First Confession Read online

  A schoolmaster’s report, at least an old-fashioned one, would surely have raised questions not about his ability, achievements or intelligence, but about his character. Sexual behaviour that might be frowned on in the very young rightly brings heavier censure when the older and more mature do the same things. The undoubtedly great George C. Marshall, general and diplomat, one of the major figures in the twentieth century, is said to have turned down the first ever seven-figure advance for his memoirs, on the simple grounds that he did not want a million dollars. It is hard not to conclude that one reason for the unpopularity of the Clinton and Blair camps today is that no one thinks that the ex-president and ex-premier would have given a similar answer. Both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair exude a sense of needless but greedy entitlement which is pretty unattractive.

  Like Clinton, George Bush, the forty-third President, could also lay on the charm. At the beginning of a meeting in Ireland, just after the outbreak of the Iraq War (which I had criticized publicly), he gave me a big Texan handshake and said, ‘Dad told me to say “Hi”.’ The idea that Dad had ever said anything of the sort seemed to me exceptionally unlikely. He was rather kindly trying to put me at my ease. I could never really understand how he had escaped the sensible policy embrace of his father and his father’s advisers like Brent Scowcroft, and thrown in his lot with the crudest of neo-cons and their Lord of the Night, Dick Cheney. He just did not seem like them at all. Maybe he reacted to the fact that his father, for all his foreign-policy sophistication, had lost his attempt to secure re-election. Maybe, being perhaps rather lazy (though he played less golf than President Obama), he found it too demanding to see the greys of the world rather than the blacks and whites. Whatever the reason, he always appeared to me to be a whole heap nicer in person than his administration, which drained American soft power to the bottom of the tank.

  I am sure that one of Bill Coolidge’s hopes, never expressed and kept close to his chest, was that those who benefited from his scholarships would return from the USA not only with greater knowledge of his country but also with the beginnings of an affection for it. That sentiment has for me grown over the years, though it is fair to say that it is directed towards the America that I know. It has been a country that has by and large led the world by example, usually but not always on the right side of the biggest global issues, always stronger because it got involved in solving international problems, though sometimes it was confused about whether it had to intervene whenever others simply looked the other way. America has been open to other countries, usually accepting the same rules as them, and as a result it has been a huge force on every continent. In practice America has been ‘First’, precisely because it has ensured that others have a piece of the action, a place in the game economically and politically. This is the approach apparently challenged by President Trump, though major flip-flops over Syria and Russia suggest that he may be amenable to more conventional advice. In the election campaign he convinced enough of those who have done badly in the last few years that their misfortunes could be blamed on America’s international leadership and responsibilities.

  How much do I know about these voters? While we visited back in the 1960s parts of what is now known as rustbelt America – the older industrial areas – and city slums, I have not over the years gone back to the neighbourhoods that prosperity seems to have partially passed by. My America has been the coasts, and their cities, the great universities (though you do have to travel through the rustbelt to get to one of them, Notre Dame in Indiana), Chicago, museums, the New York Review of Books, Chinese and Italian restaurants and embassies and conference rooms in Washington. I do not think that this America has been blown away by the recent presidential election. Nor is it other than absurd to regard America overall as a failed country. But those of us who have been marked by America for life are going to have to fight hard for this positive view of a great country and the good it has done and can do in the world in the years ahead.

  The surprise for me was that I not only fell in love with much of what I saw in America and above all with Americans themselves on this first visit. Above all, I fell in love with politics and its hazardous charms as a political career. So after that Lindsay campaign, still in penny loafers and chinos, in late November 1965 I sailed home from New York and ‘the land of the free’, on an elderly Cunard liner which rocked and rolled through strong seas. I was returning to surprise everyone who knew me in England, injected by a political virus which shaped the identity of a not very sophisticated, even slightly clueless, 21-year-old. On the rough passage home, I seemed to be one of the few passengers who could keep down my gin and tonics. I was going home to my mum and dad in Greenford. I was off on the search for a career. But neither I nor my parents would previously have predicted where I would find it.

