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Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
When the news came in March 2010 that one of the best loved,
most admired but also most feared members of the House of Lords, Baroness Park
of Monmouth, had died, there was a general mourning and not just in the House
but also among the many people who had known, worked with or just sat and
talked to Daphne Park over many years. These were people who had known her in
the Service, naturally, and in the various sister Services (I recall meeting a
Canadian former agent once who sent her all sorts of good wishes from the
Mounties), people in various organizations to which she contributed whenever
she could, people who had known her in Oxford and people who had met her and
been overwhelmed by her knowledge, her history, personality and that impossible
to define quality, charm.
I blogged about her at the time of her death and her funeral. I tried to convey my affection and admiration for that great lady as well as the laughter that her stories generated (when it was not sheer terror).
The fact that she had been an important British agent
(not a spy, if you please), rising to the position of Controller/Western
Hemisphere before she retired from MI6 (SIS) was also fairly well known, as she
had given interviews to a number of carefully chosen journalists and told tales
to equally carefully chosen friends and acquaintances. According to Paddy Hayes, Daphne Park's biographer, some people, including her secretary and
assistant of many years’ standing, regarded this with disapproval and there is
some doubt as to whose idea all this publicity was. Daphne insisted that when some
journalist let the cat out of the bag years after she had retired, senior SIS
officers suggested that she should give those interviews; Paddy Hayes thinks it
was her idea.
Whoever thought of it, the scheme was hugely successful:
Baroness Park, the charming elderly lady with her firm and strongly expressed
opinions, work in the House of Lords and her undeniable charm was the best
possible advertisement for the Service, who could pretend in an oblique sort of
way that a number of women had risen to the top or near it, a lie indirect, if
ever there was one. Furthermore, Daphne never revealed more than she knew had
been agreed on, as one can see from the various articles and interviews: they
tend to repeat the same information, much of it reasonably well known with just
the added savour of her personal experience, so far as she would talk about it.
In private conversations or talks given to private organizations she tended to
tell the most wonderful and exciting stories. I was privileged (as I said
above) to be one of the recipients. She would swoop down on me when she felt
like it in the corridors of the House of Lords where I had disconsolately
collected some documents I had to read and write about, and announce that I
would probably like a whisky. Of course, I did. Ensconced with a drink she
would turn to me and say “I think you might be interested in my stay in Moscow (or Hanoi
or DR Congo).” Off went her tales, all carefully shorn of any really secret
information, but fascinating nevertheless.
The SIS (or MI6) are notoriously secretive about their
history though some details do slip out. Paddy Hayes found it quite difficult
to unearth really detailed information about Daphne Park
Daphne Park’s life story from her childhood in Tanganyika
through her education in England, service in the SOE during the war (together
with all the problems she had because of her stubbornness) and subsequent
career in SIS where she seems to have served in some of the most difficult and
interesting places, is of such interest that even a dull writer cannot make it
otherwise and Paddy Hayes is far from being a dull writer. The book bowls along
despite the clichés and the padding. Nevertheless, with the difficulty of
information gathering and reliance on personal memories, often internally
censored, unanswered questions abound. Did Daphne go down to Odessa
and Sevastopol to find out whether the Soviets
were planning to intervene in the Suez
crisis? She said yes and a number of historians have repeated that, her closest
colleague of the time says no. Did she run agents in Hanoi and if so, how on earth did she manage
it? No evidence seems available. What on earth was she doing in Ulan Bator ? Was Marine
Captain Douglas de Witt Bazata really the great love of her life? Hayes asserts
this several times but produces no evidence, not even gossip. To what extent
was she personally involved in the civil war that erupted in the Congo after
independence and in the gruesome arrest and murder of Patrice Lumumba? Some of
the answers to the last one could have been discovered through the American
Freedom of Information Act but Hayes decided not to go down that path. The
story he recounts is not substantially different from the one I read in my
childhood in Soviet and East European newspapers.
Daphne was also involved in the negotiations with Rhodesia ’s Ian Smith after UDI that led to the
establishment of Zimbabwe .
