider the usual topics — the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat election campaigns; special points of interest regarding the election campaigns and outcomes in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland; and reports on the influence of the Internet and the mainstream media outlets during the campaign. The book also has a dozen tidy and well-laid-out single-page summaries of some of the more notable election results, such as George Galloway’s upset victory over sitting Labour MP Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow, Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble losing his seat in Upper Bann, and the late Peter Law’s protest against Labour’s all-women shortlist in Blaenau Gwent. In addition to the usual facts and figures, the book contains a reflective essay by the abovementioned Labour MP Tony Wright, providing one sitting MP’s thoughts and feelings about what it was like to be on the ground during the campaign.

Having had a little bit of experience on the ground myself at the 2005 General Election (I spent Election Night at the BBC Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, watching the results come in until the wee hours of the morning), I found Geddes and Tonge’s book to be quite fascinating. I’m not really much of a psephologist — statistics aren’t my forte, even when it comes to statistical analysis of elections — but the book is written in such a way as to be accessible to an audience that is interested in elections at a bit of a distance, away from the immediacy of the media hype and the nonstop bickering of the candidates. Even if, as the book suggests, it didn’t entirely seem as if ‘Britain’ collectively decided much of anything in May 2005 (except perhaps that Tony Blair’s days in Downing Street were numbered), this retrospective looks at some of the decisions made during the election and draws some thoughtful conclusions about the state of British politics going into Labour’s historic third term.

Never Again: Britain 1945-51 by Peter Hennessy

Running into a few Internet troubles with my laptop really ought to have made me more productive — less time wasted browsing for books I can’t exactly afford on Amazon.co.uk and from the London Review of Books shop, right?

Never Again: Britain 1945-51 by Peter Hennessy

At the end of World War II, one theme was very much on the minds of the people of Great Britain, from political and military leaders to old age pensioners: never again. Never again should the world have to suffer through another war like the one that had just ended. Never again should dictators-in-the-making be able to take advantage of mass unemployment that left millions of able-bodied men out of work, unable to support themselves or their families. Never again should the sick be unable to obtain medical treatment for lack of money to pay for it, or lack of doctors available to treat them. Never again should children go seriously malnourished or ill-educated, never again should working men and women have to live in shacks patched together from the rubble of bombed-out buildings. Even though food and other consumer goods were still being rationed, and the British military was spread out all over the world, Clement Attlee’s Labour Government (elected by a landslide on 5 July 1945) was determined to put Britain back together again and, in the words of William Blake, build a new Jerusalem on the Labour Party’s socialist principles. The British experience, from everyday domestic life to complicated questions of international relations, in the early postwar years is the focus of Peter Hennessy’s Never Again: Britain 1945-51.

I’ve written glowing reviews of several other books by Peter Hennessy, including The Secret State and The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945. He’s certainly one of my favourite historians of any age and period, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading any number of books and articles he’s written over the years. But Never Again, I regret to say, was a very disappointing book. In addition to the often startlingly clunky writing, the narrative had a tendency to feel disorganised and uneven, lurching along as ideas and themes were picked up for brief periods of time and then discarded. Even the sections that contain some noteworthy quotations and little-known bits of intriguing historical information have to contend with sentences such as the following: ‘Since the final end of Empire in the 1960s, the economic historians have discovered a rich seam of retrospection as they mercilessly subject this kaleidoscopic phenomenon to the spartan rigours of cost-benefit analysis.‘ Granted, this book was first written and published back in the early 1990s, but surely another readthrough would’ve flagged sentences like that one for deletion, or possibly even revision.

Authorial voice is a difficult thing to find when writing history, especially when writing for an audience that is not necessarily a specialist audience already acquainted with most of the material. When done well, it produces the kind of history book that simply immerses the reader in the time period and subject to hand. When done less than well, it makes reading a struggle and finishing a chore. As I see it, Never Again mainly has its problems in the authorial voice — the unevenness of the narrative, leaping from topic to topic and from casual conversational or anecdotal style to professorial lecturing tone without a lot of apparent thought put into smoothing the transition, makes it jarring and occasionally difficult to follow. I suppose I keep stressing my disappointment because I know that Hennessy is more than capable of drafting a truly well-written history book. I already own the next volume in this series; I’ll have to see if that one has more of the Hennessy style that I’ve grown to enjoy.

