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.

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.

Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate by Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse

With the Lib Dem conference going on at the moment, it only makes sense to post a book review about one of the more recent works on the party in question.

Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate by Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse

It’s a simple fact that third-party politics tend to be overlooked in a two-party system. The only time anyone really pays attention to a third party is when something happens to draw attention to it — and most of the time, that comes down to either a scandal or a really surprising election result. Finding solid political research and analysis about a third party that doesn’t focus on the scandals or the election surprises isn’t easy. And that, in essence, is the reason for Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse’s book Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate.

The book looks at voting patterns and party organisations to determine who votes for the Liberal Democrats and how these voting patterns have changed over the course of past elections. It looks at the various forms of the Liberal Party, including the Social Democractic Party and the SDP/Liberal Alliance of the 1980s. It also compares and contrasts the Liberal Democrats with the Labour and Conservative parties, exploring several key questions. Who votes for the Liberal Democrats, and why? How does the party leadership affect voting patterns? (The book was written and printed before the whole leadership kerfluffle with Charles Kennedy, so the information on that front is really only valid up through the Kennedy leadership.) How do the Liberal Democrats have to adapt their tactics in different constituencies, in a way that neither Labour nor the Tories really have to consider? And what is the importance of the grassroots organisation on a party that — as the authors state nearly ad nauseam in their analysis — tends to believe that for something to be real, it has to be local?

The analysis in Neither Left Nor Right? appears to be good but fairly basic; the authors don’t really make any conclusions that seem to me to be glaringly mistaken or out of step with what I’d already felt to be true about the Lib Dems and their political workings. There were more than a handful of good, succinct pen-portraits of grassroots campaigns and the influences that work on the political situation in different areas of the country. The book on the whole is a bit repetitive, but would likely appeal to those interested in political sociology and the workings of third-party politics in a traditionally two-party system. But there was one particular thing about the book that really annoyed me. Perhaps it’s just the copyeditor in me showing through (though since it’s what I’m doing for a living at the moment, I probably shouldn’t be so surprised when it does), but my edition of the book was very poorly edited. Grammatical inconsistencies, punctuation problems, actual misspellings of fairly simple words…I actually had to put it down once or twice because I was all but reaching for my red and blue pencils. Some editor clearly was asleep (quite possibly catatonic) on the job, and that always makes me wonder about the quality of the information itself.

If this book runs into future editions, I’d like to go back through and look at it again. At the moment, though, the mistakes are distracting enough to make me save this book only for the infrequent times when I need to look at primarily statistical data.

A Strange Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain by Edmund Dell

I’d originally thought to link this review with David Marquand’s The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair, but I think I’ll save that one for a review to come. Dell’s book deserves to stand on its own, anyway.

A Strange Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain by Edmund Dell

There’s a saying that’s usually attributed to Labour politician Herbert Morrison — ‘Socialism is what a Labour government does’. I’ve always found it to be a fascinating statement, because simply by shifting the emphasis in that statement, you can say one of two things: 1) a Labour government is, by definition, a government that will implement the classic ideas of socialism; or 2) the definition of socialism depends entirely on the Labour government that claims to be implementing it. This particular book kept me thinking about that old saying, and where the emphasis in that saying really lies. And while I can’t deny that Edmund Dell’s book is in many ways a polemic, 500-plus pages of thinly-veiled bitterness about what the Labour movement has become, it’s a book that really does keep you thinking about that possible change in emphasis all the way through.

Now, the late Edmund Dell wasn’t one who had many kind things to say about the Labour party. His book The Schuman Plan and the Abdication of British Leadership in Europe is positively vituperative in its condemnation of the Labour Party’s fear of Franco-German cooperation and further European union. An unsurprising sentiment, perhaps, since he was one of the Labour MPs who broke with the Party and joined the SDP in 1980…in part because of Labour’s anti-Europe stance, though the party’s general drift to the left also played into Dell’s decision to jump ship. But Dell doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for any aspect of Labour government or democratic socialism — at least, not in the way that it has been defined by various Labour politicians and thinkers over the years. And in some ways that lack of sympathy is the book’s main weakness: it’s not always easy to tell when his criticism of Labour’s interpretation of democratic socialism is fully justified, or when he’s attacking Labour out of sheer spite.