I am not sure she did not regret her role in it though it had grown out of her friendship
with a number of East African leaders, as she fought ferociously in the House
of Lords to help Zimbabwean dissidents, oppositionists to Robert Mugabe’s
bloody rule and refugees.
Queen of Spies is
the first biography of Baroness
Park
Paddy Hayes: Queen of Spies
Daphne Park, Britain’s Cold War Spy Master
Duckworth Overlook 2015
[This is based on a review that will appear in the next issue of the Salisbury Review.]
A number of Mr Miliband's supporters tried to pooh-pooh Disraeli's claims to being the first (and, so far, the only) Jewish Prime Minister of Britain by pointing out that he had been baptized at the age of 12 and was, in fact, a practising Anglican later in life. That is so but then Ed Miliband is a practising socialist atheist and it is highly unlikely that he has ever participated in Jewish religious ceremonies unless he thought he could get some kind of a political advantage from such participation. In that respect that would be no different from him participating in, as it were, Sikh religious ceremonies, or Hindu or Muslim.
So, it is down to race and ethnicity, according to which Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield was most definitely Jewish. Indeed, as he rose in the political sphere, he became the target of numerous attacks that now we would call anti-Semitic though the expression itself was first used after his death. Some of those attacks came from Liberal politicians, journalists and historians, including Mr Gladstone himself.
Did Disraeli perceive himself as a Jew? Was he at all interested in the Jewish question? Was his policies influenced by his race as many of the accusations proclaimed? David Cesarani asks these questions in the latest biography of Disraeli. (Alas, he died at the very early age of 58 and did not see the book's publication.)
The book is part of a series published by Yale University Press, Jewish Lives, and the author begins by asking "Does Benjamin Disraeli deserve a place in a series of books called Jewish Lives?" He comes to the conclusion that he does for various reasons not just because he was born a Jew and rose higher than any other in British politics. His analysis follows Disraeli's life and looks at his books, novels and his biography of Lord George Bentinck, his colleague in the destruction of Sir Robert Peel and, let us be honest, the Tory Party.
Cesarani looks at Disraeli's family, his early life, his cavalier attitude to other people's money and the distrust felt for him by many in British politics and society. The distrust, he concludes, had more to do with Disraeli's rackety life, his debts and his various affairs. He was seen as foreign and exotic but, thinks Professor Cesarani, his Jewishness was largely subsumed in that. The first attack on him as a Jew came from Daniel O'Connell during the Taunton by-election of 1835. The attack wounded but many commentators felt that O'Connell had overstepped the marks of decency.
It was not till later in Disraeli's career that the various slurs became stronger, culminating in the ferocious attacks during the whole of the crisis of 1876 - 78 from which he emerged as the man who had won a great victory for Britain without firing a single shot or endangering a single life. That he is emerged as such for most people and, certainly, for the Conservative Party but not for all. Gladstone continued to fulminate; other Liberal writers pronounced that Disraeli's policy was not in Britain's interest but in the interest of the vaguely describe international Jewish conspiracy who naturally sided with the Turk.
In fact, Disraeli's policy, be that the purchase of the Khedive's shares in the Suez canal (on a loan from the Rothschilds, which was seen as particularly sinister, but no one else would have been able to come up with the money and the interest they received was no higher than usual) or the tortuous effort to prevent Russia from acquiring too much influence in the Balkans, let alone get to the Straits and Constantinople, was motivated by his desire to protect and aggrandize the British Empire. He could not understand why other people, for instance Gladstone, could not see this. How could the Liberal leader not realize that Russia was not in the slightest interested in the welfare of the Christians in the Ottoman Balkans but wanted to use them to push forward to the Straits and Constantinople? (One cannot help recognizing certain themes in the debates about Russia that have continued to be argued over ferociously to the present day.)
When it came to Jewish affairs Disraeli tended to drag his feet. He rarely intervened for Jews in other countries and was little more than a lukewarm fighter for their political rights in this one. He did support, more or less, Lionel de Rothschild in his struggle to be allowed to take his oath in the House of Commons without using the words "as a Christian" but the Rothschilds considered him unreliable despite their eventual close friendship and their support after Mary-Anne's death.
