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.

The Hands of History: Parliamentary Sketches 1997-2007 by Simon Hoggart

Slipping in an extra review this week to make up for the paucity of postings last month. I have other reviews still to finish, but this one seemed to come out most easily.

The Hands of History: Parliamentary Sketches 1997-2007 by Simon Hoggart

Based on an earlier review of Playing to the Gallery, Simon Hoggart’s collection of Guardian parliamentary sketches from the early Blair years, it may come as little surprise to learn that I eagerly picked up a copy of The Hands of History, Hoggart’s more recently published collection of sketches spanning the Blair decade. The index at the back of the book is not quite as funny as the previous one, but it gives readers a good idea of what to expect within. John Prescott, master of the unintelligible and angry speech for any occasion, from party conferences to PMQs. Sir Peter Tapsell MP (Louth and Horncastle), one of the last of the old Tory knights of the shires, whose oratorical style almost demands that the Hansard editors cast his words in bronze. Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) and his collection of wigs. More inane New Labour jargon, more Conservative party leadership circuses contests, more of Tony Blair’s verb-free sentences…all of the old friends and foes are back.

Much of what I said earlier about the humour of Hoggart’s parliamentary sketch-writing still holds true, though seeing a much broader range of sketches reveals a few small weaknesses that are common to anyone who writes on regular subject on a regular basis. The most notable one is that Hoggart has quite a few standard jokes, several of which are mentioned above, and seeing them repeated in successive sketches grows a little tiring over time. (Though in one of his editorial notes, he mentions that some readers will write in to complain if he hasn’t made one of his usual references in a while.) The Hands of History does manage to catch the highlights of the Blair decade, sticking mostly to the well-known incidents and leaving out much of the day-to-day petty dramas. (I wish he’d included this sketch from mid-February 2006, if only for the amusement value, but space in the book was at a premium and the incident itself has almost certainly been forgotten.) Hoggart often has a fine gift for picking out the metaphors from the reality, as in this description from the time in May 2004 when Fathers4Justice protestors threw flour-filled condoms at Blair during his Question Time:

What an amazing shot by the protestor, throwing from hundreds of feet along a downward trajectory! And how marvellously apt! It had been aimed at Blair but it had exploded all over Brown. The protestors had thrown Britain’s finest political metaphor.

Like Hoggart’s previous book, The Hands of History knows its intended readership. If a collection of parliamentary sketches about the past ten years sounds like it would be entertaining reading, then it is not likely to disappoint — even if the politicians mentioned within do, more often than not.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.