Dell is clever with words, I must admit. There’s a wonderful description of Harold Wilson’s desperate, angry pleading with Lyndon Johnson over the shabby state of Britain’s finances in the 1960s: ‘like a suicide threatening to cut his throat on his neighbour’s doorstep’. And I must admit that he does an excellent job with the historical writings, tracing the threads of democratic socialism from the early socialist thinkers in the trade unions right up through Labour’s victory in 1997 (where his account ends). But A Strange Eventful History has to be read with one eye on the writer, always remembering that this history of democratic socialism was written by a man who sadly fell out with the Labour government that claimed to espouse the very ideals of democratic socialism…back when more people considered it to be a truly viable political movement.

New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments, 1974-79 edited by Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson

Once again balancing out the posts on the Tories, here’s a book on Labour during one of its more difficult periods in power.

New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments, 1974-79 edited by Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson

To make a fairly crude analogy, editing a book about the Labour governments of the 1970s is somewhat akin to performing an autopsy on a corpse that has been dragged about, kicked around, and otherwise mangled almost out of recognition. For the last two-and-a-half decades, politicians on both the left and the right have been pointing to the 1970s as an example of what they DON’T want to see happen again. Militant industrial action, a stagnating economy, rampant inflation, the humiliation of the 1976 IMF loan, and finally the so-called Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 all combined to a no-confidence vote in Jim Callaghan’s leadership and the 1979 General Election that brought Margaret Thatcher into power. In the years that followed, Thatcher and her successors (both John Major and Tony Blair) sought to distance themselves from that particular time in British history. Blair even chose to rebrand the party as ‘New Labour’ specifically to assure the electorate that Labour had shaken off its past failures and flaws and was prepared to be a party capable of governing once again. Yet any number of questions still remain: To what extent is New Labour really a radical departure from the party of Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, and Jim Callaghan? Were the Wilson and Callaghan years really the string of disasters that today’s politicians like to spend their time rabbiting on about? And if not, why have both the new left and the new right found the 1970s to be a surprisingly useful time period to denounce?

The essays and articles in New Labour, Old Labour are on the whole an excellent collection of analyses of different aspects of the Wilson and Callaghan governments. Well-known and respected historians and political scientists delve into the details of government and governing in the latter half of the 1970s, such as industrial and social policy, Scottish and Welsh devolution, the crisis in Northern Ireland, the Labour Party’s near-meltdown over relations with the EEC, and the ups and (mostly) downs of the economic cycle. Other articles take a more personal look at the mechanics of government, specifically with regard to Wilson and Callaghan’s relationships with their Cabinet ministers, the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the Labour Party rank and file.

There were several articles I particularly enjoyed — not surprisingly, they happened to be by authors I’ve read before whose writing styles appeal to me. Philip Norton’s article about the Labour Party’s struggles to keep control of Parliament was a personal favourite, though that might have something to do with the fact that thanks to my master’s dissertation, I can practically cite chapter and verse out of some of Norton’s other books about parliamentary dissent. Dennis Kavanagh also does a fine job looking at why it’s so convenient for politicians today to misread and misinterpret Old Labour, finding in it a useful way to define themselves and their political platforms to the electorate (’this is what we’re not’ rather than ‘this is what we are’). The one article that I wish had not been included was about social inequality under Old Labour, written jointly by Polly Toynbee and David Walker. I’m not overly fond of Polly Toynbee’s writing style to begin with, so perhaps that was a mark against the article to start. However, in the midst of so many well-written scholarly articles on the time period, the work of two journalists simply doesn’t feel like it belongs — it feels lightweight, somehow. I suppose it was added in there to make the book more marketable to a nonscholarly audience, but I think I would’ve rather seen the article written by someone else (who doesn’t set my teeth on edge to read him/her).

I used Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball’s similar book on Edward Heath’s government (1970-1974) extensively when writing my dissertation. I’ve a feeling that this book will be of use to anyone interested in the two governments that followed — and for that matter, it should be required reading for anyone who wants to take a stab at doing some serious analysis and criticism of British politics since 1979.

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds

I once had the amazing good fortune to meet Cambridge historian David Reynolds, and I think I flummoxed him a little (in the good way) when I told him straight off that I was a great fan of his work. Britannia Overruled is a classic reference text for anyone interested in studying Anglo-American relations, and Rich Relations is an intriguing look at Anglo-American relations during the ‘American occupation of Britain’ in World War II. So perhaps in keeping with his Anglo-American theme, Reynolds’ book focuses on a true Anglo-American output — Winston Churchill — and more specifically, Churchill’s impressive six-volume history of the Second World War.