When one looks at Disraeli's writings a somewhat puzzling picture emerges on the subject of his attitude to Jews and Judaism. He was, in some ways, fascinated by it all but without showing the slightest interest in the history or politics. The early novels do not even refer to Jews. Later Jewish characters appeared, usually elderly wise men who "understood" the reality of the world in a way nobody else did. Sometimes there were plot lines that involved ideas of a Jewish revival in the East but these never came to anything.
If one were to try to summarize Disraeli's rather convoluted and, let us be frank, mushy attitude to the Jewish Question, one would have to list these points. Jews ought to have the same rights as Christians because it is clear that, Christianity starting as a Jewish sect, the two were inseparable and it is wrong to try to do so. This rather conveniently by-passed the liberal argument for Jewish emancipation, as that was based on questions of equality and individual rights, concepts Disraeli loathed.
He came up with the wildest theories about Semitic, Germanic and Anglo races but was convinced and repeated this at every possible opportunity that the world is divided according to some racial theory and this gave the Jews and the Anglos a great advantage. This was a particularly unfortunate as many of those who attacked him used his own so-called theories against him. Indeed, both Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the creator of modern racial theory, and Hitler quoted Disraeli to support their own sayings. When one adds to that Disraeli's propensity to explain that there is a cabal behind all world events, run largely by Jews, one can see that his influence was oddly harmful to Jews in the twentieth century.
David Cesarani comes close to saying that it was largely Disraeli's fault that the modern lethal anti-Semitism was born and grew with such rapidity at the end of the nineteenth century. That is, surely, somewhat unfair. The likelihood is that it would have existed and battened on other historic events without Disraeli's melodramatic novels and peculiar biography of his friend. The tracing of Disraeli's attitude to Jews and other people's attitude to him as a Jew is, on the other hand, an important part of the story both Disraeli's and that of modern British politics.
Certainly Benjamin Disraeli deserves to be in this series of biographies as long as nobody thinks that this is all that matters about him. Cesarani's book ends on a rather tragic note with Disraeli losing his grip on politics and dying while under constant anti-Semitic attacks. But by this time he was seen as the creator of the modern Conservative Party and a statesman of world-wide fame. A year after his death he was honoured beyond any other Prime Minister through Primrose Day and, subsequently, the Primrose League. He remains the one against whom party leaders, mostly but not exclusively Conservative, measure themselves. He is also the one about whom biographies pour out every year. This is a fine contribution to the genre, fascinating, knowledgeable and lightly written, but there will be many more.
David Cesarani: Disraeli
The Novel Politician
2016 Yale University Press
It is hard to agree with that judgement: it underestimates Christie whose work was a great deal more interesting than just a series of mechanical plots and puts Tey into a category she does not belong to, that is the tough guy Chandleresque thriller writer. To be fair to Ms Henderson, she is not the first to voice that opinion but it is wrong, whoever says it. There can be no possible parallel between Inspector Alan Grant or any other of Tey's detectives and, say, Philip Marlowe, though it is true that Tey's books are more concerned with characters than plots, some of which are a little weak.
It has been an accepted theory for some time that Elizabeth Mackintosh who wrote as Gordon Daviot and as Josephine Tey was a particularly mysterious and private personality about whom virtually nothing was known. There had been books about her work and a collection of essays about her in general but Jennifer Morag Henderson's Josephine Tey - A Life is the first full-length biography and many revelations were promised. (Catherine Aird, herself a leading detective novelist, has been promising her own biography of Tey for some years but it has not appeared so far though there have been articles and essays by her and Ms Henderson has relied on them to a considerable degree.)
The new biography is fascinating, not least in that it destroys the myth of the very private Josephine Tey. In a way, the myth was always just that. After all, how many times can people insist that readers of Tey's better known books have no idea that she was also Gordon Daviot, a highly successful playwright and moderately successful novelist between the wars and during World War II when every single edition of, say The Franchise Affair or The Daughter of Time (the two most popular ones) mentions this fact? In The Daughter of Time there is even a reference to Daviot's best known play, Richard of Bordeaux.
