by Roy Jenkins
Being willing to take punishment almost without limit (although certainly not without pain), Selwyn, ‘the great survivor’, overcame all this and had three and a half years as Macmillan’s Foreign Secretary before being transferred from the one top departmental job to the other. Mr Thorpe conveys the impression that he was happier when he became Chancellor, preferring the ‘candle-ends’ of the Treasury to foreigners. It must be said, however, that, while he was an insensitive Chancellor, he was also an effectively innovative one. It is a general paradox of the Chancellor’s position that his ex-officio dominance in the government is balanced by the fact that most of his work is building sandcastles that are predictably washed away by the high tide of his successor. Lloyd was unusual in leaving the semipermanent landmarks of the National Economic Development Office and Council (which survived until the magisterial Chancellorship of Mr Lamont made such cross-industry advice unnecessary) and the Regulator (by which indirect taxation could be easily varied between Budgets).
Then he was the leading and most shattered victim of Macmillan’s ‘day of the long knives’. Loss of office destroyed his life. He had nowhere to live and little to do. He was also very bitter about the injustice. But he kept his mouth shut, buckled down, became more relaxed and bonhomous, forged a lucky alliance with Alec Douglas Home, and was back in office as Leader of the House of Commons within fifteen months. It was a quick tit-for-tat with Harold Macmillan. In this post, which seemed to require most of the qualities he did not possess - delicacy of touch, wit, and detachment - he was a considerable success. It lasted only a year until the general election of 1964, but was the indispensable foundation of his 1970s Indian summer of five years as Speaker.
The last time I saw Lloyd, in July 1977 when I had recently become President of the European Commission, he told me that he was writing about Suez and I told him that my Secretary-General, who had been Guy Mollet’s directeur de cabinet at the time, probably knew more about it than most people. He said, ‘Then he may well know certain things which I do not, and which were kept secret, even from me, by Eden and Mollet.’
The Longfords
This essay is based on Observer reviews of Elizabeth Longford’s memoirs, The Pebbled Shore (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), and of Frank Longford’s History of the House of Lords (Collins, 1988).
The Pakenham/Longford clan constitute without question one of the most remarkable and prolific literary families in Britain. Apart from the parents, Frank and Elizabeth Longford, Thomas Pakenham has recently and deservedly won the W. H. Smith prize, Lady Antonia Fraser (Pinter) is English chairman of PEN as well as an author whose publications are always an event, and Lady Rachel Billington is a novelist of subtlety and perception.
This essay, however, is concerned only with the parents. Elizabeth Longford, to whom I would give the first place in the whole family, has had a literary career of unusual shape. Although she had done many other things, such as inspiring Maurice Bowra to a proposal of marriage, awakening her future husband like George IV arousing the spirit of Brighton in Rex Whistler’s allegorical painting, having eight children, moving calmly from Unitarianism to disbelief to High Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, three times becoming a Labour candidate and twice fighting an election, she had never written a book until she was fifty-three. And even then her first, Jameson’s Raid, was not one of her best.
She has since become a most accomplished biographer, partly because she learnt one lesson from the only partial success of Jameson’s Raid, which is that, as Mrs Beeton might say, in order to prepare a fine dish you must first catch a succulent bird. Her subsequent choice of subjects, sometimes strengthened by a delicate special connection, has been brilliant. Victoria R.L, her first great success, was the first life of the matriarch of Europe’s royal houses to be written by a wife and mother. Gynaecologically it comfortably outclassed Lytton Strachey.
Her next subject was the Duke of Wellington, whose wife was a Pakenham forebear. This she did in two volumes, the first mainly military, the second mainly political, and both handled with a rare blend of meticulousness and verve. She is not a stylist of note; she could not be parodied. But she has a strong narrative gift and an unusual capacity to combine respect for historical fact with what is almost a gossip columnist’s instinct for what will interest her readers.
After Wellington, she turned to Byron and then to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt as well as to two or three further royal studies which were perhaps more commercial and less historical than Victoria R.I. These, however, do not come within the scope of the 1986 volume of her autobiography, which stops, quite sensibly (better perspective, hope of another instalment) but without much explanation over twenty-five years ago, when Lady Longford was sixty. These first six decades of her life contain quite enough action, variety, and above all names, to keep us going comfortably over 330 pages. She retains all her narrative sense, there is hardly a dull page, and the photographs, always extremely important in a volume of memoirs, are great fun.
What impression of her life and her qualities does the book leave? The latter are manifold, but pride of place, the book convinces me, must be given to prodigious energy behind a calm exterior. Elizabeth Harman, as she was born in 1906, was the daughter of a Harley Street eye-specialist who married the daughter of Joseph Chamberlain’s younger brother. She never knew the founder of Chamberlain family fame, who was struck down by an incapacitating stroke a few weeks before her birth, but during her formative years first Austen and then Neville Chamberlain were major Conservative figures. She was not only impervious to their political influence but also to the social nexus of the Birmingham ‘cousinage’. The only significant twitch upon the thread was about 1955 when she thought of writing a life of her great-uncle. But there were difficulties about the papers, and eventually only a tiny wing (Jameson’s Raid) of the planned mansion was constructed. For the rest she was soon as socially upmarket of the Chamberlain connection as she was politically to its left.
