It is as though these Herculean efforts have drained Harris’s resources of tolerance. His Not for Turning offers us the dark underside of the memoirs, and it is irresistible reading because the brilliance of Harris’s gift for narrative has not deserted him. The book administers a monster dose of catharsis, provoking pity, fear and horror in more or less equal measures. We are familiar with other periods of friction in High Politics – the war between the Bevanites and the Gaitskellites, the unending tussle between the followers of Peel, Russell and Disraeli, not to mention the misunderstandings between the Montagues and the Capulets. But in Harris’s account, these are all fleeting tiffs compared to the war between the Wets and the Dries. There is scarcely a minister in any of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinets who is not denounced as weak, devious, conceited or disloyal – or all of the above. Mrs Thatcher herself, although supposedly the heroine of the drama, is repeatedly ticked off, for ‘her alternatively cloying and abrasive performances’, for being ‘unimaginative’, ‘incapable of forgiveness’, of utterly lacking the logical, scientifically trained mind she was so proud of and on the contrary being remarkable for her ‘feminine logic’. Almost all her choices of minister are denounced as ‘transparently unsuitable’ (it would be unmanly not to mention here that this reviewer’s appointment to her staff is fingered in a footnote, no doubt rightly, as ‘another of her mistakes’). His account of the manoeuvres leading up to her fall is as savage an indictment of individual and collective treachery as I have ever read.
But even this passage palls beside his account of her last years, which spill over the final hundred pages of the book. In this connection, Harris argues that ‘no true portrait of her can be drawn that omits the dark reality’. He spares us nothing: her heavy drinking, her shouting matches with Denis, her wild suspicions of his infidelity, the cruel effects on her short-term memory of her succession of strokes, until she could no longer string a sentence together, although she was still capable of being wounded when her daughter Carol published a description of her dementia. Harris criticizes ‘the intrusive and distasteful elements’ of the Meryl Streep film The Iron Lady. Yet it is hard to see how his own account can escape the same indictment. By comparison, Kingsley Amis’s account of the indignities of old age in Ending Up is a drawing-room comedy.
More distressing than mere mental decay and mortality (in which, as Bishop Chartres reminded us, she really was One of Us) is Harris’s account of the way that ‘in her old age Mrs Thatcher’s thought processes became cruder and her vituperation about the Europeans more intemperate’. Increasingly she hobnobbed with the more unsavoury characters knocking about the world stage – Augusto Pinochet, Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, Aslan Maskhadov, the leader of the Chechen rebels, and President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, ‘the sort of wily authoritarian figure she understood’.
Harris’s own lenses become a little blurred too. He conceives a driving hatred for Geoffrey Howe, for whom he had once worked until Howe made a flippant remark about the Falklands War. Howe, he says, was ‘raddled with bitterness’, but it is surely Harris’s own bitterness which leads him to deny the credit that Howe genuinely deserves for the budgets of 1979 and 1981 (ditto with Nigel Lawson, who, for all his errors over monetary policy, will go down as one of the great tax-reforming chancellors). Nor is it true of Howe’s resignation speech that ‘its legendary qualities have been bestowed in retrospect’. Those mild, hesitant closing sentences were electrifying at the time, and anyone hearing them knew instantly that Thatcher was finished. It certainly is not true that, if she had gained a couple more votes in the leadership contest, she could have sailed on regardless. You cannot mislay the support of nearly half your MPs and hope to survive for long.
One may feel, as I do, that it would have been better if the general electorate had been given the chance to dismiss her, but one must understand the motives of those MPs who feared that they would be dismissed along with her. It was the same fear that animated those who supported John Redwood’s ‘no change, no chance’ leadership bid five years later (Harris worked for the Redwood campaign) – and indeed the same fear that impelled those who voted for Thatcher to replace Heath. Politics always was a blood sport with no protected species. And it is simply bad history to dismiss in half a sentence John Major’s triumph in the 1992 general election, when he totted up more votes than Mrs Thatcher did in any of her three victories.
