by Roy Jenkins
The fault of which some who had to deal with Giscard, and who admire many aspects of his constructive liberal statesmanship, would most accuse him was a certain false condescension. Does he dispel this in these memoirs? The answer must, I fear, be ‘no’, although he shows that it was balanced by many more attractive and less complacent characteristics. But it is still there. When he writes of the suicide of Robert Boulin, his minister of labour who was oppressed by a minor financial scandal arising out of his obtaining a free plot of land on the Côte d’Azur, Giscard was genuinely shocked by the tragedy. But it was a photograph of the villa ‘sans grâce, sans charme’, which Boulin built on it that most stuck in his mind.
When he arrived in Venice for the 1980 summit he metaphorically patted Prime Minister Cossiga on the head: ‘He was swimming in happiness … it was the consummation of his political life’ (Cossiga has since been president of the Italian Republic for seven years).
And when Giscard dined with the other heads of government in a great salon overhanging the Grand Canal, and was dazzled by the beauty of the surroundings, he was oppressed that no one else was appreciating the aesthetic feast. He may well have been right, but how did he know what was or was not going on in their minds? Perhaps that must wait for the sacred and profane memoirs of all of them. But of one thing we can be certain in advance: they will not be nearly as well written or elegantly self-revealing as are those of Giscard.
François Guizot
This miniature is based on a November 1990 European review of Guizot by Gabriel de Broglie (Perrin).
Guizot Was the close contemporary of Palmerston and Lord john Russell and lived somewhat but not much longer than either of these octogenarians. Yet I find him more comparable with those Englishmen who were born half a generation or a little more after him, Gladstone, Newman, Matthew Arnold, even Tennyson. Guizot is almost a Victorian, very ungallic in some ways, with a career and a mentalité which at once illustrates the considerable similarities, shot through with profound differences, between the two leading countries of the nineteenth-century world.
François Guizot (although he was a man like Disraeli or Asquith who hardly needed or used a Christian name) was born in 1787, the son of a Protestant advocate living and practising in Nîmes. His Protestantism was important, not because he was primarily a dévot but because it deeply affected his cast of mind and character, rather as it had done with that twentieth-century Protestant French politician, Maurice Couve de Murville. (Guizot’s mind was, however, both more erudite and wide-ranging than Couve’s.)
If this provenance and Guizot’s close knowledge of English language and literature (with his future first wife he had translated the thirteen volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall by the time he was twenty-four) linked him with England, another part of his family background divided him sharply from the British experience. His father was guillotined in 1794, and his maternal grandfather, also part of the legal and Protestant establishment of Nîmes at best did nothing to save him and at worst was one of the instigators of the execution. So, mingled with the parchment- inspired respectability of legal life in a peculiarly urbane cheflieu, was an appallingly intimate experience of the unforgiving confrontationalism, with its periodical blood-lettings, which was a feature of French politics at least from the mid-seventeenth century Fronde until 1945, several hundred years after serious violence had disappeared from the English scene.
Guizot was certainly not a man of violence. He was a pacific minister of the regime which, of all those that ruled France in the nineteenth century, was the least concerned with ‘la gloire’. Louis-Philippe, the bourgeois king who preferred an umbrella to a sword, was long and well served by Guizot, who reversed Thiers’ policy of tweaking the tail of the British lion and produced the most famous summons to the arms of mammon that has ever been heard in the hemicycle of the Palais Bourbon. ‘Messieurs,’ he told the assembled deputies of 1843, ‘enrichissez-vous.’ Put in its context the remark was not nearly as materialistically self-seeking as it sounds, and Guizot never made much money for himself. Nevertheless, as a political leader he had more than a touch of Neville Chamberlain about him.