The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945 by Peter Hennessy

Catching up after a few days of missed postings — I may end up switching over to a Tuesday/Sunday posting schedule after this week, just to spread out the backlog a bit.

I thought I’d posted this one already, but a look through my tags suggests that I haven’t. I’ve another Hennessy book coming up for review soon after this one, most likely on Sunday.

The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945 by Peter Hennessy

Like much of the British political system, the office of the Prime Minister (and First Lord of the Treasury) of Great Britain has been sort of cobbled together over the centuries into the form that exists today. As such, there’s an intriguing amount of flexibility in its job scope and job description that quite a lot of people don’t often notice. For instance, a prime minister doesn’t necessarily have to be the leader of the largest political party in the House of Commons — in 1940, Neville Chamberlain stayed on as leader of the Conservative Party for a few months after Winston Churchill officially became PM. A study of the office of Prime Minister in the years since World War II has to look at a subject that is deceptively complex to contemplate, all the more so because each successive PM has added his or her own interpretation of the duties and responsibilities (and perks) that come with being at the top of the greasy pole. In The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945, Peter Hennessy has written a neat and very compact analysis that incorporates insight and input from a wide range of senior officials, politicians, and media people, all of whom provide a running commentary on the changes that have taken place over the years.

Interestingly, Hennessy seems to take it as a mission to ‘redeem’ premiers that perhaps haven’t been given the credit they deserve for their achievements in their time in office. He has quite a few kind words for Clement Attlee’s seemingly unflappable outlook on governing, Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s sense of duty and determination, Edward Heath’s successful European entry negotiations, and Jim Callaghan’s deep roots in the labour movement. But he’s not above castigating a prime minister for serious flaws or failings — he points out Anthony Eden’s near-monomaniacal hatred of General Nasser and Harold Wilson’s slapdash attempts to control inter-Cabinet squabbles as special examples of leadership problems. Even Winston Churchill is dismissed as having been too old and too steeped in wartime tradition to think that he could manage Britain at peace (leaving Korea and Indochina aside for the moment, that is). As for what he has to say about Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair…well, let’s just say that he thinks their approaches to Cabinet government leave much to be desired.

As a study of the premiership and as a person-by-person analysis of those who have held the office of First Lord of the Treasury since 1945, I can only say that this book is invaluable. Even if it’s occasionally a little frustrating to look at the footnotes and see ‘Private information’ as the source for a really insightful comment or quotation, it’s rather difficult to fault the breadth, depth, or quality of Hennessy’s research on this topic.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I actually picked up this book from my father — he bought it after seeing an TV interview that mentioned it, and suggested that I should read it once he’d finished with his copy. Which meant that I had to wait for a bit, as he took his time reading it…but it was worth the waiting.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

At times, it seems as if everyone and his or her mother has written a book about Abraham Lincoln. Hagiographical biography, revisionist history, stacks of dense tomes trying to prove that he was a genetic freak or clinically depressed or homosexual or secretly racist or made out of jam or any number of other shocking revelations. And that’s not even to start talking about the books about Mary Todd Lincoln and her forays into wacky behaviour. So at the outset, it might seem that Team of Rivals is just another Lincoln book to add to the towering pile. But Doris Kearns Goodwin takes a slightly different tack by looking at Lincoln in the context of the men who formed Lincoln’s cabinet during his five years in office — particularly the three men who had actually competed with him for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. Not only did Lincoln bring these former rivals into his cabinet, but he also sought to include the strongest political players from all factions of his fractious political party: former Whigs, hardcore anti-slavery Democrats, and others who were less interested in what Lincoln had to say than in what his political clout could get them. But the new President wanted the best men (as he saw them) surrounding him, and he was prepared to assemble a team of his own former rivals and even enemies if it meant that he got the best men for the job. Managing such a complex jumble of egos and rivalries would seem an impossible task, and Goodwin shows that at times it nearly was — and yet Lincoln was able to do so, in the middle of attempting to fight and win a devastating civil war.