Despite or perhaps even because of these blemishes, I cannot conceal my feeling that Robin Harris’s Not for Turning approaches the condition of art. It is as compelling in its unrelievedly black and venomous fashion as the novels of Céline or Thomas Bernhard. Anyone who thinks that, in the modern politics of nudge, soundbites and focus groups, all passion is irretrievably spent has got another think coming.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
Introduction: The Amphibious Mob
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, Peter Ackroyd (Chatto)
VOICES IN OUR TIME
Kingsley Amis: the craving machine
Spectator, 11 November 2006
The Life of Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader (Jonathan Cape)
Alan Bennett: against splother
Spectator, 22 October 2005
Untold Stories, Alan Bennett (Faber & Faber/Profile)
Muriel Spark: the Go-Away Bird
Spectator, 15 August 2009
Muriel Spark: The Biography, Martin Stannard (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
V. S. Naipaul: no home for Mr Biswas
Spectator, 5 May 1984
Finding the Centre: Two Narratives, V. S. Naipaul (André Deutsch)
Hugh Trevor-Roper: the Voltaire of St Aldate’s
Spectator, 15 July 2006
Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
W. G. Sebald: a master shrouded in mist
Spectator, 26 February 2005
Campo Santo, W. G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell (Hamish Hamilton)
John le Carré: spooking the spooks
Spectator, 23 September 2006
The Mission Song, John le Carré (Hodder & Stoughton)
Elias Canetti: the God-Monster of Hampstead
Spectator, 23 July 2005
Party in the Blitz: The English Years, Elias Canetti, translated by Michael Hofmann (Harvill Press)
John Osborne: anger management?
Spectator, 6 May 2006
John Osborne: A Patriot for Us, John Heilpern (Chatto & Windus)
Professor Derek Jackson: off the radar
London Review of Books, 7 February 2008
As I Was Going to St Ives: A Life of Derek Jackson, Simon Courtauld (Michael Russell)
Germaine Greer: still strapped in the cuirass
Times Literary Supplement, 19 March 1999
The Whole Woman, Germaine Greer (Doubleday)
EARLY MODERNS
Rudyard Kipling: the sensitive bounder
Spectator, 3 November 2007
Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling, Charles Allen (Little, Brown)
George Gissing: the downfall of a pessimist
Spectator, 8 March 2008
George Gissing: A Life, Paul Delany (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Virginia Woolf: go with the flow
Spectator, 23 April 2005
Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, Julia Briggs (Penguin/Allen Lane)
Arthur Ransome: Lenin in the Lake District
London Review of Books, 24 September 2009
The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome, Roland Chambers (Faber & Faber)
E. M. Forster: shy, remorseless shade
Spectator, 19–26 December 2009
Concerning E. M. Forster, Frank Kermode (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Arthur Machen: faerie strains
Spectator, 29 October 1988
The Collected Arthur Machen, edited by Christopher Palmer (Duckworth)
Fred Perry: winner takes all<
br />
Times Literary Supplement, 26 June 2009
The Last Champion: The Life of Fred Perry, Jon Henderson (Yellow Jersey Press)
M. R. James: the sexless ghost
London Review of Books, 26 January 2012
Collected Ghost Stories, M. R. James (Oxford University Press)
Wilfred Owen: the last telegram
Wall Street Journal, 29–30 March 2014
Wilfred Owen, Guy Cuthbertson (Yale University Press)
John Maynard Keynes: copulation and macroeconomics
The Oldie, April 2015
Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes, Richard Davenport-Hines (William Collins)
DIVINE DISCONTENTS
Basil Hume: the English cardinal
Times Literary Supplement, 8 July 2005
Basil Hume: The Monk Cardinal, Anthony Howard (Headline)
The Red Dean
London Review of Books, 26 April 2012