Yet outside politics there were sides to him that were well beyond the life and style of the man of Munich from Birmingham. Guizot was a savant, a slightly reluctant figure of fashion, but the far-from-reluctant lover for twenty years of the exhibitionist Princesse de Lieven, and in general a writer of letters to women on a scale that fully rivalled Asquith. To combine this with a reputation for gravitas which put him closer to Gladstone and a literary output that exceeded that of any nineteenth-century politician of either side of the Channel made Guizot a very remarkable man. Hippolyte Taine, whose historical judgement is not negligible, placed him with Balzac, Stendhal, Sainte-Beuve and Renan as one of the ‘five writers and thinkers who, since Montesquieu, have most added to the knowledge of human nature.’ He was a member of the Académie Française for the massive span of forty years, and during this period, on top of his seven years as Louis-Philippe’s first minister, he poured out his multi-volume historical works: six on the English Civil War, eight of his own memoirs, four of a history of France, another three of which were edited by his daughter after his death.
Guizot had two wives, the first twelve years older than himself, the second her niece. They were both dead, each time to his great dismay, by the time he was forty-five. Four years later, in the midst of other more exclusively epistolatory relationships, he began his very public and wildly unsuitable liaison with Dorothea de Lieven. It was unsuitable not least because he soon became a sober-sided minister of foreign affairs and she tried to be the greatest political intriguer in Europe. It was public in Paris, where he visited her house twice a day and even conducted diplomatic interviews there. But it was private, although hardly secret, in relation to his family. He spent a lot of time at a Normandy property called Val-Richer, which he acquired almost at the time he acquired her and which became almost synonymous with his name. She was only allowed to pay one morning call there. Nor was she allowed in London when he was ambassador here.
Altogether he was a strange and rewarding man, and it is not surprising that, right through to his death in 1874, he was the favourite port of call for British politicians passing through Paris. A visit to him was almost as obligatory for a would-be statesman of intellectual tastes as was a large luncheon at the Café Anglais for the Prince of Wales. And the fare that he provided, while not as rich, was more than adequately sustaining.
Nigel Lawson
This was a 1992 Sunday Telegraph review of Nigel Lawson’s ministerial memoirs The View from No. 11 (Bantam).
This Monstrous and self-obsessed book is only partially redeemed by the intelligence of the author and by his retention of a certain writing craft, which could not, however, be called art because of a lack of both overall proportion and of any positive stylistic qualities beyond that of lucidity. One may search in vain for (intentional) jokes, or for evocative writing, or for shafts of insight into the character of himself or others.
It is a long search, for we have over a thousand pages on Lord Lawson’s ten ministerial years. There are eighty chapters, a number I have rarely seen exceeded in any book other than a Victorian ‘three-decker’ novel. And The View from No. 11 does not have quite the narrative compulsion of, say, Middlemarch or Can You Forgive Her?
Memoirs or autobiographies are of course by their nature fairly solipsistic. But Nigel Lawson goes beyond the habitual bounds of egocentricity, as is illustrated in two ways. First, the photographs. In an autobiography, these necessarily include a good number of the author himself, but variety is normally sought by changing the background and the companions as much as possible. Lawson, per contra, specializes in close-ups of his own features. One page contains four different versions of the familiar countenance. I was reminded irresistibly of a long-defunct confectionary product known as Fry’s Five Boys Chocolate Bars. Each wrapping was covered in five munching faces, all displ
aying varying aspects of self-satisfaction.
Second, it is a tremendous book for putting the blame on others. The third chapter on his Chancellorship is rather poignantly entitled ‘A Job with Few Friends’. But if the number was small when he was doing his duty at the Exchequer it is difficult to believe that this book will not make it still more exiguous. Even allies get fairly dismissive treatment. At the beginning of the Thatcher Government, for instance, Lawson was Geoffrey Howe’s Financial Secretary at the Treasury and in charge of the then panacea subject of monetary policy, although as the interplay between the stubbornly disloyal monetary aggregates of Mo, M1, M3, M4 and even M5 are developed, a lay reader could easily be forgiven for thinking that the narrator must have been at the Ministry of Transport. But it was to Chancellor Howe that Lawson was then responsible, and many opinionated minutes, all too frequently reproduced here, he fired off to him.