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds

One of the quotations often attributed to Churchill is the pithy and somewhat flippant declaration: ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it’. Brave words from any politician, but in a sense Churchill really did write the history that would later lionise his name. After the Conservative Party’s massive defeat at the polls in 1945, Churchill was left as the Leader of a tiny Opposition and faced with the need to earn some kind of income to offset the extremely high tax rates that the Labour Party had recently imposed. With reams of personal papers at his disposal — as well as a number of highly sensitive government documents that just happened to have come with him when he left Downing Street — he set out to write a detailed history of the war that had just been won.

There’s been so much written about Winston Churchill from just about every possible angle, from admiring hagiographies to damnation with only the faintest of praise. Reynolds’ approach to this study of Churchill after the war is both novel and utterly fascinating. Churchill is as much a larger-than-life figure in this day and age as he was during his lifetime…and so there’s something terribly human about a Churchill who is desperate to cut a good deal with his publishers, hoping to secure an advance on his writing to prevent having to sell his beloved Chartwell, or a Churchill who is worried that he might (A) die or (B) win the next General Election (both of which seemed to be equally unwelcome possibilities) before he can finish the next volume of his book. It’s a side of Churchill that isn’t often seen, even by historians.

Reynolds writes with equally painstaking detail about the writing process, picking through multiple drafts and identifying selections that were cut out to avoid offending living politicians or relationships with Britain’s allies, or even to conceal vital state secrets such as the truth about the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. It’s history at the nitty-gritty level, writing about the history of history being written — and in being written, how that history shapes people’s perceptions of the very immediate past and perpetuates that image into the future. It’s certainly not a surprise that the book won the 2004 Wolfson History Prize, because Reynolds proves that it is indeed possible to write a history book that can appeal to historians and ‘lay readers’ alike. As he says in his introduction, ‘…Churchill the historian has shaped our image of Churchill the Prime Minister’, and In Command of History deftly illustrates how successful Winston Churchill actually was in writing the history that would later be so kind to him.

Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey by Giles Radice

A slight shift away from the Tories and their troubles to the Labour Party and its internal conflicts.

Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey by Giles Radice

The history of the Labour Party in the post-war period tends to be a study in personality conflicts. From the Bevanites vs. the Gaitskellites in the 1950s to the low-level sniping and griping dutifully recorded by Tony Benn, Richard Crossman, and Barbara Castle in the 1960s and 1970s — not to mention the whole of the 1980s — party politics and personal politics seem to go hand in hand throughout. (Small wonder that Tony Blair looked back in horror at his predecessors’ approach to party management.) In Friends and Rivals, former MP Giles Radice has written a study of three of the biggest Labour personalities of their day: Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins, and Denis Healey. They were in the limelight of Labour politics for nearly two decades, in and out of various Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet posts. Yet Radice’s book is not merely about the three politicians as people, but rather about the way in which their three-way rivalry gradually weakened the Labour Party’s position in the country and paved the way for the rise of the militant left…and Britain’s swing toward Margaret Thatcher’s particular brand of conservatism.

Tony Crosland is certainly known for his stated desire to destroy ‘every fucking grammar school’ during his time as Education Secretary, but his book The Future of Socialism was the Little Red Book for a generation of centre-left politicians. Roy Jenkins was one of the crown princes of the Labour Party during Harold Wilson’s time, with any number of supporters who would have carried him on their shoulders to Number 10 Downing Street, but his determination to see Britain into Europe cost him his place in British politics for the better part of a decade — only to see him re-enter the political scene at the head of the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s. Denis Healey had the unenviable position of Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1976, when Britain had to go cap in hand to the IMF for a massive financial bailout. He ran for leader of the Labour Party in 1979, only to be defeated by Michael Foot and the growing hard left movement that took control of Labour during that time period. All three men were brilliant in the ways that work best for politicians — Oxford graduates, devastatingly clever debaters, excellent writers and public speakers. Indeed, it’s easy to see how their similarities contributed significantly to their personal differences as each attempted to outshine and out-manoeuvre the other two.