It turns out that Beth Mackintosh who, according to her great friend Caroline Ramsden, used the different names with different friends, had a number of them and kept in touch with such people as Dodie Smith, John Gielgud, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, James Bridie as well as her sisters and at least one friend from Anstey College where she had trained to be a PE teacher. The letters are available in various collections as are notes Beth Mckintosh made and correspondence between her and her publishers and agents. Ms Henderson seems to have tracked down every piece of evidence about her subject wherever it happens to have been, collated it all and made a fascinating story out of it. Anyone who is interested in Josephine Tey, in life in Scotland in the thirties and forties and the world of English and Scottish theatre should read this book. They will not regret it - there is so much material there.
On the other hand, one must admit that there are also problems with it. Firstly, the style is clunky and full of unnecessary modern jargon. Tey herself was a brilliant and witty stylist and it is a pity that her biographer cannot come even close to it. Secondly, there is a great deal of padding and repetition - trite comments about the First World War, repeated assurances that Tey was a complex personality and kept her family and her friends apart, pages on the growth of Scottish nationalism with which she had nothing to do - all this is unnecessary when the real story is so interesting.
Finally, those mysteries. Ms Henderson found out that Gordon Daviot was busy during the Second World War, writing short stories and short plays that were broadcast by the BBC, something, as she rightly and indignantly points out, the Corporation should not have lost track of. There is also the curious fact of the third nom-de-plume, F. Craigie Howie, used only once for a play, Cornelia, produced by the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre soon after the war. Apparently only two people knew the real identity of the author, Beth Mackintosh herself and James Bridie and neither revealed it so how it became known is not clear.
The link with Hollywood is spurious and consists of a single event when Gordon Daviot, a then successful dramatist, was asked to produce a script for a film. She did not go to Hollywood but wrote the script at home; it was then sent off and re-written several times by other authors as was the custom. She was not credited though the most recent list on IMDB does give the name of Josephine Tey as one of the contributors. By no stretch of the imagination can this be called experiencing Hollywood.
Finally, those young men she is supposed to have romances with and who are supposed to have a great influence on her. Some of this comes from Catherine Aird who relies on vague reminiscences by one Beth Mackintosh's sisters. Ms Henderson discusses the likelihood of some kind of an affair with a young Scottish officer, Gordon Barber, supposedly the source of the name in Gordon Daviot, who was killed at the Somme and who had kept a diary, which does not mention Beth, and comes to no conclusions. It might have been him she remembered and mourned, it might have been another young officer, Alfred Trevanion Powell or it might have been someone completely different. One cannot help wondering whether it might not have been merely an idealized young man.
The supposed brief post war affair with Hugh Patrick Fraser McIntosh who died of TB in 1927 is presented as a fact with no supporting evidence at all, beyond the fact that Josephine Tey used the name Patrick in several books and quoted one of McIntosh's poems in To Love and Be Wise. Well, maybe. The book is given to presenting a number of "would have beens" and "might have beens" and "probablys" as facts and that is irritating in the extreme.
There really is no need for any of that. The book is based on detailed and meticulous research and presents a fascinating portrait of a very good and many-faceted writer who will no longer be hidden by rather spurious mythology. For all of that we must thank Jennifer Morag Henderson.
Jennifer Morag Henderson: Josephine Tey - A Biography
2015 Sandstone Press, Ross-shire
Let us turn, instead, to the Thatcher premiership before that assassination; let us turn to the beginning when everything seemed to be going wrong and yet she managed to impose her authority on the party and the government.
There has already been a reference on this blog to Kwasi Kwarteng's book about those crucial six months from Geoffrey Howe's budget of March 1981 to the party conference (oh happy days when there was only one of those a year) of October 1981 in Blackpool. The book is topped and tailed by a chapter by a Portrait of a Lady and an Epilogue that takes us to the summer of 1983 and the triumph of that year's election. Mr Kwarteng acknowledges that the Argentinian junta did Margaret Thatcher a favour by its invasion of the Falklands but also acknowledges that the landslide of 1983 was not occasioned solely by the Falklands war, which is unlikely to have been fought by any other Prime Minister, in any case.