Except as a silent recipient of such effusions, however, Howe is not at this stage allowed a role beyond that of a sort of furry pet padding around in his Hush Puppies and greeting the initiatives of his brilliant lieutenant with a mixture of incomprehension and apprehension. Better in some ways a direct stiletto into the back, which is what, to take a few random examples, Peter Rees, his first Chief Secretary at the Treasury, Gordon Richardson, Governor of the Bank of England until 1983, and Arthur Cockfield, Conservative tax expert until he became a Brussels Commissioner, all receive. Enemies within the government, such as Prior, Walker, Biffen, Gilmour, receive still shorter shrift, although they at least get the dagger in the front. And several of them will probably be more pleased with the book than will Lord Tebbit, who gets one of the few unalloyed tributes for his performance in the 1983 Parliament accompanied by the (to him) infuriating statement that he was a strong supporter of entry into the ERM in 1985.
Lawson’s unconcealed lack of admiration for colleagues does, I suppose, make the long watches on the Medium Term Financial Strategy and exchange rate policy less tedious than they might otherwise be. But it does give an unappealing impression of everyone being out of step but Johnnie. And it is not made better by an excessive use of Christian names, which sometimes carries a flavour of Girls’ Own Paper quarrels: ‘John felt so strongly about it, however, that he wrote personally to Margaret setting out his objections to the MTFS which understandably annoyed Geoffrey when he got to hear of it.’
All previous skirmishes, however, are merely a run-up to the 1987-9 epic battle with ‘Margaret’. This has almost an operatic quality about it, except that a wise intendant would have insisted on a much shorter overture. At first there was mutual admiration, and scenes with considerable duet potential. On the night of the 1985 Budget she unexpectedly rang the Number 11 doorbell and our hero who always slept naked (the 1100 pages allow room for such graphic detail) only had time to slip on trousers but no shirt or shoes before going down and holding a ‘somewhat stilted chat’ in the open doorway against the appropriate backdrop of the dreaded Foreign Office battlements. Yet even at such happy times there were rumbles of menace from the distance which hinted that all might not be well in the end.
Then comes the story of the mounting quarrel itself, beginning after the 1987 election and gathering momentum with the Prime Minister’s open disapproval of the Chancellor’s exchange rate policy, until two and a half years later it burst into resignation over the return to 10 Downing Street of Sir Alan Walters as her economic adviser. This is well and convincingly told except perhaps for Lawson’s claim that Mrs Thatcher was seized with jealousy of him after his triumphs in the 1987 campaign.
His determination to shift, or at any rate spread, the blame for the bonanza which helped to make the subsequent slump deeper and longer than it need have been, is a good deal less convincing. The general tone is one of claiming that he did not cause the trouble, with an alternative plea that, if he did, there were plenty of others, commentators as well as ministers, urging him to go even further.
How will Lawson look in history as a Chancellor? My guess is: technically well equipped for the job (although to judge from the success of the non-economists Cripps and Butler and the relative failure of the economists Dalton and Maudling this is not crucial), durable (in a category comparable in this respect this century only with Lloyd George and Neville Chamberlain), confident, probably good to work for, but insensitive, brutally opinionated, and by believing that he had created a miracle whereas he had merely dashingly ridden a long upswing, heavily responsible for present discontents.
Is his vast budget of events accurate? Probably mostly so, although of his six references to me, two are directly and factually inaccurate and one inferentially so. But I daresay others are luckier.
Selwyn Lloyd
This essay is based on a 1989 Observer review of D. R. Thorpe’s Selwyn Lloyd (Cape).
Selwyn Lloyd, born in 1904 and dying in 1978, was Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and both leader and then Speaker of the House of Commons, without ever quite becoming more than a middle-rank politician. Nevertheless, he thoroughly deserved a good-quality biography, the more so as he was in my view an unusually nice although sad man, and he got exactly this from D. R. Thorpe. Mr Thorpe’s book is tailor-made to fit Lloyd, and indeed sits on him more easily than any of his oddly stiff suits (abundantly illustrated within) ever seemed to do. These tailor-made qualities of the book are neatly summed up by a phrase from a review, quoted by Mr Thorpe, of Lloyd’s own memoir of his five years in the Speaker’s chair: ‘modest, open-minded, friendly and honest’.
