Commentary: New Labour, Bad Writing

John Lanchester’s London Review of Books assessment of the recently published memoirs of Cherie Blair, John Prescott, and Tim Levy ties in rather neatly to a post I made a few months ago about the unsettling similarities between John Prescott and George Brown.

I’ve been looking into the history of political memoirs, focusing at the moment on the National Archives files regarding the legal squabblings that surrounded the publication of Richard Crossman’s diaries in the mid-1970s. Crossman claimed, before he died, that the purpose of publishing his memoirs was to expose the secretive inner workings of government and give the reading public a more realistic view of the everyday life of a Cabinet Minister. (This he certainly did, in what Cabinet Secretary Sir John Hunt shudderingly called a ‘blow-by-blow account’ of everything from dissention during Cabinet meetings to rows within Crossman’s private office.) Crossman almost assuredly sought to one-up Harold Wilson, whose The Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record was rushed to press in 1971 in hopes of earning its author a bit more money to support the lifestyle (i.e., the political staff) to which he had become accustomed as Prime Minister. But when Crossman was diagnosed with cancer, the publication of his diaries became a good deal more pressing a concern to him — and after his death, his executors (including Michael Foot) took up the call to ‘respect his final wishes’ and see the diaries into print.

I’m still pondering various opinions about whether the publication of the Crossman diaries has done more good than harm, but there’s one thing that certainly sets Crossman apart from most of his literary successors. With the possible exception of Alan Clark (who published one volume of diaries during his life and provided enough material for two more volumes after his death), most of the flood of political diaries and memoirs that have come on the market since the 1970s are by authors who are still alive; some are even still in office, or not very long out of it. The incentives to rush out a self-justifying memoir are even greater now that so many of them are on the market, if only to get the jump on any other colleagues (or enemies) who might have a book of their own ready to go. But I’d imagine that there’s something oddly unsatisfying about attempting to respond to posthumous diary or memoir, like Crossman’s. It’s too final, somehow — like getting into an argument over the telephone and then having the person at the other end suddenly hang up on you when you’re in mid-sentence. To paraphrase a comment supposedly made by a disgruntled Harold Wilson during a Cabinet meeting in the middle of the Crossman affair, ‘If any of you are looking to publish a diary, too, for God’s sake don’t die first. We need a chance to reply.’

Lanchester suggests that the memoirs in his review are as much as exercise in self-definition as they are in self-justification:

Since [the electorate] so manifestly aren’t grateful, or understanding, they feel a strong need to tell their version of their own story, to restore the complexity and inwardness to the public version of selves which, very often, exist purely as caricature.

Considering the content and tone of many of the memoirs that have been published since Crossman opened the doors, I’m inclined to agree with him.

Commentary: Politico’s Great Statesmen Series

I’m sitting on a backlog of not-quite finished reviews at the moment, so in lieu of rushing through the first one in the queue (which is likely to be about Edmund Burke), I’m going to slip in a bit of commentary about Politico’s Great Statesmen book series.

The Great Statesmen series is a line of reissued political memoirs and biographies of various British politicians. I’ve acquired four Great Statesmen titles in the past year, two biography (Francis Beckett on Clement Attlee and D.R. Thorpe on Alec Douglas-Home) and two autobiography (Geoffrey Howe’s Conflict of Loyalty and Denis Healey’s Time of My Life), and I’ve been very satisfied with the series’ production quality and appearance. I do quibble somewhat with the inclusion of Francis Beckett’s biography, which may be one of the more recent Attlee biographies but is by no means the most well-written. (My arguments on this front are set out in a review I wrote for the May 2008 issue of Political Studies Review.) Yet on the whole, it is very good to see a publisher taking the time and effort to put together a quality series of this nature, almost made for collecting by those who are fond of modern political history.

At the time of this writing, the main Politico’s Publishing Web site is not working very well for me. It’s a pity that the Politico’s Web site maintainers haven’t set up a separate section to show off this line, because it’s well worth the Web space. I’ve been able to compile a partial list of the titles currently available in the Great Statesmen line — I may have left out one or two, but these are the ones I have seen offered for sale online and in some bookshops.