The six months in question were eventful: the March budget, now seen as the foundation of Thatcherite economic policy that eventually turned the country round, was attacked on all sides, including the Conservative. Among other derisory descriptions it was characterized as one that gave no hope to the young and the unemployed, often by the politicians and economists who had brought the country to the economic crisis. which necessitated the budget.
Those six months also saw the death of Bobby Sands, the Sinn Fein MP, and other hunger strikers in the Maze, riots in Toxteth, Brixton, Moss Side and one or two other areas as well as a split in the Labour Party, which could have resulted in a genuine social-democratic party that might have been victorious in 1983. But it did not do so.
Thatcher's Trial goes through the various events in great detail, something that even a hefty three-volume biography cannot do but there is a problem with it all: one gets the distinct impression that Mr Kwarteng dislikes Margaret Thatcher and would like to side with her various opponents, particularly the wet grandees she eventually got rid of. It is of them that he writes with affection and admiration and it is of her that he is rather dismissive.
We hear a great deal about her "uncomplicated" attitude, her very simple religion, her continuing behaviour as if she were a prize-winning grammar school girl (Mr Kwartend is, as we all know, an Old Etonian), her black and white attitude to the world, which is a complicated and delicately shaded affair.
It is not entirely clear why saying that the riots were a matter of law and order and criminal behaviour is rather simplistic and worthy of disdain, whereas saying that spending more government money was politically astute, subtle and complex.
Nor can one be all that impressed by Mr Kwarteng's sympathetic attitude to the various opponents of Geoffrey Howe's budget because they were people who cared about the social fabric of the country. Those riots could not have been caused by the less than two years of the Thatcher government. Even David Owen wrote about the problems that had accumulated for twenty years though he seems to have forgotten that for more than half of that period there was a Labour government and towards the end he was part of that. The social fabric of the country had worn very thin, indeed, by 1979 under the great care of those who were wringing their hands at Thatcher's "cruelty" and "uncompromising hardness".
The same applies to the problems of Northern Ireland, inherited by Thatcher from three of her predecessors. Even the rule to which the Maze prisoners objected to and, which pushed them into those hunger strikes had been put into place by the Labour government.
The truth is that Thatcher was faced with a very difficult situation and had to take very difficult decisions. Had some of her predecessors who allegedly cared so much about that social fabric, were more subtle and did not take a supposedly uncomplicated attitude she had imbibed with her Methodism taken some of those decisions, those early months of her government (as well as the later struggle with the unions) would have been very different.
She was, however, lucky in her opponents from the "wets" in her own party to the Argentinian junta, from the outdated and increasingly extreme Labour party to the incompetent Social-Democrats. Even Arthur Scargill played it all wrong but one cannot really blame him: he thought he was still dealing with her complex, politically subtle. intellectually broad-minded (or so Mr Kwarteng will have us believe) predecessors.
If one can put up with the author's rather unexpected attitude to his subject one finds a great deal of interest in the book. Mr Kwarteng has done his research and has shaped it into a very interesting, fluent account. Higher praise one cannot give.
Kwasi Kwarteng: Thatcher's Trial
Six Months That Defined A Leader
2015 Bloomsbury, London
The book I have just finished is of a lesser breed: it is called Movable Feasts by Arnold Palmer and deals with the changing times of various meals, especially breakfast and dinner and with the slow introduction of lunch or luncheon (originally nuncheon) and afternoon tea into the timetable.
The book, written and published in the fifties is charming and often informative but suffers from that playful coyness that we can find in a good many books on food of that period despite the efforts of such writers as Elizabeth David, Patience Gray and others. There are, however, some interesting facts culled from letters, diaries and works of fiction from the 1780s to the First World War in the way the timing of various meals moved, sometimes later, sometimes earlier.