Nor do I have the impression that her own parental home was a decisive influence upon her life. She did not rebel against it, but she fluttered away from it with all decent speed. Her principal destination was Oxford. She arrived there as a scholar of Lady Margaret Hall in the autumn of 1926, and proceeded to have a success which was the more remarkable because she broke away from her contemporaries rather than epitomized them. During their first three or four decades of life the Oxford women’s colleges had been substantially a blue-stocking world of their own, mostly filled with earnest young women reading English Literature or Modern Languages and mingling only marginally in the male activities of the University. Girls for Commem. Balls and other activities were much more likely to come from London than from St Hugh’s or St Hilda’s.
Elizabeth Harman changed all that. She became a welcomed invader of almost every field of male Oxford life. She even changed her subject to assist her penetration, deserting the safe Eng. Lit. in which she had achieved her scholarship for the more dangerous but masculine Lit. Hum. Her success was on a wide front: amorous (although chastely so, she is at pains to assure us); social (she was on close terms with almost everyone in the University who subsequently gained fame, and dined if not at Blenheim at least at the George Restaurant twice a week); journalistic (she wrote fluently and was one of the first women to be accorded the accolade of being an ‘Isis Idol’); and, up to a point, academic. To her great disappointment she obtained only a second class, which was a considerable achievement after her late start on the classics. However, she received forty-eight letters of condolence on missing a first, which must surely be a record.
What faults can be found? The galaxy of names does occasionally become almost oppressive. And there is a small deficiency of critical judgement. Every goose turns out to be if not himself a full swan at least closely related to a particularly resplendent one. Even their Headington family doctor was Graham Greene’s elder brother. Yet this is a dilemma for any autobiographer or diarist. It is difficult to make the bricks of
interest without the straw of fame.
Frank Longford as a writer has been even more prolific than his wife, and his eclecticism has been almost limitless. The full extent of this I realized only when looking at the ‘books by the same author’ list in one of his recent publications. Normally one’s eye goes over such a list with hardly a flicker. But not on this occasion. It was a revelation. The full variety is an almost breathtaking tribute to sustained energy and dauntless self-confidence. The list is long (twenty-two books, one for every thirteen months since he resigned from ministerial office and began to write intensively at the age of sixty-two), but its composition is by a wide margin still more striking than its size.
Who else could have produced Humility in 1969, Eamon de Valera in 1970, The Grain of Wheat (a volume of autobiography), Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ all in 1974, Kennedy in 1976, Saint Francis of Assisi in 1978, Nixon in 1980, Ulster in 1981, and Pope John Paul II in 1982? That year he supplemented his papal biography with Diary of a Year (his own) and then swept on through Eleven at No. 10 (1984), studies of the Prime Ministers he had known, exactly the same number as did Gladstone, as it happens, One Man’s Faith (also 1984), The Search for Peace (1985), The Bishops (1986), Saints (1987), to a gentle tribute to the Peers entitled A History of the House of Lords (1988), which can be regarded as completing a spiritual and temporal trilogy.
How does the quality of Lord Longford’s work stand up to these prodigious tests to which he subjects his stamina? There is inevitably an element of Dr Johnson’s famous comparison between women preaching and dogs ‘walking on their hinder legs’ about it. It could hardly be otherwise. The result is neither meticulous scholarship (it would not be appropriate, for instance, to compare his House of Lords book with Enoch Powell’s The House of Lords in the Middle Ages), nor a particularly polished pattern of writing. Subjects are often unceremoniously hauled in by the scruff of their necks and the simple device of beginning the sentence ‘Incidentally …’
There is indeed often an engaging inconsequentiality about the writing, and a certain lack of stringency in the structure is balanced by a similar avoidance of astringency in the comments about individuals. Compliments come naturally to Lord Longford. Almost every book cited is ‘impressive’, ‘invaluable’, ‘brilliant’ or ‘penetrating’ and almost every noble family justifies its nobility. There is, however, sometimes a hint of steel beneath the velvet. He can clothe a rebuke in a compliment with unique skill. When he writes of the Law Lords, ‘We would be honoured if they mingled with us more freely outside the Chamber,’ I take it that he means that he finds them a stand-offish lot.
Equally, I shall never forget the sharpest thing he ever said to me. Anthony Crosland and I had successfully opposed a pet scheme of his in a mid-1960s Cabinet meeting. When it was over he upbraided us in the middle of the road outside 10 Downing Street. I think he was quivering with (probably well-justified) rage, but what he actually said was, ‘I will still write very favourably about you both in my autobiography, but not quite so favourably as I would have done until this morning.’ This did not prevent what he subsequently wrote about me, mostly in his Diary of 1981, being thoroughly agreeable, for he is instinctively a generous man.
