by Roy Jenkins
Lord Young’s book has some virtues as well as faults. He emerges from it as a more and not less attractive character than I had thought him. He writes well about his family background, of his pietistic feeling as a member of an immigrant group, and of pride in his material success without in any way wishing to slough off this background. He is moving on his relations with his equally talented brother, the former chairman of the BBC, who died in 1986. He is also true to his subtitle, ‘A Businessman in the Cabinet’. He may have been thrusting, but to an unusual extent he was interested in the details, often the tedious details, of administering his departments rather than in the higher politics that swirled around the Cabinet table.
This has its disadvantages as well as its advantages. It produces some dull narrative and some odd English. This latter misfortune is partly the result of a stylistic trick of using adjectives as nouns and nouns as adjectives. But it also comes from an addiction to opaque jargon. Although as a minister Lord Young was inordinately interested in presentation and treated his public relations adviser as at least as important as his permanent secretary, I find it difficult to believe that, because of their language, all of his announcements had as much impact as he could have hoped. I am still puzzling over one which he describes as ‘probably as far-reaching as any that I made during my time in Government’. ‘We announced’, he writes, ‘the additional spectrum for the existing cellular telephone service that would serve to relieve congestion within the M25.’ After reading that four times I sympathize with Lord Young’s feelings of ‘culture shock’ which he, again four times, says he experienced on moving to a new job.
He is also cavalier with his spelling of proper names, as indeed he is from time to time with syntax. The British Ambassador in Washington was not called Ackland. Lord Grimond does not spell his Christian name Joe, and the exact whereabouts of that great Brussels building, the Balleymont, escapes me.
Harold Wilson
This was a 1992 Observer review of Harold Wilson by Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins).
Pimlott’s Life of Hugh Dalton, published in 1985, was the most relentlessly penetrating political biography that I can recall. It was in no way a hatchet job. It just turned on the X-ray machine and watched with clinical detachment both the healthy and diseased tissue which was exposed.
It rightly made Pimlott’s reputation. Although he has produced no intermediate full-length biography his subsequent editing of Dalton’s diaries, his various essays and reviews, together with the knowledge that he was working on this major study of Harold Wilson, have given him the status of the foremost Labour biographer. The expectation produced the same frisson of malicious excitement and more charitable apprehension that the news of Francis Bacon being called in to paint a portrait of a vulnerable chairman might, ten years ago, have aroused amongst the directors of a cautious and conventional company.
I therefore approached this book with two questions equally in my mind. First, would it show Pimlott’s reputation to be too high; and second, would it show Wilson’s to have long been too low? On the former point I was quickly reassured. For its first 280 pages (out of 730) I thought this an almost perfectly structured biography. This does not mean that it then (1963, when Wilson became leader of the Labour Party following Gaitskell’s death) goes to pieces. On the contrary, it continues to be fascinating and penetrating in its account of Wilson’s two premierships and of the dispiriting four years that separated them. But there are to my mind (and judging by very high standards) certain faults of construction which appear from this point forward.
Mr Pimlott writes up some issues to an extent that puts them out of proportion. It is not sensible at this stage to give us a 6000-word essay on the details of the Profumo case. This fault reflects itself more seriously in the long penultimate chapter. This is devoted to Wilson’s entanglement with the Security Services and to an analysis of whether this was a factor in his resignation, whether there was anything in the ludicrous allegation that he was a Soviet agent, and what on earth provoked him to blow off to two unknown journalists who produced a sensational book called The Pencourt File and then either to regret what he had done or to lose all interest in the issue. The analysis is done with skill and judgement, but it is none the less an unfortunate wadge to be sitting so near to the end of the book and risks making Pimlott look on a par with the purveyors of sensational investigation, which he most certainly is not.