As the author explains, mostly his account is of the aristocracy and the gentry, with some interpolation of city gents and businessmen because, on the whole, we know more about them (though, as it happens, the timetable of working classes, farmers and even farm labourers is not unknown).
The book was reprinted in 1984 with an introduction by David Pocock that consisted of some comments about post-fifties eating habits and possible future developments. We can always assume that any predictions for the future are going to be wrong and Mr Pocock's are no exception. How could he possibly have known the interest in more traditional food, the growth of local food shops and of farmers' markets and, on the other hand, the development of luxury and complex convenience foods? One cannot really blame him for that.
What I did find slightly odd was the information he received from his Mass-Observation correspondents on which he based his own observations. Because these were observations sent in by various individuals they could never give an adequate picture but they are strange, nevertheless. According to these observations, people had stopped eating lunch, subsisting on a diet of tea and biscuits. The seventies and eighties were the heyday of the big business lunches but, presumably, people who indulged in them did not send in reports to Mass-Observations. But even people who were not in the business lunch category must recall the sandwich shops and their queues, the boxes of packed lunch that one took to work and the cups of soup one bought from various shops. Lunch at one's desk did not consist of nothing but biscuits. It consisted of sandwiches, maybe salads, soup, tea or coffee and it was eaten at the desk in order to have time to do something else when going out for a lunch break.
Mr Pocock also talks of the demise of the afternoon tea. While it rarely exists in its full glory at people's homes, it never really died out in various hotels and restaurants. In the last couple of decades it has had a great revival with every hotel, restaurant, cafe, especially museum cafes competing with each other in the production of afternoon tea (sandwiches, scones and cakes) or cream tea (just scones with jam and cream) plus a far greater variety of beverages than our ancestors could imagine.
It is Mr Palmer in the main body of the book who mentions another disappearance, that of muffins. They were not to be found anywhere in the British Isles in his day. Well he would be pleased now: muffins are available in every bakery and every supermarket. Their return was, I suspect, via the American brunch in which "English muffins" play an integral part.
Predictions are always difficult and should not really be indulged in by people who write about history; they should know that the past does not predict the future and, in any case, when it comes to food, names of meals and their times, the changes in the various centuries have been so great that it would be foolhardy to make a decision what to use as a basis for a prediction.
I would have wished fewer references to Henry James and some to Saki, who is a mine of information about lunches in the Edwardian years and who actually has a highly entertaining story called Tea. The story contains several different items of interest. We find out that 4.30 was the sacred hour of tea in all good houses and it usually involved a good deal of silver and porcelain as well as tinkling laughter on the part of the hostess; that even a young lady who was living on her own had tea at that hour but it may well have been a "picnic tea" in the kitchen; most interestingly, though, we find out that such a young lady, though from a good family, who had to work for a living, creating couture hats, could still afford caviare for tea.
Or what of Harold Nicolson's delightful essay Edwardian Weekend in his 1926 collection Some People? There could be no doubt in any reader's mind of the importance of afternoon tea or any other meal to the Edwardians. In fact, the only conundrum faced by anyone who read that essay is the possible state of those people's stomachs and livers.
Sadly, Arnold Palmer does not refer either to Saki or Nicolson but he culls many interesting bits of information from Dickens (naturally, since it is food), from Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen as well as the tiresome Henry James.
He also has several stories of his own childhood memories and of memories of people older than himself who could recall late nineteenth and early twentieth century habits. Undoubtedly, these memories constitute the most amusing part of the book and the most informative.
Well yes, another book about Disraeli and this one actually addresses the question as to why there are so many of them around. How does the mythology of Dizzy agree with the reality of Disraeli the politician and how did the former manage to take such a hold of the Conservative politicians (and others, including most recently, the leader of the Labour Party) and of historians of the period, including someone so very non-Conservative as Dick Leonard? (I note that the Conservative History Journal blog has mentioned Disraeli twenty times, which is a nice round number and does not take into account the various articles that have been published in the Journal itself over the years.)