Goodwin draws on reams of correspondence and diaries of the period, sketching images of the nonstop life that Lincoln and his contemporaries led from the frontier circuit courts and smoke-filled back rooms to the glittering drawing-rooms of fashionable Washington mansions. Goodwin’s subjects really come to life on the pages as she compares and contrasts their family backgrounds, their lifestyles, their personal and political beliefs, and their ability to move in the political world of antebellum America. What interested me most in reading Team of Rivals was the stark contrast (which Goodwin doesn’t emphasise nearly enough) between Lincoln’s ability to wrangle his cabinet members and the bigwigs in the Republican party, and his seeming inability to find a decent general for the Union armies. It’s a very odd contrast, and one worth pondering on, because Goodwin doesn’t really elaborate on what might seem to be a noteworthy contradiction.

Team of Rivals is a fairly ambitious book, encompassing pretty much the whole of Lincoln’s life and the lives of his contemporaries and family members as well. There are places where it’s rather slow and clogged with detail, and sometimes it’s hard to keep track of who’s who and what position they hold. But there’s plenty of gossipy details about family life and Washington society, and Goodwin does an excellent job at times in showing just how complicated Lincoln’s task was in keeping the White House running smoothly and still keeping one eye on political currents and undercurrents in state and local politics as well. It’s a good solid history book, and remarkably enough it says something new about a president who has been the subject of many a good book (and many a bad book) in the last century and a half or so.

Democracy by Michael Frayn

This particular review is going to be more of a review of the play than of the playscript itself, but since I don’t normally buy playscripts, the fact that I’ve bought the latter is a sign of how much I would encourage anyone to see the former. (I’ve seen the play three times, twice in London and once in a touring company.) It’s one of those shows that I’ve a feeling I’ll try to see no matter when and where it’s being performed.

Democracy by Michael Frayn

Democracy is historical fiction…or rather, fictionalised history. It’s the story of Günter Guillaume, the East German spy who infiltrated the office of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Guillaume and his wife Christel, both officers of the Stasi, ‘escaped’ from East Germany in the early 1950s and spent several years building a cover for themselves as members of the SPD, the left-of-centre social democratic party in West Germany. Willy Brandt, formerly the mayor of West Berlin, became the first socialist Chancellor of Germany (since the 1930s) in October 1969. And by a stroke of good fortune (for the Stasi, at least), Guillaume gained a position in Brandt’s office shortly afterwards — and he eventually became Brandt’s personal assistant, with the kind of access to documents that would make any intelligence officer dizzy with delight. Democracy is mainly Guillaume’s story, but in a way is equally Brandt’s story, because the fortunes of the two men were so closely linked that the ups and downs of one seemed to spill over into the other.

Frayn’s play is fast-paced, a whirlwind of political life, showing how Guillaume has to bounce back and forth between his workday life in Brandt’s office and his clandestine meetings with his Stasi contact. Brandt’s private life is equally important to the play: Frayn’s depiction of Brandt’s frequent extramarital affairs with attractive journalists and party workers, his love of alcohol and bad jokes, and his ‘feverish colds’ (the accepted euphemism for his periodic cycles of depression) all combine to create an image of a deeply flawed but driven, almost hunted, political leader. The most tragic aspect of the whole story is the fact that Guillaume’s arrest and Brandt’s subsequent resignation was almost the last thing that the Stasi wanted. Brandt’s Ostpolitik had given East Germany a new standing in the international community, and Guillaume’s arrest was the equivalent of an own goal for East Germany. Democracy highlights this fact, and carries it through to the end of the play — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reuniting of Germany, and the final words from the play’s two protagonists:

BRANDT: We’re healed and whole. For a little while, at any rate. And for a little while everyone’s glad.
GUILLAUME: And wherever he goes, my shadow goes with him. Together still.

