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.

How to Be a Civil Servant by Martin Stanley

Gerald Kaufman’s How to Be a Minister was a sly, satirical look at what happens to politicians who find themselves a few inches nearer to the top of the greasy pole. But for their counterparts in administration, the mandarins of Whitehall, the equivalent guidebook was a little longer in coming.

How to Be a Civil Servant by Martin Stanley

Martin Stanley is a former senior official in the Cabinet Office who then went on to head the Postal Services Commission. His book, How to Be a Civil Servant, is written primarily for an incoming civil servant who will be working in Whitehall — most of the information relates to how to deal with ministers and junior ministers, Parliament, and the EU. Far from being written in impenetrable bureaucratese, the text is clear and straightforward, very well-organised. And it is far from dull, as a few examples will illustrate:

…it is perfectly proper for our drafts to omit facts and arguments which might cast doubt on the appropriateness of [policies]. In doing this, we are not being unprofessional. Rather, like the barrister whose principal duty is to the court and who does not necessarily believe in the client’s case, we are simply providing the best possible professional service to our clients, without going so far as to mislead the Minister or Parliament. (11)

And on more specific subjects, such as individual jobs:

[Personal Private Secretaries] are on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and know where all the bodies are buried. For this reason, they are usually promoted when they leave Private Office…. (21)

And yes, it does mention Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Minister fame, but only as a convenient shorthand reference when referring to the Cabinet Secretariat.

How to Be a Civil Servant is a delightfully witty but remarkably practical book for anyone who happens to be entering into a fast-track, high-flying Civil Service job. For that matter, the chapters about Parliamentary Questions and how to respond to them would be most enlightening for newly elected Members of Parliament, let alone a civil servant. The book is tongue-in-cheek without being overly sarcastic, which makes it more of an actual ‘how to’ book than Kaufman’s satirical study. And for those who’ve any interest in looking at Whitehall from a rather less cynical and scheming viewpoint, How to Be a Civil Servant is probably the most helpful text that’s out there.

In addition to the book, the author has created a companion Web site at http://www.civilservant.org.uk. The Web site is well worth exploring in its own right, not least because it has any number of files and pages that are worth looking at…in my opinion, this one in particular.

How to Beat Sir Humphrey: Every Citizen’s Guide to Fighting Officialdom by Antony Jay

In my undergraduate days, I wrote a massive honours thesis on my pet obsession at the time (and somewhat still, to this day): the 1980s satirical political comedy Yes, Minister. As part of my quest to get my hands on every bit of Yes, Minister merchandise I could find, I purchased the DVDs and the ‘Hacker diaries’, acquired a complete set of Richard Crossman’s three-volume Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (key background texts for much of the series), and managed to find the 1988 and 1989 day planners in near-mint condition. Yet I still scour the Internet in search of other items that I’m looking for…and this book was one of those items. I found it in audiobook format first before finding it in paperback — but more on that shortly.

How to Beat Sir Humphrey: Every Citizen’s Guide to Fighting Officialdom by Antony Jay

Antony Jay wrote How to Beat Sir Humphrey about a decade ago, and in it he has written a step-by-step overview of how ordinary citizens can combat government- or private finance-backed plans that they feel will be detrimental to their community — plans for development that can be as localised as an old building being torn down to make room for a supermarket, or as expansive as a proposed motorway extension. How to Beat Sir Humphrey describes how to organise an action group for best efficiency, ways to raise money and community awareness about the project, pitfalls to avoid at all cost, and how to potentially beat the local officials and the bureaucrats at their own game. One thing to note: the book is written with the intent of fighting British officialdom, so it’s possible that other countries might have different steps or bureaucratic levels that Jay doesn’t mention. But most of the strategies seem to have universal merit and application…such as festooning a local official’s car with yards and yards of ‘red tape’ as a mild protest to draw media attention to the cause.