Radice’s book is a very well done piece of research, thorough without being tedious and chatty without being superficial. The lives of Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey are so intertwined that to write about one without the other two would be a very difficult task, and Radice somehow manages to give all three of them equal attention. (My one criticism, and it is a minor one, is that I have a bit of a problem with Radice’s occasional tendency to say, ‘I was there at the time, and here’s what I thought and look how correct I was’, or something to that effect. It’s a small distraction in what is otherwise an excellent account.) I would say that this book is almost required reading for a deeper understand of 1960s and 1970s British politics, particularly with reference to the British entry into the EEC and the conflicts that plagued Harold Wilson’s various Labour Governments. It’s an intriguing study of the politics of personalities — an aspect of political history which remains extremely important no matter who happens to be occupying the front benches or standing at the despatch boxes.

Speaking for England: Leo, Julian and John Amery — The Tragedy of a Political Family by David Faber

More backlog, more Tories.

Speaking for England: Leo, Julian and John Amery — The Tragedy of a Political Family by David Faber

On 2 September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared in a debate in the House of Commons that he was not going to declare war on Germany, even though the invasion of Poland the day before had made a clear statement about Hitler’s intentions towards Europe. Deputy Labour Party leader Arthur Greenwood rose to speak in reply, and initially announced that he would be speaking for the Labour Party in response to the prime minister’s statement. But before Greenword could say another word, a voice called out from the Conservative Party benches, ‘Speak for England, Arthur!‘ — and it would not be an exaggeration to say that that furious outburst from prominent Conservative MP Leo Amery marked the beginning of the end for Chamberlain’s government. Amery also provided the statement that marked the actual end of Neville Chamberlain’s premiership, when he finished his long and devastating critique of the government during the Norway Debate by quoting Oliver Cromwell’s famous words of dismissal to another Parliament, several centuries before:

You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

Leo Amery (1873-1955) spent much of his life devoted to politics, particularly the political causes of imperial preference — favourable tariffs for trade with the Dominions and colonies — and other aspects of the relationship between Britain and the Empire. He eventually became Secretary of State for India under Winston Churchill’s wartime government. But it was during his time as India Secretary that his political life was marked by a sudden and personally devastating event that caused quite a stir at the time. Amery’s elder son John, who had been living in France and had been unable to get back to England when the Germans invaded, went on German radio and made a series of virulently anticommunist and anti-Semitic radio broadcasts from Berlin. (Considering the fact that Leo Amery’s mother was a Jewish Hungarian and Leo had grown up surrounded by his mother’s Jewish friends and relatives, his son’s anti-Semitism was a particularly personal blow.) John Amery also gained permission to travel around occupied Europe in an attempt to recruit British prisoners-of-war to a ‘British Free Corps’ that would fight with the Nazis against the Red Army on the eastern front. When the war ended, John Amery was arrested and tried for high treason, actually plead guilty to the charge (on the premise that doing so would mitigate the pain of his family, since it was all too apparent that he wasn’t likely to win with a not-guilty plea), and was duly hanged in Wandsworth Prison in December 1945.

Speaking for England is primarily a biography of Leo Amery, and the bulk of the book is devoted to chronicling his youth, education, wartime activities, and the ups and downs of his political life. Amery was contemporary, friend, and occasional sparring partner to the vast majority of the British political elite from the first half of the twentieth century, and his turbulent relationship with Winston Churchill provides a wealth of anecdotes and historical analysis that at times is the driving force of the biography. It isn’t until the later chapters of the book that the focus partly shifts away from Leo Amery and onto his sons John and Julian — highlighting the sharp contrast between John the amoral and shiftless wastrel and Julian the polyglot World War II intelligence officer who later followed in his father’s footsteps to become an outspoken backbench Conservative MP.

David Faber has written a strong and moving biography in Speaking for England, one that reads more like a real story than a biography. There’s a fairly good balance of the political and the personal, as Faber seems to devote almost as much attention to Leo Amery’s fondness for mountaineering and other rugged outdoor sports as he does to the blow-by-blow accounts of interwar and wartime politics. Faber certainly doesn’t try to redeem John Amery as a person — not a easy thing to do at any rate, since the evidence points to the conclusion that John Amery was a thoroughly nasty piece of goods from his childhood days, a sociopath and a compulsive liar who probably would have been imprisoned long before his broadcasts had it not been for his father’s influence. I do wish that Faber had paid a bit more attention to Julian Amery’s later career after the war and after his brother’s death. Julian Amery was a fascinating character in his own right, making a right nuisance of himself from the backbenches over British involvement in Suez in 1956, and Faber barely breezes through that period. Considering how much of an impact Leo Amery had on his younger son’s political ambitions, it’s a shame that Julian’s story isn’t told to the fullest. That, I think, is really the only thing that mars what is otherwise a marvellous biography.