by Roy Jenkins
But my major encounter with him was in Brussels eight years before that. As the challenger to the French government of the time he wished to pay a day-long visit to the Commission. That was a perfectly reasonable request. Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the Opposition, paid one at about the same time. So did future Chancellor Helmut Kohl. However, the Giscard Government became very edgy about it. I cannot quite think why for I doubt if being photographed with me in the Berlaymont was going to win many votes in Château-Chinon, or anywhere else for that matter.
This did not prevent it being one of the trickiest diplomatic days I have ever spent. In order to avoid great ‘remous’ in Paris, I had to refrain from going down to meet him on the pavement or allowing him to meet an assembly of Commissioners in the Commission meeting room or proposing a formal toast at luncheon, all of which verged on being head of government treatment.
I thought Mitterrand behaved very well in the circumstances. The neurosis was on the other side. However, this book combined with that recollection makes me realize that Elysée politics, both ways round, are a fairly rough affair, perhaps a little more so than in most other democratic countries.
I also recollect that at lunch that day Mitterrand told me that he thought he would probably be too old to fight the 1981 presidential election. In 1990, with two presidential victories behind him, that may I suppose be regarded as mild supporting evidence for Giesbert’s dictum that ‘Il ne fait jamais ce qu’il dit, il ne dit jamais ce qu’il fait’.
Jawaharlal Nehru
This essay is based on a 1989 Observer review of Nehru by M.J. Akbar (Viking).
Jawaharlal Nehru, born in 1889, was Prime Minister for the first seventeen years of Indian independence. The quarter century since has produced six Prime Ministers, but three of them - Shastri, Morarji Desai and Charan Singh - were short-lived. Nehru’s daughter filled the office for sixteen of these twenty-five years and his grandson then added another four. It is a dynastic record without parallel in any democracy.
Among the Viceroys there were two Elgins and two Hardinges, but no English (or Scottish) political family in India or Britain has maintained that degree of individual pre-eminence over three generations. The Nehru feat is the more remarkable because India is much the most disparate country of the three. What also seems to me to be remarkable is that Mrs Gandhi, who was an immensely filial daughter and a somewhat perfunctory wife, did not call herself, and hence her son, Nehru, particularly as the Gandhi has no connection with the Mahatma.
Was the Nehru family feat sufficiently remarkable to call in question India’s democratic credentials? Only superficially so, I think. The intervals, and particularly the Desai intrusion into Mrs Gandhi’s reign, are an answer to that. Indian governments pay the Raj the unfortunate compliment of inheriting from it too great a taste for the use of political imprisonment, but that apart there can be little doubt that by the tests of freedom of expression, freedom of political manoeuvre and freedom of electoral choice, India has astonished the world by showing that a country does not need to be rich to be a liberal democracy.
Nehru was the primary architect of this, which alone would make him one of the great men of the twentieth century. Beyond this pluralism, he gave India in the 1950s a major presence on the world scene - a presence greater than, even with its somewhat more solid economy, it has today. The non-aligned movement, of which, flanked by Tito and Nasser, Nehru was the clear leader, sometimes seemed ‘holier-than-thou’ and needed the resolution of Truman and Eisenhower for there to be something to be non-aligned between. But it gave to fissiparous India a valuable sense of the prestige of nationhood.
Nehru was accused of preaching conciliation abroad and practising ruthlessness at home. But his implacability was largely confined to anything touching the fragmentation of the country which had already lost Pakistan. He liked to think of himself as a Gandhian with Abraham Lincoln’s problems. No doubt there were elements of vanity and double standards in the balance sheet. But the achievement and the sweep of his perceptions were by any standards formidable.
In addition he encapsulated three different and even contradictory strands of India’s relationship with Britain and the West. For his first twenty-five years Nehru lived the slightly parasitical life of a rich Westernized Indian. His father, Motilal Nehru, later a notable Nationalist leader but at this stage an immensely successful, high-living advocate, a sort of F. E. Smith without the swashbuckling, appears in the early part of the book as a more interesting character than Jawaharlal Nehru was himself.