Jay admits at the end of the book that the suggestions he gives in How to Beat Sir Humphrey are not wholly fail-proof. Sometimes, even one’s best efforts will not be successful, and the project will go through in spite of local disapproval. But he suggests that even the effort made to organise citizens in a civically responsible fashion is one of the things that strengthens our civil society, and that the game itself is really always worth the candle.

For fans of Jay’s television work, the audiobook release is an even better find than the original text itself. Why? Because the person who reads the audiobook is none other than Derek Fowlds, the actor who played high-flying civil servant Bernard Woolley with such pedantic charm in Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. Hearing Derek Fowlds reading the audiobook is an experience that almost borders on the bizarre. Listening to Bernard Woolley give you advice on how to combat Sir Humphrey Appleby and those of his ilk — you almost have to suspend disbelief in order to wrap your head around that set-up. It’s an extra little treat for those who enjoyed the original television satire.

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.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

I reviewed David Lodge’s Nice Work a couple of months ago — here’s another campus novel to break up the steady stream of nonfiction.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

It’s a few years after the end of World War II, and a hapless young man named Jim Dixon has somehow managed to blunder into a job teaching history at a stolid and relatively undistinguished red-brick university. He isn’t particularly interested in what he’s teaching, he isn’t particularly fond of his students, and he regards his fellow staff members (particularly Professor Welch, a senior member of his Department) with something not far short of outright loathing. He doesn’t even have much interest in Margaret, the colourless girl he’s been seeing — especially not after he meets Christine, a very attractive and intelligent woman who unfortunately is the girlfriend of Professor Welch’s smarmy, artsy son Bertrand. Far from being lucky, Jim seems to have the worst luck of anyone, even if he does bring the bad luck on himself more often than not. But when he’s invited to give a public lecture on ‘Merrie England’, he has a chance to secure his teaching job for the forseeable future. The outcome of his lecture might well depend on how lucky — or unlucky — he really is.

Lucky Jim is a campus novel, a story set on a red-brick university campus (as opposed to the ‘varsity novel’ set in Oxford or Cambridge), and it revolves around the lives of the academics and their little turf wars. None of the characters are particularly likeable, though in some ways that’s part of the point of the novel. But even if the satire feels more than a little dated a half-century on — it was first published in 1954 — it is still fairly pointed in its mockery of the classist nature and the pretentious, inbred world of academia. Amis also has an ear for clever turns of phrase, and one of my favourite scenes in the whole book features the best description of waking up with a hangover that I’ve ever read.

As far as the ending goes…well, I won’t spoil it for you completely, save to say that it’s a happy ending. And perhaps it’s just me, but I found the happy ending to be rather unsatisfying. Jim gets his happy ending by chance and through a plot device that slots neatly into a deus ex machina At the least, it seems a little too much like the climax of a rather weak late Victorian novel. By the time I was about halfway through the book, I was generally rooting for Dixon not to get his happy ending. (I’m not entirely sure what that says about me, or about the novel, but it does bear mentioning.) As a classic of academic satire and one of the best-known campus novels, most anyone involved in a love-hate relationship with the academic world will be able to get something worthwhile out of it.

The Lord Chamberlain Regrets….:A History of British Theatre Censorship by Dominic Shellard, Steve Nicholson and Miriam Handley

I’ve been pulling together some research notes on various aspects of political censorship in relation to the publication of Richard Crossman’s diaries, and since I’m in a censorship sort of mood, here’s a book all about the power of blue pencils.

The Lord Chamberlain Regrets….:A History of British Theatre Censorship by Dominic Shellard, Steve Nicholson and Miriam Handley

Censorship is a subject that’s guaranteed to stir up passions, and theatre censorship touches a raw nerve at times. When politicians try to determine what the general public should and should not be allowed to see, one might say that the stage is set for a complicated drama — or quite possibly, a farce. From the early nineteenth century until Theatres Act of 1968, the Lord Chamberlain had the power to licence playscripts for performance in the major London theatres and in other theatres across Britain. Any playwright who was serious about having his or her work performed at a ‘quality’ theatre had to submit the play to the Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil. Numerous British playwrights found that their works were deemed unsuitable for performance unless they made specific changes to the text and/or content, removing reference to major religious figures or important living persons (particularly the royal family), toning down language or violence on stage, or even altering the nature of the relationship between characters (if homosexuality, for example, seemed to be an issue). W.S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan fame took pot-shots at the Lord Chamberlain’s power of licencing in one or two of his plays, and the very notion of having a theatre censor prompted criticism and scorn — either for there being too much or too little censorship of performances on stage. But the power (or the perceived power) of the Lord Chamberlain’s office often worked as a self-censoring device, where anxious playwrights would submit their ideas for consideration and approval even before sitting down to write a script.

