Three British liberals have died in the past few days, all before their time. Jim Thompson, Gareth Williams and Hugo Young were still in their sixties. Each was outstanding in his profession, as priest, lawyer and journalist. They cut their political teeth with the rise of the welfare state and sharpened them on the Thatcher era. They lived to see what they regarded as Thatcherism’s denouement in the Labour landslide of 1997. They are gone. Something has died with them.
The three had much in common. None was from a specially privileged background, benefiting instead from that launchpad of postwar meritocracy, Oxford and Cambridge. All understood that a solid grounding in an “extrovert” profession — the Church, the Bar, the press — was the best preparation for public affairs, that and a flair for eloquence. Each was hampered by his political beliefs at some point in his career. Perhaps as a result, each enjoyed a reputation that outstripped their collective curriculum vitae.
Jim Thompson was the archetypal political clergyman, left-wing and right-thinking. His career was of the sort that forces respect for the Church’s ministry even from the irreligious. Curate in East Ham, vicar in Thamesmead, where he lived on the estate, Bishop of Stepney, then Bishop of Bath and Wells, Thompson breathed the inner-city challenge. The clergy is the last profession that still lives among those it serves, poor as well as rich. The bishop brought up his family in a Thamesmead council flat.
Thompson’s path to a senior post was balked by his anti-Thatcherism, a scandal shared equally by cringeing Church and Tory State. He won Bath and Wells only after Margaret Thatcher had gone. Yet he served on the Church’s Board of Social Responsibility, steering into the public domain the controversial Faith in the City report and reviews of marriage and gay adoption. He was a leading “urban bishop”, and suffered for it.
Thompson’s most public pulpit was radio’s “Thought for the Day”. Mornings were galvanised by his reciting a heart-breaking incident and demanding what was to be done about it, even if the answer was often in the next world rather than this. Some logistical fault once had him declaiming from a village phone box, as if the entire Firmament of Heaven was sharing it with him, courtesy of British Telecom. Thompson came to embody clerical rage at the failings of politicians.
Gareth Williams’s rage was more controlled. As a barrister he had the argumentative urgency of a man who was born in a taxi. He switched from crime to the more glamorous world of libel, a theatre that rarely puts social justice on stage. He had a Welsh genius for retaining radical credentials even while climbing the greasy pole of legal politics. He was the iconoclastic chairman of the Bar Council in 1992 and duly joined the glittering court that danced attendance on the Blairs.
Williams opted not for quangos but for titles and ermine. He sat in a House stuffed with Tony Blair’s bought peerages, yet could rail against hereditary lords. A predecessor as Leader of the Lords, another Welsh lawyer, Ivor Richard, had been sacked for demanding an elected Upper House and not budging. Williams agreed with Richard but capitulated when told that Mr Blair wanted no such thing. Having risen from Welsh legal obscurity to Cabinet office without the inconvenience of ever facing an elector, Williams was not going to jeopardise everything. At the time of his death his political influence was at its zenith. He was bidding to become Cranmer to Lord Irvine of Lairg’s Wolsey.
Yet Williams achieved what is given to few lawyers. He steered through the creation of a supreme court and a judicial appointments commission, truly radical measures. He finally killed off the hereditaries. A natural sceptic, he was a minister who contrived to get things done by the Blair Government without losing “old Labour” credentials. He was an original.
The third death, for me the saddest, was that of Hugo Young. He had spent half his career on The Sunday Times, moving to a more congenial home at The Guardian at the time of the Wapping upheaval in 1984. He embodied the opinion journalism that finds its outlet in the personal column. The closest parallel is perhaps to a Puritan preacher/pamphleteer, ironic in the case of Young, a committed Roman Catholic.
His passion was in his pen. He was viscerally opposed to Mrs Thatcher and American Republicanism, and an instinctive fan of the European Union and new Labour. (Thatcher rather liked him because, so he believed, she never read him.) As chairman of the Scott Trust and thus boss of his own paper, he kept Scott’s creation left-wing and true, a proprietorial longevity that has seen off Beaverbrooks and Northcliffes and makes Rothermeres and Blacks seem mere doodlers. I once asked Young what would happen if a Guardian editor advocated a Tory vote. He regarded the question as either psychiatric or blasphemous.
Young’s writing steered clear of sanctimony and aspired to rhetoric, with a voice that was always his own. He eschewed honours and political friendships, as a true journalist must. He was withering with his foes. A demolition job on Neil Kinnock randomly reordered the words in a Kinnock speech, retaining its utter vacuity. Young’s excoriation of Mr Blair’s Iraq adventure was biblical. If his world seemed circumscribed by The Guardian and Hampstead, that world had its virtues, not least independence of spirit.
These were good men. None was dishonest, insincere or wanted anything from politics but a better life for their fellow human beings. But what was their legacy? They must have produced thousands of sermons, speeches and columns, all designed to influence the course of policy. Yet the dawn that they welcomed in 1997 — “the people’s triumph” cried Young at the time — today seems wormwood at dusk.
Nothing that Mr Blair has done since reflects anything said or written beforehand. He has refused to tax the rich. He has dropped more bombs on civilians than any British ruler since the Second World War. He has appeased property developers, butchered the railways and made motoring cheap. He has imprisoned more Britons than ever and put David Blunkett in the Home Office. This champion of the liberal consensus has become a Ramsay MacDonald, a Tory at heart.
Bishops, lawyers and journalists are impotent in defiance. Thompson could toss his bromides into the ether. Williams could entertain dinner guests with subversive wit and promise he would “try to bring Tony round”. Young could expostulate that new Labour was proving not liberal but “unprincipled and treacherous”. But they were all spitting in the wind. Williams, who came nearest of the three to the anterooms of power, could only plead for an elected Upper House and crawl away defeated.
The political climate in which these men worked has evaporated. Monday’s Times/Populus poll was extraordinary. It showed Labour regarded as middle-of-the-road, with the Liberal Democrats as far to Labour’s left as the Tories are to its right. Mr Blair has studied the new psephology. The middle-ground majority wants clear water between itself and Labour’s old constituency of the poor and working-class. It wants to flee the inner city to (once) rural estates. It wants selective schools, crime-bashing and cheap petrol. It wants to hang tough at home and feel good abroad. Mr Blair obliges.
The concept of a liberal Establishment versus a conservative one cannot survive this. Conviction politicians are now career politicians. We are moving back to the “club/mob” politics of the 19th century, of shifting Westminster loyalties and voting blocs for sale. Mr Blair, like Gladstone, finds radicalism overseas more appealing than at home. Joseph Chamberlain once boasted that “in social questions the Tories have always been more progressive than the Liberals”. Who knows, those uncertain days may return.
I believe in an “Establishment”, where the term implies a politically literate group loyal to each other and thus able to take and sustain hard decisions. Thompson, Williams and Young were parts of such an Establishment, like the Thatcherites they so hated. I tremble at what may take their place. It is a choice between the crazed opportunism now being laid bare at the Hutton inquiry and the headline-grabbing whimsy of Tory and Liberal Democrat policy-makers. I prefer my gang of three. They always knew where they stood. So did I.