Jawaharlal emerges as a fairly dim Harrow schoolboy, Trinity College, Cambridge, chemistry undergraduate, and Inner Temple pupil barrister. He rather wanted to get away from Indians and recalled disdainfully (of his compatriots) E. M. Forster’s remark that the reason the races could not meet was that the Indians bored the English. If they did I do not think that Nehru was at this stage an exception. He was a silk-shirted hedonist admiring but not really penetrating English life.
Back in India after seven years away he began to undergo a remarkable and forceful metamorphosis. He became Gandhi’s disciple and heir, he converted his devoted father (who threw away - or at any rate suspended use of - his champagne cellar and Western clothes), and together they began lives of alternating agitation and gaol. In Motilal’s case this ended with his death in 1931, but in Jawaharlal’s case it continued until he was released from his last spell in a Raj prison on 15 June 1945.
Of the preceding twenty-three years he had spent almost nine of them incarcerated. There is a too comfortable impression in Britain today that for someone of Nehru’s stature these imprisonments were the equivalent of a reading and writing rest cure on the island in the lake of Udaipur; and that any boredom was made tolerable by the prospect on release of the adulation of the crowds and a no-hard-feelings singing of ‘Forty Years On’ with the provincial governor. Only the adulation of the crowds had reality. For the rest the long gaol sojourns were as depressing as they were unhealthy.
Within fifteen months of the last one, however, Nehru was Prime Minister; within two years he was apparently the lover of the Vicereine (which might be regarded as a more seductive embrace than Harrow songs, although Akbar seemed commend-ably uninterested in this relationship); and within ten he was putting on a remarkably good show as the patronizer of the leaders of the Western world.
He became the arbitrator of the future of the Commonwealth. Churchill, who twenty-five years before had called Gandhi a seditious Middle Temple lawyer posing as a half-naked fakir, took to telling Nehru in private letters that he was ‘the Light of Asia’. And Eisenhower, who had allowed Dulles for most of the 1950s to preach against India’s immoral neutralism, ended the decade by coming on a state visit to Delhi and paying a notable tribute.
Mr Akbar therefore has a splendid subject, and publishing a quarter of a century after Nehru’s death was a good vantage-point, provided he could avoid being oppressed by the bulk of S. Gopal’s authoritative three-volume 1976 biography. Does he succeed? I cannot quite decide. He is a notable journalist, and he writes compellingly with vividness and passion. But he writes journalist’s history.
Maybe in substance he does achieve proportion and perspective: I certainly feel that I understand the balance of Nehru’s life better for having read him. But he never achieves a reflective style. He is a natural polemicist (and - an anti-partition Muslim himself - he has a polemical sub-theme, which is to put all the blame for dismemberment on Jinnah), so that even when he strives for balance his method is to refute one polemical passage with another polemical passage the other way.
His book also demonstrates the width of the gap between the Indian and the British literary traditions. There is some odd English. Governments are constantly ‘protesting’ activities of ‘the hostiles’ with weapons nefariously ‘gifted’. And in the passages dealing with anything British, the solecisms are thick upon the ground. Mountbatten is a sufficiently central character that it is a pity for Akbar to inform us
that he was always known as Dicky and not ‘Dickie’, as he himself invariably wrote it. And there are many others of a similar degree of unimportance. Furthermore, I have never read a book which so cried out for pictures, and which has none. I longed, for instance, to be able to look at one of Motilal Nehru - which is a tribute to the strength of the narrative. Indeed there are times when Akbar himself seems to be referring to and describing his own non-existent illustrations. Were they in the Indian edition, but could not be afforded in the enterprise culture of modern Britain?