And in the stage production I saw, the lighting shifts to throw both men into shadow. A taller shadow for Brandt and a smaller one for Guillaume…but it is impossible to tell which one overlaps the other. It’s a fine and thought-provoking play, not least because it puts a fascinatingly personal dimension on the Cold War politics of East and West Germany.

Dead Politicians: Ian Smith, 1919-2007

The former Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith has died at the age of 88.

I wrote my master’s dissertation on the renewal of oil sanctions on Rhodesia in 1971, so the death of Ian Smith makes this something of a red-letter day here at To Bed With a Trollope. And yet as I remarked to a friend, I honestly don’t know what I can say about him now that he’s dead.

The link to the BBC’s Web site gives a general overview of Smith’s involvement in the white-minority government that unilaterally declared Rhodesia’s independence from Britain on 11 November 1965. Smith’s government chose UDI rather than accept the British government’s prerequisites for Rhodesian independence under black majority rule. Harold Wilson’s Labour Government slapped oil and other economic sanctions on Rhodesia, and for the next fifteen years or so the Rhodesian regime was a general thorn in the side of most any Labour or Conservative Government that attempted to find a solution that wouldn’t be regarded as a complete sell-out (cf. this cover of Private Eye, featuring Smith and the then Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home). For a country that was largely insignificant to Britain’s greater economic or strategic interests overseas, Rhodesia’s negative effect on British domestic politics (and for that matter, on its relationship with other Commonwealth countries) was disproportionately large.

I can of course make the cheap and easy comment that one can directly trace a line from Ian Smith’s actions to the chaos that’s going on right now in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. But as with any historical cause-and-effect scenario, it’s a good deal more complicated than villifying one person as the mastermind behind the current sorry state of affairs. No matter what one might say about ‘old Smithy’, as some of his contemporaries referred to him, he certainly wasn’t the only one whose actions left much to be desired…and much room for a historian’s criticism.

In the Heat of the Kitchen by Bernard Donoughue

Gearing up for another set of book reviews for the month of November. I may be able to post some more recently written ones very soon, once I sort through a few older ones that I haven’t yet had a chance to go back and edit.

In the Heat of the Kitchen by Bernard Donoughue

Bernard (now Lord) Donoughue served as a political advisor for Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan from 1974 to 1979, and in that time he was in a perfect position to observe the workings of government and the ways in which individual personalities clashed over different issues. It’s something of a shame that this book doesn’t exactly do justice to either Labour Party history or Labour Party gossip.

Admittedly, it is an autobiography, and as such it is not meant to be a purely academic analysis of the author’s time in politics and public life. But the autobiographical sections veer sharply toward the mawkish, with a tendency to harp on about his own beliefs and political prejudices, and it is more than a little tiresome to be jerked out of what promises to be an interesting narrative by snide little side commentaries that are wholly unnecessary. A good (or bad) example of the narrative problems:

Of the half a dozen books in which I have been involved, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician is the one of which I am most proud. Morrison had of course been a great political figure during my childhood, one of my earliest heroes….But he was not a wholly attractive personality and his reputation dimmed after his defeat in 1965. Fortunately, interest in him revived somewhat in the early glow of achievement of his grandson Peter Mandelson, and the book achieved a reprint in 2001 with a fascinating foreword by Peter. But its sales were never great. Since it contains little ‘psychobabble’ or speculation about Morrison’s (undoubtedly thin) sex life, it might anyway be unsuited to the modern literary market.

(You need to imagine my raised eyebrow here.)

One of the more detailed chapters in Donoughue’s book relates how thoroughly Harold Wilson was cowed by his personal secretary Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender). Although the tales that Donoughue tells are worthy of note in terms of understanding the power dynamics inside Number 10, the overall effect is to turn Marcia Williams into some sort of malicious, predatory she-demon and Harold Wilson into Richard Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances. Donoughue’s negative perspective is understandable, considering that Marcia Williams absolutely could not stand the fact that he was able to take a political policy line independent of hers and attempted to limit her influence over Wilson. But Donoughue unfortunately doesn’t make enough of an attempt to look back on events with a more detached eye, something that would have improved the quality of the writing and the substance of the text.