This is an undoubtedly clever and witty book, what with that sub-title echoed in the chapter headings such as Christian and Jew, Doer or Dreamer?, Men and Women, Friends and Foes and others that appear to be oxymorons: Tory Democracy and Progressive Conservative. It goes through the biography in a tight fashion but manages to get most of the details in, even to dispel a few myths, some started by the great man himself some by others. But the real theme of the book remains that curious dichotomy between the reality of a politician who had very few principles though a number of romantic ideals and the astonishing image of the man who is seen as the progenitor of just about every Conservative political idea one can name.
Did Disraeli ever talk of One Nation Conservatism? Certainly not. He did not even support it. He wrote about the Two Nations but he did not actually object to it; he merely thought that there could be an ideal society in England in which the "two nations" could live in harmony and vaguely envisaged some form of a feudal structure that would create such a society.
Did he believe in protectionism as his followers in the great fight of the 1840s against Sir Robert Peel and the repeal of the Corn Laws did? Most certainly not and, to be fair, nor did he ever say so. When he became Prime Minister in the midst of a deep agricultural depression he refused to bring back any protectionist measures, realizing all too well how disastrous that would be for the party in electoral terms. His main complaint about Peel was that he had betrayed the party in the sense of changing his policies (free trade was not the first one) without consulting the members. This was a novel idea in British politics and, to a great extent, we can date the importance of well organized parties, as something to admire and something to deprecate from Disraeli. Curiously enough, though the authors mention this, they do not make too much of it when summing up Dizzy's achievements.
The historian John Charmley, has described Disraeli as the presiding genius of political spin doctors and the very existence of the mythology long after the immediate posthumous effect, the Primrose League(postings here and here) had disappeared from sight, would indicate the correctness of that analysis.
This book comes to a not dissimilar conclusion:
This in the end was Disraeli's great achievement. He may not have reformed the nature of British society. He may not have transformed our standing overseas. But he did make politics interesting and engaging, including for those with no vote. As one contemporary observed, 'I never listened to a speech of yours without thinking, this word, this sentence, will be remembered a hundred years hence.' This was indeed the true magnetism of Disraeli. It is the reason why successive generations of politicians are drawn to him. if we look in his career for solid achievement we shall be disappointed. But if we want something to raise our game, Disraeli is the man.Sadly, that last sentence demonstrates that even this well-written book, despite the many semi-slangy and often coy expressions, falls a long way short of Disraeli's own ability to communicate, while politicians of the day may refer to the great man but remain dull and pedestrian in their very references, let alone other speeches.
Douglas Hurd and Edward Young: Disraeli or The Two Lives
2013, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London
An extraordinary amount of excitement and patriotic fervour was erupting around me as I was reading Peter Whittle’s Being British – What’s Wrong With It?. Team GB (an expression that would have been guaranteed to bring nausea to any right-thinking or, for that matter, left-thinking of the old school person before the vocabulary of Cool Britannia permeated public discourse) was winning medals. All doubts about the pharaonic and overweening arrogance that created the mega-farce of the London Olympics for which we shall be paying for decades to come have been dispelled, at least momentarily. Britain was winning medals and nothing else could possibly matter. One person on another forum jubilantly wrote about the first couple of gold medals “because we are GREAT Britain” as if that was the definition of this country’s greatness.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, what a peculiar position sport occupies in our political and social consciousness. As far as sport is concerned all the virtues, so eloquently extolled by Peter Whittle in his book, that have been abandoned or made to seem embarrassing, become acceptable. People are allowed to wave flags and cheer their country (though some problems arise with people who appear to think that certain sportsmen and women are Scottish if they win and British if they lose). Even the BBC joins in.
There is another difference: for a short time the people who are presented as heroes and role models are not vacuous celebrities but people who have, necessarily, kept the old virtues of hard work, self-discipline and aspiration. This will not last. Soon we shall go back to endless gossip about celebrities, including loutish footballers, and the accepted “virtues” of instant gratification and celebrity for no apparent reason. Of course, Olympic medal winners are not particularly useful as role models in another way: very few people can achieve those standards. If we do want children and young people to aspire to achievement we need to present them with models they can emulate with some hope of success.