On another occasion he made a very successful joke against me in the House of Lords. He was describing the difficulties of resignation, which he had done in 1968, but said that there was the compensation of many people having been kind and sympathetic. Then, following a slight pause, he added: ‘The noble Lord, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, for instance, told me afterwards that he had very nearly written to me.’ The laughter was convulsive. I joined in it but was, I suppose, mildly discomforted, the more so as the story was true, although omitting the fact that his resignation had been against my early public expenditure cuts as Chancellor, which made it difficult for me to find the right words to put on paper. However, I regarded the joke as well within the bounds of courtesy and even friendship and thought no more about it until I received an agonized letter from Frank Longford. He claimed he had hardly slept at all on the night afterwards, worrying that he had been offensive. He added, very engagingly, that he had succumbed to what had been a temptation throughout his life, that of desiring to amuse at almost any cost. He almost suggested that he might have to go on a pilgrimage of expiation. I wrote back reassuring him that he had not offended me. But a couple of weeks later when there was to be a spouse-comprising dinner given by my wife after a National Trust lecture by Elizabeth Longford, he wrote again to say that, following his offence, I would surely prefer that he did not come. Once more I wrote a letter of reassurance. A few months later he got up in the House of Lords and made the same joke again.
The trouble with most people of Longford’s degree of generalized generosity is that the absence of a sharp edge of criticism makes their speeches and their writings (if they exist) dull. What makes Frank Longford wholly exceptional is that with him this is the reverse of the truth. Across the table, on his feet, or with his pen, he is one of the funniest men that I know. He is also an extremely clever man, although not at all in the ‘too clever by half’ category. He accompanies this by being uninhibited by the fear that people will laugh at him. He does not, perhaps, like being ignored, a fate which he has for many years avoided by a fairly wide margin, but he is quite indifferent to being mocked. This is an essential ingredient of his being a great Anglo/Irish eccentric, and relentless crusader for his chosen causes, as well as a most prolific author. It does not guarantee that the causes or the subjects will always be chosen with perfect discrimination, but they will certainly be pursued with a unique combination of courage, zest and wit.
François Mitterrand
This piece was a 1990 European review of Le Président, by Franz-Olivier Giesbert (Editions du Seuil).
Franz-Olivier Giesbert, now editor-in-chief of Le Figaro, wrote a life of François Mitterrand, the aspiring French politician, in 1977. Now, thirteen years later, he has produced this second book, Le Président, on Mitterrand the successful statesman, who on grounds of impact on the political life of France and longevity in office, must stand an unchallenged second among the four presidents of the Fifth Republic.
Mitterrand presumably liked the first book, for he has collaborated a good deal with the production of the second. This suggests either a considerable tolerance on Mitterrand’s part or an indifference to whether he is portrayed as amiable (which Giesbert certainly does not do), provided he is treated with a reluctant respect and admiration as an extraordinary political animal (which Giesbert equally certainly does do).
Giesbert is a highly successful journalist who, barely on the threshold of middle age, has established a star’s reputation, both as a political writer and as an editor. Most good journalists write books because they feel they should master a less ephemeral medium than the column or the report. But, only too often, they then proceed to nullify this purpose by choosing the most ephemeral subjects and treating them in the most ephemeral way. In Britain, Hugo Young’s One Of Us (about Margaret Thatcher) and Anthony Howard’s life of the former Conservative minister R. A. Butler are notable and rare exceptions.
Superficially Giesbert is in the mould rather than the exception. He likes writing books about events on which the dust has hardly settled: he likes reporting in direct speech conversations at which he was not present; and a certain addiction to reporters’ clichés shines through the linguistic haze. People who are displeased even if unseen are too easily described as being ‘rouge de colère’.
That almost exhausts the criticisms, for Giesbert writes with a compelling penetration. He takes one over the terrain of the Mitterrand years with the impartial but pitiless clarity of a powerful searchlight sweeping across a convoluted tract of countryside. The ‘direct speech’ technique may be presumptuous and unscholarly, but this is balanced by Giesbert’s uncanny skill in avoiding false notes. His accounts carry a great ring of conviction. It is as difficult not to believe them as it is to stop reading his hi
gh-paced narrative.
His vignettes of Mitterrand’s changing acolytes, allies and adversaries, Mauroy, Fabius, Rocard, Delors, Attali, and many others, are almost as good in a small way as the picture of the great spider at the centre of the web, silent, subtle, more predictable in method than in political position, which Giesbert cumulatively builds up. Essentially it is a portrait of ambiguity. All of his personality is founded upon it, according to Giesbert. ‘This man, in fact, is never the one that one believes he is. He is at once better and worse.’ ‘François Mitterrand is never wholly himself nor wholly someone else.’ The book’s central message is that the President always takes great care to be elusive. His actions never follow his words. He is the greatest master of secrecy and dissimulation since Talleyrand.
So, Giesbert’s compliments are distinctly barbed, even if apparently acceptable. To what extent are the barbs justified? I have never worked closely with Mitterrand. I ceased to be President of the European Community four months before he became President of the Republic. I was once summoned to have an hour’s engaging conversation with him (in Buckingham Palace of all places, when he was in London on a state visit) during which I thought he exercised great charm.
