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.

How to Be a Minister by Gerald Kaufman

In lieu of a rambling, disjointed post about the things that I find wrong or misleading with Jenni Russell’s recent Guardian.co.uk article about the deteriorating relationships between ministers and civil servants, here’s a review of a fairly light-hearted but meaningful book about the difficulties involved in being a member of any particular Government.

How to Be a Minister by Gerald Kaufman

Labour MP Gerald Kaufman (Manchester Gorton) worked as a press advisor to Harold Wilson and later became a junior Minister under Wilson and then under Jim Callaghan. Today, he is probably best known to the general public for his description of the 1983 Labour election manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. But one of the other things he is known for is his book How to Be a Minister, written and published shortly after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. Presumably, Kaufman wanted to write about his experiences as a Minister when his memories (and perhaps his wounds) were still fresh, and that’s essentially what he does — he gives advice on how to be a Minister, drawing on personal experiences and observations of the foibles of the 1970s Labour Governments.

The book’s chapters cover a wide range of Ministerial topics, touching on everything from working with trade unions to running (and not being run by) your Department to not getting in trouble with your Prime Minister. One thing that Kaufman does emphasise — understandably, considering his situation — is the fact that every Minister is an ex-Minister waiting to happen, and that one of the worst things you can do as a Minister is to fall under the impression that you will be in office forever. The entire last chapter of the book is devoted to the tricky task of leaving office gracefully, if you can help it, and how this difficult task can be managed with a minimum of pain and suffering. The book is liberally sprinkled with examples of ‘how to do’ and ‘how not to do’ things as a Minister, and fortunately Kaufman is willing to put up his own failures, as well as his successes, for the readers’ examination.

All in all, How to Be a Minister a nice, quick read, and it’s sitting on my bookshelf with my other ministerial diaries and memoirs as a sort of meta-piece about life in government. Kaufman is able to look back on his tenure as Minister with irony and general good humour…two things that are not always part of a politician’s retrospective on his or her career.

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong by Jonathan Dimbleby

Thinking about the late Ian Smith has made me look back over my reviews and select a book that deals with decolonisation and the remnants of the British Empire — in this case, the last major imperial remnant.

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong by Jonathan Dimbleby

I can remember watching the Hong Kong handover on television in July 1997, though I have to admit that I only had the vaguest notion of what was going on or what was the significance of the pomp and circumstance at the time. (Perhaps understandable, seeing as how I was several years away from being able to vote and was only just starting to take an interest in international politics.) The existence of Hong Kong and its status over the years is only generally included in most surveys of Chinese or British history, and even then not many people seem to know what to make of it. So when I came across a book that focused on the handover — and specifically focused on the role that Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s last government, played in the transition period — I thought it would be a good way to fill out a blurry memory with a bit of historical context.

The Last Governor, as might be expected, centres on former Conservative MP Chris Patten’s time as governor of Hong Kong from 1992 (when he lost his seat as MP for Bath) to the end of British colonial rule on 1 July 1997. Quite a few diplomat-types regarded Patten as a strange and alarming choice for governor. Patten certainly wasn’t a sinologist, and he’d barely expressed any particular interest in China or Hong Kong during his time in Parliament. He was a career politician, not a career diplomat, and officials in London and Beijing seemed to share a genuine concern that Patten would try to ‘politicise’ his time as governor and meddle in the political and business negotiations that surrounded the process of Hong Kong’s transition to Chinese sovereignty. The operating thoughts of the officials was that the Hong Kong transition had to be as smooth and unruffled as possible in order to avoid possibly catastrophic effects on Hong Kong’s economy…so many of them were absolutely horrified when the new governor began to push for, well, more democracy in the administration of Hong Kong. With the handover only five years away and the Chinese government already suspicious of what they perceived to be British plans to promote subversion through increased democracy, Patten’s policies left him open to attacks from all quarters. Some officials on both sides definitely would have preferred it if Patten were replaced by a governor who would be friendlier to Chinese interests.