The cult of celebrity is not particularly new as a swift reading of past publications can tell us but as Peter Whittle points out, its overwhelming importance that excludes and dismisses the more traditional virtues that allowed people to achieve things in life is something new and immensely harmful to several generations of children in this country who find themselves unable to compete either with their coaevals from other countries or from the private educational sector.
Other problems raised in Being British – What’s Wrong With It? are the deliberate destruction by the self-hating political elite of pride in one’s country and one’s culture, the whole idea of multiculturalism related to it, mass immigration that is both cause and effect of it, the dismissal of working class virtues, their destruction through all the above and the overwhelming and rapacious welfare state, and, above all, complete ignorance of the country’s history. Of these I personally consider the last to be the most important. (Well, I would, wouldn’t I?) Not knowing or understanding the past means an inability to understand the present or to imagine a future.
Once or twice I found myself vigorously shaking my head in disagreement. For instance, history tells one that riots were a reasonably frequent part of English life till late in the nineteenth century as was criminality. All too often when Britishness is invoked the reference is to a relatively short period of around 100 – 120 years from around 1820 to the beginning of the Second World War, when the state took over the running of people’s lives, never properly letting go again and stifling all the many very good qualities that those people possessed. Nor am I impressed by any sentimental feeling towards the 1950s. A swift look at the films and books of the period will show a decade of greyness and depression despite the political hype (for how else would one describe Harold Macmillan’s famous comment about never having so good and one of net emigration. People did not simply talk about wishing to leave as they appear to do now according to the author of Being British but actually did so in large numbers.
Nevertheless, the main argument of the books is entirely accurate. Britain has created many good things in the country and in the world though often those who did the creating were the ones who found many of the solid British virtues tiresome and stifling, a curious contradiction noted by George Orwell many years ago, but those achievements have been deliberately denied and belittled by a weird self-hating elite. The people of the country have been deprived of their history, of their pride and self-respect. Given that this is a country and a culture that has been admired and emulated across the world (though not the NHS) it is strange and disturbing to see its denigration at home.
However, Peter Whittle (who is, incidentally, a good friend as well as the Director of the New Culture Forum) sees many causes for hope. The future might be brighter than the immediate past. People seem to be refusing to knuckle under: they remain stubbornly proud of their country and its achievements, they want to learn about its history and they are waking up to the importance and necessity of all that has been taken away from them. Let me recommend this book to anyone who is perturbed by what has been going on and would like to see the hopeful signs to develop into something more lasting.
Dr Harshan Kumarasingham, the
Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Potsdam and a past
contributor to the Conservative History Journal, gives his views on Edward
Heath and Philip Ziegler’s biography.
Edward Heath did not emerge, but was elected as leader of the
Conservative Party in 1965. The new
leader was young, experienced, and progressive with strong contacts with the
Parliamentary Party after an effective tenure as Chief Whip. Heath the Grammar school scholarship boy
personified a professional image that was accurately and purposefully
non-patrician. This was the man the
party hoped could beat Harold Wilson at his own game sharing a greater
commonality and image with the electorate than any previous Conservative
leader. Heath could project a ‘modern’
image of someone who had risen through the ranks through ability not nobility. However, expectations of a new age under a
new style of leader were not unanimously idealistic. Heath carried significant pressures as the
new leader of a new era. The Economist reported at the time of
his ascendance as leader a sense of Conservative realism: ‘Mr Heath certainly
carries radical hopes in his baggage.
But in electing him, the Tories have primarily shown their instinct for
power. They picked, by a narrow
majority, the man they reckoned most likely to bullock their way back into
power. They will remain united behind
him just as long as his pursuit of power looks promising.’ The Shadow Cabinet under Heath’s clear
leadership had created a prepared and much publicised programme at Selsdon for
when it returned to power, which seemed to deliver the progressive hopes
envisioned by ‘Rab’ Butler Britain
The rest of the review is here.