In the Heat of the Kitchen generally wavers between readable and unreadable, though I was able to plough through it and reach some sort of muddled understanding of Donoughue’s perspective on the high politics and various intrigues that characterised the Labour governments of the 1970s. I haven’t yet had a chance to read his Downing Street Diary, but I do wonder if that book will be even more tainted by the personal prejudices of its author. It’s rather a shame, really — for someone who had quite a few interesting political ideas and helped at least two prime ministers reach a better understanding of key policy issues, Donoughue does not really convey a good sense of his overall intelligence and scope of political awareness in this autobiography.

The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government by David Leigh

I’ve acquired a copy of the BBC2 television programme The Plot Against Harold Wilson, in which journalists Roger Courtiour and Barrie Penrose described how Wilson contacted them in the late 1970s to give them information about various plots against him during his premiership. It seems as good a time as any to post this little review.

The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government by David Leigh

Generally, I am not one for books on conspiracy theories. Most of the time they smack of lone individuals sitting in darkened rooms, meticulously crafting cunning hats out of aluminium foil ‘just in case’. And at times, The Wilson Plot veers into this realm — the full name of the book is overly dramatic, to say the least. But Observer journalist David Leigh’s account, published in 1988 the wake of the debacle over former MI5 officer Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, adds quite a lot of damning evidence to corroborate one of Wright’s more controversial claims: that certain well-placed members of the British (and American) secret services believed that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was an agent of the Soviet Union. Leigh sets out to prove that Wilson was not and could not have been on the Soviet payroll, and at the same time does his best to expose much of the darker side of Cold War espionage…including the often vicious ‘dirty tricks’ carried out against Wilson and many others who were unfortunate enough to fall foul of the Anglo-American ’spycatchers’.

First and foremost, ‘overthrow’ is not the right word at all in this context. British Intelligence’s intereference with Harold Wilson was not some kind of Mossadeq Lite or Nasser Mark II. Granted, some of the same ideas and thought trends that contributed to suspicions surrounding Wilson had roots in the same anti-Communist mania that powered both of the abovementioned incidents. There was a similar streak of paranoia involved as well — most notably concerning the unexpected death of the right-leaning Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, which some of the more obsessed chose to regard as a KGB-backed assassination that would allow Wilson to succeed to the Labour leadership and thence to the premiership. But none of the plots and plans that Leigh recounts come close to government-toppling. Most never got farther than sordid whispering campaigns, usually hinting that Wilson had been compromised in some nebulous sexual escapade involving either his political advisor Marcia Williams or Cabinet Minister Barbara Castle. The intelligence services’ fascination with sex and its use as a weapon is certainly nothing new, and in the political context it certainly comes across as the product of a number of people with more time on their hands than they really ought to have had.

What is disturbing, in Leigh’s account, are the power games that were rife within MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War — and the near-complete lack of accountability for the resulting damage and repercussions. The defections of Kim Philby and Guy Burgess led to more than a few in-house mole hunts that slandered reputations and destroyed careers. MI5’s decades-long cover-up of Sir Anthony Blunt’s war-time espionage appears to have played a key role in the 1967 suicide of Labour politician Bernard Floud. The testimony of rather suspect defectors like Anatoliy Golitsyn, amongst others, caused Anglo-American as well as inter-departmental strife. The people crafting the cunning aluminium foil hats in those days were wielding an unpleasantly large amount of power to make other people’s lives miserable. The Wilson Plot may be over the top and unnecessarily dramatic at times, but I think that Leigh’s underlying message cannot be overstated: There are those in the intelligence services whose view of the world is (to be frank) utterly divorced from reality, and if there is no sense of accountability for their actions then it is hardly surprising if innocent people are caught in the crossfire.