Critics of The Last Governor — most notably the British officials in the Foreign Office and elsewhere who come out looking like utter quislings in Dimbleby’s assessment of their actions — could quite easily subtitle the book ‘How Bloody Chris Patten Aggravated Everyone Under The Sun, Made Things A Billion Times More Difficult For All Of Us, And Didn’t Actually Do Anything Anyway’. For comparison purposes, I’d probably have to look at a book that is more critical of Patten’s stint as governor and see if the criticism of his actions is as convincing as Dimbleby’s defence. But the long and short of it seems to be that Chris Patten did his best to stand up for the people of Hong Kong and keep up a strong front until the very end. The last thing he wanted was to leave the British government open to the charge of cutting and running (a charge often levelled at it by anyone who found it expedient to do so), and he did everything in his power to prevent that. The handover of Britain’s last significant colonial possession has a long and tortuous history behind it, but Dimbleby’s book gives a brisk, journalistic account that should interest most anyone who might want to know more about the events leading up to 1 July 1997.

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.

Fourth Among Equals by Bill Rodgers

I can’t use the ‘dead politicians’ tag on this post, since Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank is still very much with us. TheyWorkforYou.com has a very nice profile of his most recent activity in the Lords, if you’re interested in such things.

Fourth Among Equals by Bill Rodgers

Bill Rodgers was one of the four founding members of the Social Democratic Party, the ‘Gang of Four’ as the press and the public soon dubbed them. Along with Roy Jenkins, David Owen, and Shirley Williams, Rodgers left the Labour Party in 1980 in response to the growing militancy of the Labour left and their trade union affiliates, particularly the creation of an electoral college that would have given the trade union block vote a definite and potentially deciding advantage on Party policy issues. They formed the Social Democratic Party, specifically distancing themselves by name from the word ‘labour’, which had lost its public appeal in the wake of the strikes and general social discontent of the late 1970s.

Rodgers was never as public a figure as his colleages. Roy Jenkins had name recognition as a former Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and European Commissioner, and had the carefully cultivated air of an elder statesman; David Owen had been the youngest Foreign Secretary ever, with a fiery style and a flare for the dramatic that served him well in debates in the Commons; and Shirley Williams was a committed European-ist and, well, a woman. (Which is not to underestimate her political abilities in the slightest — it is merely a reflection of politics at the time, for when Harold Wilson placed her in his Cabinet in the mid-1970s, his Cabinet was the first to have contained the grand total of two women.) Even the book’s title shows Rodgers’ wry acceptance of his position in the SDP’s collective leadership, since the title is a play on the idea of the Prime Minister as being primus inter pares (’first among equals’). If his choice of words is a ploy to lend credibility to his idea of himself as being a sort of detached observer of the meteoric rise and rapid decline of the SDP…well, for the most part, it seems to work in his autobiography.

The book starts off as many political memoirs do — the sense of community of the town where he was born, the family relationships and early connections to political life, the experiences that shaped his concept of politics, anecdotes of his time in National Service and at Oxford. (And like many memoirs, the section dealing with Rodgers’ time at Oxford University rather devolves into a list of ‘Eminent People I Might Have Once Seen Whilst Walking Through The Streets’.) Rodgers was a member and would later become a General Secretary of the Fabian Society, that wild-and-crazy pamphlet-producing hotbed of intellectual socialism. What Rodgers does succeed in creating from this long life story is a sense that breaking ties with the Labour Party was not at all an easy choice for him to make. The rise and decline of the SDP would take another book to explain fully, but Rodgers tells his side of the story with rather more regard for balanced opinion than what I’ve read from David Owen and Roy Jenkins. I actually found the parts where Rodgers talks about his work as a Liberal Democrat life peer in the House of Lords to be more interesting than the tales of SDP in-fighting and drawn-out political bargaining with David Steel’s Liberals.