Biography
Clem Attlee - Francis Beckett
Anthony Crosland - Kevin Jefferys
Alec Douglas-Home - D.R. Thorpe
Hugh Gaitskell - Brian Brivati

Autobiography/Memoirs
Time and Chance - James Callaghan
Time of My Life - Denis Healey
The Course of My Life - Edward Heath
Conflict of Loyalty - Geoffrey Howe
A Life at the Centre - Roy Jenkins (which I have reviewed here)

Reviews of both the Thorpe and Beckett biographies are in the abovementioned review article, and I’ll be writing a review of Geoffrey Howe’s biography for Political Studies Review in the near future. I’ve yet to start Healey’s memoirs, but when I finish that, I’ll be sure to post a review of it here.

Commentary: John Prescott…and George Brown

I’ve been meaning to write about a few non-book review subjects for a while now, but have had a difficult time trying to determine precisely what kind of commentary I want this blog to contain. It may seem a little odd to open with this particular topic, especially now that other pieces of news have supplanted this topic in the public mind, but of late my thoughts have been drifting back to John Prescott’s recent admission that he has been struggling with an eating disorder.

Further information appears here from the Guardian and the Independent, along with marginally sympathetic commentary by Armando Iannucci.) Although these articles only hint at it, much of the general political blogosphere seemed to think that this ‘confession’ is part of a publicity stunt designed to sell copies of Prescott’s forthcoming memoirs. More generally, the responses tended to degenerate into snide, crude, or openly hostile comments about Prescott’s weight, appearance, intelligence, political leanings, sexual appetites, and so forth. Yet the more I read about Prescott, more my thoughts kept coming back to another Labour politician who engaged in similarly self-destructive behaviours.

John Prescott entered the House as the Member for Hull East in 1970, a General Election in which more than a few Labour MPs lost their seats. One of those lost seats was Belper, where a 5 percent swing to the Tories turfed out the MP who’d represented the constituency since 1945: George Brown.

George Brown’s been all but forgotten by the history books, except for perhaps a dozen winceworthy anecdotes of slurred speeches and drunken rages. In truth, he seemed to vanish from the public consciousness almost from the moment Harold Wilson finally got fed up with him and accepted the last of his many resignations in March 1968. Yet there are a number of repeated patterns — unsettling echoes, if you like — in both men’s behaviours, in the way they were treated by the political press, and in the way that they were regarded inside and outside their party. (One Telegraph writer even made the comparison rather more explicit by describing Prescott as ‘a kind of George Brown without the charm.’) And although some commentators may remark that at least George Brown had the excuse of his horrible addiction to alcohol to explain his temperament, a comparative look at the two men reveals some points to ponder.

Both George Brown and John Prescott occupied the unenviable symbolic sinecure of First Secretary of State (Brown as Minister for the short-lived conglomerate Department of Economic Affairs, Prescott as deputy PM and as the head of another cobbled-together superdepartment now known as Defra). Both garnered the reputation of aggressive, deal-brokering, pull-no-punches politicians, repelling many of their colleagues and often embarrassing or exasperating their few patient supporters in the process. Going back further in their political careers, the similarities keep cropping up. Education was a sore point with both of them — Brown went to a junior grammar school, but left school at 15 to start working, while Prescott’s poor showing in the eleven-plus sent him to a secondary modern — and both ended up supplementing their schooling with further education (Brown at night schools and Workers’ Education Association classes, Prescott at Ruskin College in Oxford). Both came from trade union backgrounds, and made much of their links to the trade union movement as a badge of Labour Party authenticity. Both had turbulent marriages: George Brown ended up leaving his wife for his secretary, and although Prescott may have stayed with his wife he nonetheless owned up to his own infidelity. And on the whole, both do not seem to have been truly capable of dealing with the pressures of political life, particularly towards the end of their careers in the House.

I think a full and properly considered comparative study of Brown and Prescott would require in-depth research into press coverage of both men, with appropriate weight given to the general changes in the timbre and focus of political reporting since the 1960s. Private Eye immortalised the phrase ‘tired and emotional’ in connection with George Brown, and Simon Hoggart’s political sketches seldom failed to take advantage of Prescott’s struggles with public speaking — not to mention Jeremy Paxman’s The Political Animal, with its apocryphal quip that in recent years, prospective Hansard editors had to ‘translate’ a John Prescott speech into intelligible text as part of the application and vetting process. Apart from the official press coverage, George Brown’s antics often cropped up in the diaries of Richard Crossman and Tony Benn, and perhaps a forthcoming crop of diaries and memoirs from politicians of the Blair years (in addition to the ones that are available now) will reveal more stories about Prescott. It’s a study worth conducting, I think, if only because I would hate to see another Labour politician conveniently forgotten by those who prefer to distance themselves from history.