The Red Dean of Canterbury: The Public and Private Faces of Hewlett Johnson, John Butler (Scala)
Charles Bradlaugh: the admirable atheist
London Review of Books, 30 June 2011
Dare to Stand Alone: The Story of Charles Bradlaugh, Atheist and Republican, Bryan Niblett (Kramedart Press)
Mr Gladstone’s religion
London Review of Books, 17 February 2005
The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics, David Bebbington (Oxford University Press)
The rise and fall and rise of Methodism
Times Literary Supplement, 27 May 2005
Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, David Hempton (Yale University Press)
IN SEARCH OF ENGLAND
Pevsner in Berkshire
Times Literary Supplement, 16 July 2010
Berkshire, Geoffrey Tyack, Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner (Yale University Press)
Oliver Rackham: magus of the woods
Spectator, 4 February 1989
The Last Forest: The Story of Hatfield Forest, Oliver Rackham (J. M. Dent & Sons)
The last of Betjeman
Spectator, 13 November 2004
Betjeman: The Bonus of Laughter, Bevis Hillier (John Murray)
Ronald Blythe: glory in the ruts
Times Literary Supplement, 1 January 2010
At the Yeoman’s House, Ronald Blythe (Enitharmon Press)
The suburb and the village
Times Literary Supplement, 1 January 2010 and 25 December 1998
Wall Street Journal, 27 November 2010
The Freedoms of Suburbia, Paul Barker (Frances Lincoln)
Town and Country, edited by Anthony Barnett and Roger Scruton (Jonathan Cape)
Villages of Britain: The Five Hundred Villages that Made the Countryside, Clive Aslet (Bloomsbury)
Mark Girouard and the English town
Spectator, 2 June 1990
The English Town, Mark Girouard (Yale University Press)
Life in the Georgian City, Dan Cruickshank and Neil Burton (Viking)
SOME OLD MASTERS
Thomas Hardy: the twilight of aftering
Spectator, 19 May 1990
Thomas Hardy: Selected Letters, edited by Michael Millgate (Faber)
Hardy the Writer, F. B. Pinion (Palgrave Macmillan)
A Thomas Hardy Dictionary, F. B. Pinion (Macmillan)
Hardy Landscapes, Gordon Beningfield (Viking)
Charles Dickens: kindly leave the stage
Spectator, 8 September 1990
Dickens, Peter Ackroyd (Sinclair-Stevenson)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a wonderful leaper
Spectator, 11 November 1989
Coleridge: Early Visions, Richard Holmes (Hodder & Stoughton)
John Keats: what’s become of Junkets?
Spectator, 20 October 2012
John Keats: A New Life, Nicholas Roe (Yale University Press)
Samuel Pepys: from the scaffold to Mr Pooter
Spectator, 28 September 2002
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Claire Tomalin (Penguin/Viking)
Shakespeare at Stratford: the divine pork butcher
Spectator, 28 April 2007
Shakespeare the Thinker, A. D. Nuttall (Yale University Press)
THE GREAT VICTORIANS
Sir Robert Peel: the first modern
Times Literary Supplement, 28 August 2007
Robert Peel: A Biography, Douglas Hurd (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Lord Palmerston: the unstoppable Pam
Times Literary Supplement, 12 November 2010
Palmerston: A Biography, David Brown (Yale University Press)
Walter Bagehot: money matters
London Review of Books, 6 February 2014
The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot, Frank Prochaska (Yale University Press)
Lord Rosebery: the palm without the dust
London Review of Books, 22 September 2005
Rosebery: Statesman in Turmoil, Leo McKinstry (John Murray)
Arthur Balfour: a fatal charm
London Review of Books, 20 March 2008
Balfour: The Last Grandee, R. J. Q. Adams (John Murray)
OUR STATESMEN
Margot, Asquith and the Great War
London Review of Books, 8 January 2015
Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary 1914–1916: The View From Downing Street, selected and edited by Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock (Oxford University Press)
Margot at War: Love and Betrayal in Downing Street, 1912–1916, Anne de Courcy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914, Douglas Newton (Verso)