I use ‘almost’ because ‘modest’ understates Mr Thorpe’s achievement in building a highly readable and rewarding new account of the politics of the 1950s and 1960s around Lloyd. This list omits, however, a certain nostalgic provincial piety which was a quality of the subject as it is of parts of the Thorpe book. The account of Lloyd’s funeral in Wirral, with its description of the service and the principal participants, could almost be a ‘50 years ago’ extract from the Hoylake Gazette (shades of the recurring ‘Mr Hoylake Urban District Council’ joke about Lloyd in the Spectator of thirty years ago, on which Bernard Levin made his reputation). But these sorts of detail fit the narrative and add to the interest, as well as illustrate what emerges as a fascinating sub-theme of the book, which is the uneasy interplay of Harold Macmillan’s self-conscious metropolitan Edwardianism and Lloyd’s instinctive respect for the golf courses and villas of 1930s Cheshire suburbia.
Macmillan, late in life, when reminded that Lloyd was from the Wirral murmured, ‘up there … juts out … funny place to come from’, and had not made things better by referring to him earlier as ‘a little country notary’. Selwyn (rather like Austen Chamberlain he could be referred to by his Christian name without undue familiarity) probably minded the tone more than the substance, apart from treating Merseyside as a bucolic village, for he was eager to call his never-written autobiography ‘A Middle-Class Lawyer from Liverpool’.
He was not a very notable lawyer - a reliable Northern Circuit junior before the war and a part-time silk earning barely £2000 a year from his practice after it - he was amongst Liverpool barristers not merely well behind great advocates like F. E. Smith and Hartley Shawcross but not quite up to Maxwell Fyfe. The one surprising thing that the Bar did for him, however, was to make him a determined opponent of capital punishment. On that he never subsequently wavered.
If he was a second-class lawyer he was undoubtedly a first-class soldier. He leapt into the Territorial Army just before the war began and bounded up in rank. By the end of 1939 he was through the Staff College and a brigade major. He never commanded troops, but he was a staff officer of the highest quality who ended the war as one of the select band of ‘civilian’ brigadiers. He loved the army because it filled his life, kept his endemic loneliness at bay, provided him with official accommodation, demanded the loyal and efficient discharge of higher orders, and rewarded him with the prestige of rapid promotion. Much of his remarkable political career he spent try
ing to get the same benefits out of political life, and succeeding for a high proportion of the time.
He began as Minister of State at the Foreign Office. Esprit de l’escalier made him subsequently believe that he said on appointment, ‘I think there must be some mistake; I’ve never been to a foreign country, I don’t speak any foreign languages, I don’t like foreigners,’ and that Churchill responded, ‘Young man, these all seem to me to be positive advantages.’
Even if this had been entirely true, he would have been no worse than Edward Grey in these respects. After this start he not only served three reasonably successful years as Minister of State, but, after a fourteen-month sabbatical as Minister of Supply and then of Defence, came back to the Foreign Office to serve as Secretary of State for five and a half years, until very recently the longest continuous period for any Foreign Secretary since the equally insular Grey.
They both landed the country in disastrous wars. Grey’s was won after four and a half years of slaughter. Lloyd’s was lost after twenty-four hours of humiliating miscalculation and chicanery. But there the comparison stops, for Grey’s foreign policy under an easy-going and domestically oriented Prime Minister was very much his own, whereas Lloyd’s, under a fretful and externally obsessed one, was very much his master’s. Mr Thorpe portrays him as being snatched away from negotiating a perfectly tolerable Suez settlement with the Egyptian Foreign Minister in New York, brought back overnight and even more jet-lagged because it was (just) the pre-jet age, half-charmed and half-brainwashed over lunch alone with Eden, and then rushed off to Paris for secret and committing talks with Prime Minister Guy Mollet and Foreign Minister Christian Pineau without any officials present. The verdict for which Mr Thorpe goes on Lloyd’s role in the Suez affair is one of guilty but with heavily diminished responsibility because of a mind enfeebled by excessive loyalty and inadequate self-confidence. It can hardly be a ringing exculpation but I think he achieves it. In any event his Suez chapter is a very good one, fair, convincing and compelling.