So where do I stand on this book? It’s made me want to go back and reread David Owen’s memoirs (which I haven’t yet posted my review of here) to see where the two men disagree on what happened to the SDP. As a political memoir, it’s very readable and far less tiresome than some other memoirs I’ve read. But I can’t quite decide if the sense of disquiet I was left with when I closed the book was due to the sad story of the demise of the Gang of Four, or the strangely fatalistic calm with which Rodgers recounted it.

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.

Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics by Matthew Parris

Another quasi-politician’s memoirs? Don’t worry — I’ll run out of them one of these days.

Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics by Matthew Parris

The subtitle of Chance Witness is a very good indication of former MP and newspaper columnist Matthew Parris’s approach to his autobiography. He never claims to be one of the in-crowd in the political circles in which he moved for a time. Most of the time, he claims, it was only through chance that he ended up where he was — for example, he attributes his selection as a Conservative MP in the 1980s primarily to the fact that he once leapt into the freezing waters of Thames to save a drowning dog. (It apparently swung the vote of the selection committee, which was wavering only slightly in his favour.) Yet a fair number of key events in his life weren’t entirely left to chance…unless you consider that there was an element of chance in the fact that at a fairly young age he realised he was homosexual.

The trouble with most autobiographies I’ve read usually revolves around the fact that quite a lot of people simply haven’t led lives which really lend themselves to the kind of prolonged navel-gazing that autobiographies demand. More often than not, what starts out interesting and full of vivid detail can often devolve into a virtual laundry list of ‘people I have known’ and ‘places I have been’ and ‘what it all means to me’. Or conversely, an autobiography which becomes quite fascinating in the later chapters devoted to adulthood requires a long and arduous slog through page after page of the author’s reminiscences of memorable bowel movements from his/her childhood. (Or something along those lines.) But as far as autobiographies go, Chance Witness generally doesn’t suffer much from the occasional tedious bits that tend to pepper the pages of similar stories. Put it down to Parris’s long stint as parliamentary sketch writer for the Times, a job that requires the writer to be succinct and clever with words and ruthless about fitting as much information as possible into a restricted space. If anything, there are places where the narrative seems to have been cut short, though in such a way that the marks of the authorial scissors aren’t readily apparent.

Chance Witness has much to recommend it, not least of which is Parris’s thought-provoking account of his time as a MP in the 1980s, when his sexuality wasn’t so much an open secret as it was a carefully-circumvented predicament. He talks quite frankly about his experiences ‘cruising’ on Clapham Common in the days before London’s gay community truly existed, including a horrific account of a incident where he was savagely beaten by two men while crossing the Common one evening…and the shame he felt when he lied to the police and to the press about where and why he was attacked. Yet Parris manages to strike a decent balance when discussing his sexual orientation in relation to his life: he doesn’t try to pretend that it has overshadowed or affected everything he’s ever done. Chance Witness is quite interesting to read almost for that reason alone, even if there’s much else to recommend it.

The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair by David Marquand

Slipping in yet another history of the political (centre) left in twentieth-century Britain.

The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair by David Marquand

Political writer and former Labour (and then SDP, and then Lib Dem, and then New Labour, and then anti-New Labour) politician David Marquand’s book isn’t as much of a polemic as, for instance, Edmund Dell’s strange and eventful history. Nonetheless, the author does have quite a bit of criticism to direct at the politicians he mentions in this book. The Progressive Dilemma is a collection of interconnected essays, beginning with the ‘ghost’ of Liberal Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and continuing through to Tony Blair and New Labour, that presents a historical assessment of why the centre-left was an electoral failure for so much of the twentieth century. It should be noted that this book is a revised edition of Marquand’s earlier book of similar name, which was published in 1991 and therefore only went as far as Neil Kinnock.