Churchill’s calamity: day trip to Gallipoli
Spectator, 14 April 1990
Oswald Mosley: the poor old Führer
London Review of Books, 6 July 2006
Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism, Stephen Dorril (Viking)
Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism Between the Wars, Martin Pugh (Pimlico)
Roy Jenkins: liberal lothario
Times Literary Supplement, 22 October 2004
Roy Jenkins: A Retrospective, edited by Andrew Adonis and Keith Thomas (Oxford University Press)
Denis Healey: the bruiser aesthete
Spectator, 21 October 1989
The Time of My Life, Denis Healey (Michael Joseph)
Harold Macmillan: lonely are the brave
London Review of Books, 8 September 2011
Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan, D. R. Thorpe (Pimlico)
The Macmillan Diaries Volume II: Prime Minister and After, 1957–1966, edited by Peter Catterall (Macmillan)
Edward Heath: the great sulk
London Review of Books, 22 July 2010
Edward Heath, Philip Ziegler (HarperPress)
Margaret Thatcher: making your own luck
Times Literary Supplement, 5 June 2013
Margaret Thatcher Volume I: Not for Turning, Charles Moore (Allen Lane)
Not for Turning: The Life of Margaret Thatcher, Robin Harris (Bantam Press)
A Journey with Margaret Thatcher: Foreign Policy Under the Iron Lady, Robin Renwick (Biteback)
The Real Iron Lady: Working with Margaret Thatcher, Gillian Shephard (Biteback)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
What a debt I owe to the Literary Editors who have indulged and encouraged me over the past thirty years: Mary-Kay Wilmers and John Sturrock at the London Review of Books, Mark Amory at the Spectator, Alan Jenkins, David Horspool, Lindsay Duguid and all my old comrades at the Times Literary Supplement. To their Editors in Chief, Mary-Kay herself, Peter Stothard at the TLS and Fraser Nelson, Matthew d’Ancona, Boris Johnson, the late Frank Johnson, Dominic Lawson, Charles Moore and Alexander Chancellor at the Spectator who have smiled on the publication and now the republication of these pieces I am no less grateful.
At Simon & Schuster, Suzanne Baboneau and Iain MacGregor have bravely supported this reckless enterprise and given valuable help in shaping it, w
ith Jo Whitford deftly supplying the finishing touches. As ever, my agent David Miller has guided me with his unique amalgam of sympathy, sense and brio.
Perhaps the debt that I need most reminding of is the one I owe to the authors of the many and varied books discussed here. It is they who have been on the receiving end of my misprisions and pasquinades, who have innocently provoked my digressions and speculations, whose best stories I have pillaged and whose merits I have often underplayed or misunderstood. I would like to think that I have given them the credit they deserve, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
PICTURE PERMISSIONS
Page link: all images © Getty Images
Page link: John Osborne © Getty Images; Professor Derek Jackson © National Portrait Gallery; Germaine Greer © Getty Images
Page link: all images © Getty Images
Page link: Cardinal Basil Hume © Camera Press London; Dr Hewlett Johnson © Getty Images
Page link: all images © Getty Images
Page link: Charles Dickens © Getty Images; Samuel Taylor Coleridge © National Portrait Gallery; John Keats © Getty Images
Page link: all images © Getty Images
Page link: Denis Healey © Getty Images; Harold Macmillan with President Kennedy © Press Association
INDEX
Abbott, Senda, ref1
Abercrombie, Patrick, ref1
Aberdeen, Lord, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Ackroyd, Peter, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Adam Bede (Eliot), ref1
Adams, R. J. Q., ref1, ref2, ref3
Adie, Kate, ref1
Adler, H. G., ref1
Adler, Jeremy, ref1, ref2, ref3
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