Cecil Parkinson
This is based on a 1992 Observer review of Lord Parkinson’s memoirs, Right at the Centre (Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
This Book is to me a disappointment. I thought it might provide a companion volume to the rich delights of the memoirs with which Lord Young of Graffham marked the completion of the economic miracle of the 1980s and his own decline into silence. However, Lord Parkinson is a much better politician than was Lord Young, and is not similarly addicted to strangulated jargon. As a result this is quite a good although intensely political book, with nothing much in it for those who are not enthralled by how Michael Portillo became ‘a deservedly popular minister’ or how ‘Eric Ward, our excellent Central Office agent in Yorkshire’ rearranged the order of a meeting so that Parkinson could hasten back down the motorway ‘with headlights on at full speed’ (but it was all legal, for the boys in blue were part of the plot) to be at Margaret Thatcher’s side within two hours.
There is, as might be expected, a great deal of Lady Thatcher in the book, and indeed Parkinson straightforwardly sums up his life as having been ‘a Thatcherite ministerial career’. He begins with fifty pages on her downfall, which moves him, with the literary assistance of Lord McAlpine, into the poetry of a Chinese proverb about ‘dragons in shallow waters being the sport of shrimps’.
Then we have forty pages that cover everything from the author’s birth in 1931 to his entry into active Conservative politics a third of a century later. He began in the small railway junction town of Carnforth (where Gladstone was anxious to discover the politics of the stationmaster after the Queen’s famous en clair telegram on the murder of Gordon - ‘these news are too dreadful’ - had passed through that functionary’s hands). Parkinson does not tell us about this, being more concerned in those days with his membership of the Labour League of Youth than with high Victorian politics. He writes frankly and well about this period, although he allows his parents to remain very shadowy figures.
In 1952, having just attended as a Bevanite supporter the most blood-letting of all Labour Party Conferences at Morecambe, he went to Cambridge, and during three years in that university underwent an unexplained transformation from slightly truculent left-winger to excessively clean-cut runner and glee-singer who was happy to become a management trainee with the Metal Box Company. From there he elided into being a City accountant, a member of the Hertfordshire bourgeoisie, and a natural and neighbourly Conservative activist.
The rest of the book, except for a rather dignified six pages (‘manly’ is the faintly mocking adjective which I cannot get out of my mind) about his parental and matrimonial troubles, is all politics, and politics seen very much from the level of the plain and not from the high peaks of questioning thought.
It is autobiography by manifesto, with party conferences (not the fratricide of Morecambe, which is left far behind, but the black ties of the Conservative agents’ dinner and the gratifying embarrassment of the standing ovations) erected into stations of the cross. It was Blackpool that made him in 1981 when he had become party chairman, but it was also Blackpool that was the scene of his breaking in 1983, when he honourably and quickly decided that he should not go on as a liability to Mrs Thatcher. And 1990 at Brighton - ‘my final speech to a party conference’ - was sufficiently l’ultima lacrima that it required extensive quotation, rarely a good recipe for memoirs.
The interesting question that remains is what was it that turned Cecil Parkinson, the railwayman’s left-wing son from Lancashire, into the most perfectly attuned to the Home Counties machine politics of the Conservative Party of any of his contemporaries. He notes with faint worry that Willie Whitelaw, whom he half admires, hated being chairman of the party, whereas he loved it. (Rab Butler also disliked it, but he is a bit outside Parkinson’s historical sweep.) And it must be stressed that Parkinson did not, in my view, love the Conservative Party because he could not find anything else to love or any other role to perform successfully. The evidence from this book as from elsewhere suggests that he was a competent departmental minister, a bit dogged by dogma, but not more.
Parkinson’s nearest rival for Conservative Associations’ favourite of the decade was, I suppose, the man whom he constantly proclaims as his friend, Norman Tebbit. Yet Tebbit, more abrasive, more original and, in a curious way, more intellectual than Parkinson, is not really the man for leafy suburban garden fêtes in the way that is Parkinson. Tebbit is to be wheeled out occasionally for big and rough jobs, but not to be wasted. He is of course Essex man in a way that Parkinson is not. But while Essex man may be alleged to have provided the marginal votes of Thatcherism it is Hertfordshire man who has the more central position on the M25 and is cosier for the chairmen, the treasurers and the ladies’ sections.