Marquand’s main message, it seems, is that the Labour Party’s long-standing insistence on defining itself as the party of the working-class (or rather, the trade unions) severely hampered its ability to re-orient its policies in lines with demographic and societal shifts. The image of Labour as the party of trade unions worked to exclude many Liberals and liberals (note the capitalisation differences) from joining to the party and contributing to its intellectual and political development…which eventually led to stagnation and electoral defeated. The radical redefinition of Labour’s political programme may have made it electable once more, but the lack of a defineable ideology left it crippled, overly prone to drifting with public opinion and, as Marquand worries, less able to govern effectively.

It’s a complicated-sounding summary, and Marquand’s book is fairly complex. I might argue that it’s not very accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a general understanding of twentieth-century British history, particularly in the context of the forces that shape electoral politics. I also would have liked a few more references and citations in the text (more footnotes generally can’t hurt a history book), but that’s my personal preference in such matters. In the end, though, Marquand’s underlying message is a welcome plea for historical context and balance. He points out the flaws with both neoliberal Thatcherite economics and the socialist belief that economies can be micromanaged and engineered precisely to a government’s standards. Yet he also denounces how both sides exaggerate and inflate each other’s faults, creating a falsely persuasive argument against either the ‘bloated bureaucratic socialists’ or the ‘greedy heartless Tories’. That sort of arguing leads nowhere, he claims — and it certainly doesn’t provide an answer to the ‘progressive dilemma’ that continues to pose problems for British politicians in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Things Can Only Get Better by John O’Farrell

A political book that isn’t based around the life and times of a particular politician? Now there’s a change in my reading habits.

Things Can Only Get Better by John O’Farrell

Things Can Only Get Better is subtitled ‘Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter’, so you get three guesses as to which 18 years he was talking about (and the first two have already been cut from the budget to reduce the number of civil servants administrating them). O’Farrell was one of the writers for Spitting Image, the satirical sketch show of the scary-looking puppets, and this book is the story of his work for the Labour Party in south London during the years when Margaret Thatcher and John Major were in power.

O’Farrell was very active in local Labour politics in Battersea and in the neighbouring areas in the 1970s and 1980s, and the back cover of the book describes it as the ‘confessions of someone who has been actively involved in helping the Labour party lose elections at every level’. Reading Things Can Only Get Better is indeed very much like reading a confession…though more often it’s a denunciation of the people and events that seemed to conspire to keep Labour out of office for so long. (Not surprisingly, O’Farrell doesn’t exactly stress the fact that in some ways, one of those ‘conspirators’ was the Labour party itself). Granted, he does get in a few good lines along the way, as in his opinion of the Falkland Islands:

It just wasn’t fair. Why did Margaret Thatcher have to go to war against a fascist dictatorship? Why couldn’t we have a straightforward goodies and baddies war, where Margaret Thatcher was the baddie and the People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of Narnia were the goodies?

Good for a chuckle, at least. But to have to read pages and pages where the main message is one of ‘Death to Thatcher, death to the Tories’ rapidly gets tiresome, and eventually off-putting. O’Farrell takes potshots at anyone whom he seems to think helped keep Labour out of office — there’s a rather savage attack on David Owen and the SDP; O’Farrell essentially calls them all traitors and backstabbers for jumping ship when Labour seemed to be sinking beneath the waves. I’m far from being a Thatcherite myself, but I honestly don’t buy the theory that for two decades Labour was unjustly crushed under the Iron Lady’s heels, or that the Liberals and the SDP and the Monster Raving Looney Party were in league with the Tories in a grand plot to keep the left out of office, or — and this sort of thing really turns my stomach — that British voters were just too stupid/greedy/lazy to really understand what a menace the Conservatives were to the country. Sorry, John, but even I know that that’s not the way to convince anyone that you’re on the people’s side.

As the personal story of a grassroots political activist and a man who genuinely wanted to make things better for the people of the area he lived in, Things Can Only Get Better is an entertaining book. But it’s not always easy to wade through the knee-deep anti-Thatcher polemic to get to the story, or even to the funny bits. Even so, I did find the book a welcome change from the more official sorts of biographies.

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 from 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.