The complicated relationship between the Lord Chamberlain’s office and the theatre world shaped the nature of British drama for over a century. The authors of The Lord Chamberlain Regrets… have gone back to the archives, digging through the records of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office to find the actual reports that were written about plays and the comments that were made about questionable content in such key dramas as George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (the ‘profession’ in question was fairly obvious to the audience), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (one audience member who wrote to the Lord Chamberlain to complain about the play described how it had given him nothing but two hours of ‘angry boredom’), and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (described as being like looking into ‘the anteroom of hell’). Yet some entries show the difficulty of dealing with other kinds of potentially controversial subject matter. Such was the case of J.W. Brannigan’s The Life of Christ, with which the censors could find no fault other than the fact that ‘Our Lord must not be impersonated on the stage’…and thus was not accepted for licence.

The book is a very good reference work for those interested in the history of censorship and the individual circumstances surrounding the censorship of certain plays and performances. I think that my lack of familiarity with theatre history was what kept me from enjoying the book more. Then again, not knowing anything about the plays themselves does help me to keep a more open mind about why certain plays received such a harsh treatment at the Lord Chamberlain’s hands. Oscar Wilde (who as might be expected features fairly prominently in this history) once quipped that there was no such thing as a moral or an immoral book; only a well-written or a badly-written book. I’m not so sure that the same can be entirely said of drama, but The Lord Chamberlain Regrets… offers the opportunity to examine just how concerns over morality affected the writing and performance of plays in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half (and a little more) of the twentieth.

Nice Work by David Lodge

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

Nice Work by David Lodge

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

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

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

The Politico’s Book of the Dead edited by Iain Dale

One of my tags for this blog is ‘dead politicians’. This review’s designed to make full use of it.

The Politico’s Book of the Dead edited by Iain Dale

Despite the morbid-sounding title and the very creepy illustration on the front cover (zombie Alan Clark!), this book is a collection of short biographies — or rather, obituaries — of various British politicians and political figures. Most of the obituaries are recent ones, from within the last twenty years or so, but there are a few from earlier in the twentieth century. The only real criterion for inclusion in Politico’s Book of the Dead seems to be that in one way or another, the individual has made a strong contribution to modern British politics.

It is easy to see the reason for some of the editor’s selections. Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson get fairly long entries, as does John Smith, Tony Blair’s predecessor as Labour Party leader. Sir Oswald Mosley (of British Union of Fascists fame) and Alan Clark (of Diaries fame) also have detailed biographical entries. Some of the deceased are more known for their connections through famous relatives than for their own deeds — Megan Lloyd-George and Violet Bonham-Carter are two such individuals. Quite a few are relatively obscure, often known only for one event or action that gave them the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. But most interestingly, there are obituaries for three fictional political figures: Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby from the television series Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Minister, and Harry Perkins from the book and later TV mini-series A Very British Coup.

Most of these obituaries were written at the time of the subject’s death, though some were written specifically for this book. The majority given here tend towards the fairly dull and watery, mainly (I imagine) through the wish to not speak ill of the dead. In Alan Clark’s case, for example, his marital infidelities are brushed aside rather blithely (in my opinion). I also would have liked to see obits for at least all the dead prime ministers and party leaders since World War II, and the book doesn’t offer that either. But Politico’s selection is a fairly representative sample of British movers and shakers both past and present, and it’s good for picking up and reading a few at a time to expand your knowledge of the late great and good.