There are also a few signs of haste towards the end, although some of the unimportant errors of fact come earlier. The few that exist are curiously gratuitous. Very close to a subtle and convincing description of Wilson’s approach to economic planning and the creation of the ill-fated Department of Economic Affairs, Pimlott suddenly informs us (for the second time) that the St Ermin’s Hotel (an old battleground in Labour history) is ‘off the Strand’. It is not. It is behind St James’s Park tube station. It does not matter where it is. However, unnecessary facts, which can have their interest, ought not to be brought in unless you know them. It is as though a great pianist, having gone faultlessly through a most difficult scherzo, suddenly struck a simple chord bang wrong.
These are all fairly minor faults. Pimlott’s reputation survives intact, and is even enhanced. What about Lord Wilson’s? Pimlott’s verdict on him seems to me to be less clear than mine on Pimlott. At the end of the book I was far from certain what he believed, and what he wanted us to believe, about that sure-footed climber to the top of the greasy pole who dominated British politics between Macmillan and Thatcher, and who both won more victories for the Labour Party than any other leader and sowed the seeds of its decline into a party as weak on electability as on a consistent direction of policy.
I do not regard this ambiguity as a biographical fault. It stems from the fact that Pimlott is more anxious to explain than to denounce or to justify. He unravels the complex issues of law and fact like an advocate before a sophisticated supreme tribunal rather than a police court lawyer going for a quick verdict. Thus there is a masterly description of the mixture of scholastic assurance (although within a narrow range of intellectual interest) and social wariness (although cosseted by a small close-knit family of similar tastes and outlook) with which Wilson’s educational career advanced. At his various schools there was a story element of ‘please, teacher, I know the answer’ rather than of the moulding of his mind by easy companionships. At Oxford he flowered into an outstanding academic performer but not into an outstanding University figure. His exact contemporary, Edward Heath, who came from equally quiet beginnings and was less clever, was incomparably better known. Wilson allowed most aspects of Oxford life of the 1930s, from the Union or the Labour Club to excitement with the left-wing poets, or even exploring the then remote continent of Europe, to pass him by. However, he liked his ‘other Oxford’, became a fellow on graduating, was married in his BA gown and in the chapel of Mansfield, the nonconformist college, and would have made his wife happier by settling for life in the city of dreaming spires. Furthermore, Pimlott informs us, he was disappointed when, in 1977, University College (where his fellowship had been) preferred his solicitor, Lord Goodman, to himself as Master.
This admirably captures the half insider/half outsider position that characterized Wilson’s relationship not only with Oxford but with the upper civil service, the Bevanite group, and indeed the British public. Pimlott is anxious to be fair to Wilson, and pays appropriate tribute to his nerve, his kindness, his good manners to colleagues (and to people generally), and to his willingness to undergo personal humiliation in order to hold his party together as an effective instrument of democratic government.
Yet you can almost hear Pimlott changing gear before his favourable passages. None the less I hope and believe that his book will mark an important stage in the recovery of Wilson’s reputation which is already taking place. If I were a dealer in Prime Ministerial shares I would at present buy Wilsons as eagerly as I would sell Majors, although it is of course the case that there is room for
a very sharp recovery in Wilsons before they begin to approach par.
The other thought with which I am left is that subjects who are alive, even if as quietly so as Lord Wilson alas is today, impose certain elusive but real limitations upon their biographers. Ben Pimlott has written a very good biography, but he has not written a definitive one. Philip Ziegler, whose more private-paper-assisted study is due out next year, need not fear that there is nothing more left to say. But even he will be writing with his subject in the wings. There is a lot to be said for allowing the doors of history to slam shut before the biographer gets to work. Widows are difficult enough, as several hopeful chroniclers have found, without having to cope with the living presence, immanent even if not interfering.
1 It should be remembered that this lecture was written in early 1988.
1 Not strictly true; he had lived briefly in Exeter.
1 Writing in 1989, I did not include Governors, which limits the degree of prescience that I can claim.
2 Since this passage was written the Somerville governing body has decided it wishes to become mixed. Lady Margaret Hall has achieved marked success in its mixed status. The number of colleges has increased from thirty-five to thirty-six. And the problems of being a single-sex college in a mixed university have perhaps become more acute.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © Roy Jenkins 1993
First published 1993 by Macmillan London Limited
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ISBN: 9781448203215
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