Politics have moved on, and Cecil Parkinson has not been so narrowly confined that he cannot enjoy the Bahamas, golf and skiing. Nevertheless, his book reminds me of a forty-year-old story of a politically obsessed Labour MP who on a delegation visit to Switzerland was shown a breathtaking view of the Matterhorn and said, ‘Ee, I wouldn’t like to go canvassing up there.’
Parkinson’s canvassing days and indeed his conferencing roller coaster days of triumph and setback are as much over as are mine. But I think he will have a niche in history that will have nothing to do with his troubles. He may well look in retrospect as quintessential a figure of the 1980s as was, say, George Brown of the 1960s or Selwyn Lloyd of the 1950s.
Enoch Powell
The Lives of Enoch Powell by Patrick Cosgrave (The Bodley Head), reviewed by me in the Observer in April 1989.
The Central thesis of a 1989 biography of Enoch Powell is that he alone and single-handed determined the results of two general elections: by his last-minute endorsement of Conservatism in 1970 he created the Heath Government, and by his anti-European ‘vote Labour’ speech in the February 1974 campaign he snatched away the power that he had reluctantly given and allowed Wilson his ‘tit-for-tat with Teddy Heath’.
Hyperbole apart, this is an odd claim in a hagiographic biography, for these were the two most perverse and deleterious election results in recent British history. In 1970 Labour deserved to win and it would have been better both for its future as a party of government and for British interests in Europe had it done so. In 1974, by contrast, Labour did not deserve to win, Harold Wilson had little idea what to do with his victory once he had achieved it, and the course was set for both the weak leadership and the trade union excesses of the late 1970s which between them destroyed one of the two best instruments of left-of-centre government in the world (the other was the Brandt/Schmidt SPD) since Roosevelt’s Democratic Party.
All this can of course be given some teleological justification by saying that it was a necessary vale of sorrows on the way to the sunny uplands of Thatcherism. But this will not wholly do, for Mr Powell is by no means a strict enough Thatcherite, and I am not sure that Mr Cosgrave is either.
However, Enoch Powell’s role as an architect of misfortune is not nearly as strong as Cosgrave presents it, not because the misfortunes did not occur, but because he was far less in control than this implies. His key 1970 speech did not take place until thirty-six hours before the poll, and it was for him in unusually convoluted terms. It requires a great deal of faith in the immanent power of every word of the hero to believe that these late words bestowed victory on Mr Heath. I think two jumbo jets in the May trade figures had more to do with it. And the most that Po
well did was to cease during that campaign to be quite as much of a nuisance to Heath as he had been during the latter’s not very skilful five years as leader of the opposition.
In 1974 Powell’s ‘vote Labour’ appeal was at least delivered so as to leave a little more time for it to sink in, and there was certainly something very odd that happened at the end of the campaign to Conservative expectations, particularly in the West Midlands. But there was a mismatch between Powell’s power and his objective. His power sprang from the populist nature of his views on immigration. But he could not in his right mind have wished to shift votes to Labour on that issue. Heath might be bad from this point of view, but Wilson was worse. What made him want to move votes was the European issue, where his conviction was passionate but based on abstract and highly intellectualized views about sovereignty and the nature of national identity.
Inevitably there was some difficulty about using the shovel for a task different from the purpose for which it had been made. In any event he was markedly unsuccessful a year later in persuading Tories to vote ‘no’ in the European referendum. I find it difficult to believe that they had found it easier a year earlier to accept his still more jolting advice to vote Labour on the issue.
The paradox of Cosgrave’s book is that he is better on Enoch Powell as an extraordinary and interesting man than he is upon him as a politician. It is a paradox because the author is a devout political follower who is prepared to defend even the most perverse of his subject’s swoops as being yet another example of his ‘logic and honour’, while he appears to find some of his personal idiosyncrasies as mysterious as do others.
