THE political news story I’ve liked best so far this year is one that appeared in
The Times towards the beginning of the month. Headed “Blair scorned Tory ‘Little Sir Echo’ support for war”, it exposed the disdain the Prime Minister felt — and apparently expressed in private — for the supine support the Tories under Iain Duncan Smith offered for the Iraq war.
Blair didn’t even find it helpful, since the fact that he faced no threat from the Opposition at home rather tied his hands in persuading President Bush to proceed cautiously. He was even alleged to have encouraged Charles Kennedy to get the Liberal Democrats to be more vocal in their opposition to the war, as that would help his negotiating position with Bush.
Kennedy, it is true, subsequently knocked that part of the story on the Today programme — although not wholly convincingly. But what attracted me about the original report was not so much its detail as its flavour. We get any number of accounts of politics as played out formally behind the proscenium arch. What we are seldom presented with is the view as seen from backstage.
Yet there is more, I’ve always thought, of the reality of politics there than in any histrionic drama enacted in front of the footlights. I first became convinced of that when I came across a remark Andrew Bonar Law made to Herbert Henry Asquith at the start of the parliamentary year in 1912. “I am afraid, Mr Asquith,” the dour ScotsCanadian is supposed to have said, “I shall have to show myself very vicious this session — I hope you will understand.”
The remark was quoted by Asquith in his memoirs and has since sometimes been used to illustrate the essential camaraderie of British politics at the top. There may have been a time when that was true, but it has not been the case for some years. The last Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition who genuinely got on together were probably Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson, and that was primarily because they had several traits in common, including a propensity to cheat at politics.
But it isn’t the sentimental — “You know, the great thing about Parliament is that, however rude they have been about each other, they always have a drink together afterwards” — version of the parliamentary pillow fight that I am seeking to evoke here. All I want to show is that the reality of British politics is generally rather different from the actual show that appears on stage.
When you think about it, that must be true. Who, after all, at least in troubled times, is the average backbench MP closest to? It will not be any member of his own party: instead it will be his or her parliamentary “pair” — the MP from the opposite side of the house who acts, in effect, as warder/keeper/nanny, all rolled into one. And yet how often do such arrangements surface in the public domain? The answer is “only when they go wrong” — meaning when someone has voted in a division who should not have done.
But that is very much the exception. The rule is for two MPs from different parties to collude regularly in order to make their private lives as tolerable as possible. True, the system is not really needed when you have the colossal majorities to which we have recently grown accustomed. But it remains, nonetheless, the glue that usually holds the Commons together.
A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
ONE of the minor mysteries of Anglo-American history may at last have been solved. Why Churchill failed to show up at Roosevelt’s funeral in April 1945 has long perplexed and puzzled the old boy’s admirers on both sides of the Atlantic. (The Americans, of course, got their own back in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson was the most notable absentee from Churchill’s funeral, held in St Paul’s.)
In an admirable new book called Franklin and Winston (so far published only in the United States, but available through Amazon.co.uk) Jon Meacham comes up with as plausible an explanation as I have yet seen. According to Meacham, Churchill staked everything on a gambler’s throw. What he desperately wanted was for the new President, Harry Truman, to come to London — a state visit for both FDR and his wife Eleanor had been provisionally scheduled for June 1945 — and he feared that the project would be jeopardised if he flew to Washington and met the new President there. Hence the game of playing hard to get so far as the funeral was concerned. Had Truman sent word that he would come to London in June in any event, Churchill would have hopped on a plane straight away. But no such message came, and no London visit took place, so he was left with the worst of all worlds. I don’t know whether everyone will entirely buy it, but at least it’s a better explanation than the rather limp one (pressure of work, etc.) that Churchill comes up with in his war memoirs.
A DATE FOR THE DIARIES
THANKS to that excellent Radio 3 programme Night Waves, I got an advance peek over the weekend at the new television series adapted from Alan Clark’s Diaries. It is, I think, beautifully cast — John Hurt, who plays Clark, is particularly good when he soliloquises from the Diaries themselves. The dramatic scenes in and around the Palace of Westminster did not, I felt, add much — al though Louise Gold presents an uncannily accurate evocation of Margaret Thatcher’s voice, issuing from behind a bouffant hairstyle, and Jenny Agutter turns in a remarkably true-to-life performance as Clark’s wife Jane.
By one of those strange quirks of BBC scheduling, the six-part serial is going out first on BBC Four. I suppose the aim is to try to get at least some form of audience to roll up there. I read the other day that since its launch in 2002, this upmarket digital channel has only once succeeded in attracting a “house” of more than half a million.
The Clark Diaries, which is being put out twice on Thursday nights, deserves at least to match that, if only because it provides a classic example of political life as it is actually lived rather than as the romanticists, the time-servers and the spin-doctors would have us believe. Which is, I suppose, where we came in.