  5

  ‘Wet’

  ‘Oh, Eeyore, you are wet,’ said Piglet, feeling him. Eeyore shook himself, and asked somebody to explain to Piglet what happened when you had been inside a river for quite a long time.

  A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

  ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

  Most people are not defined primarily, or even partly, by their political affiliation. Other things take precedence: race, nationality, religion, language, looks, bank balance, job or profession, and so on. But political success, or lack of it, can give you a certain celebrity, or it may simply mean that you are remembered for some generally acceptable or obnoxious or peculiar set of views. I invariably chat to taxi drivers, who are usually good company with views that are less predictable than is often imagined. I have been driven by a Buddhist communist, who apologized for not being in saffron, and by a man who looked as though he had once been a boxer and had strongly libertarian views on issues of gender self-identification. I have also been driven by a large number of cabbies who venerated the memory of Margaret Thatcher, and would like to have had ‘that Ken Livingstone’ in the back of the cab to tell him what they thought of his mayoral record in London. These days Uber and cycle lanes tend to be the principal subjects of these conversations, hardly surprising since together they are helping to bring London to a standstill.

  The other day a driver put me on the spot. Half recognizing me, he asked, ‘Didn’t you used to be that Conservative?’ What was he getting at exactly? Did he want to isolate what the nature of my formal Conservative vocation had been: that Conservative minister or MP? Did he question whether I was still a Conservative? Did the ‘that’ suggest a particular sort of Conservative – an odd ball, a quisling, a dubious bounder, potentially (worst of all) a friend of David Mellor or Boris Johnson? What was it all about? The question was of course bound to elicit a positive response, in the present as well as in the past tense. I was a Conservative and still am.

  I have to say that an even more basic question would have been and indeed was asked by my Oxford friends when, on returning from New York, I wrote to and was offered a job by the Conservative Research Department, in the run-up to the 1966 General Election. Having got more than a taste for politics in America, I thought that it might be rather fun to work on a campaign in Britain. Then, I hoped, I could go on after a few months to a post as a general graduate trainee at the BBC. In the event, I so enjoyed the politics that I gave the BBC a thumbs-down when they offered me a job, which they clearly regarded as lèse majesté and my friends as an act of complete insanity.

  But why, my friends asked, the Conservative Party? The truth is that when pushed I have always known two things about myself politically. First, I am not a Liberal (though I am certainly liberal) and, second, I am not Labour. Nor am I or ever will be a right-wing Conservative. I strongly endorse the proposition that in politics your opponents are in other parties, while your enemies are usually in your own. Though I am a pretty calm fellow, some of my alleged colleagues on the right have sometimes made me throb with rage. I have always thoug
ht myself a moderate Conservative about the things that matter most in politics. Margaret Thatcher, though she was kind to me, regularly employed my pen and promoted me in government, would certainly have thought of me as a card-carrying ‘wet’, to use the rather odd public school lingo used to describe almost any political view to the moderate left of her own. Tamurlane would definitely not have been regarded as wet but I am not sure about Genghis Khan. For the time being I will skirt around the fact that Margaret herself could show signs of rising damp from time to time.

  My first political act occurred at school. Aged about fifteen, I joined a group of friends to heckle a rather polite Labour Party candidate in the 1959 General Election at an open-air meeting in Ealing. We were in the safe Conservative part of the borough and (with no idea of how fogeyish we must have seemed) shouted questions about Labour policy on grammar and independent schools at the candidate, standing on his soap-box on the green just outside the gates of the very good local grammar school. I hope we did not actually shout, like so many Beyond the Fringe parodists, ‘What about the public schools?’ though I cannot give a cast-iron assurance on this point. That was the entirety of my teenage political experience. There was not much insurrectionary fervour at my school. But one boy in my class used to wear a CND badge, and went each year on part of the Aldermaston March with his parents, shouting, ‘Ban the Bomb.’ This was much less selfishly oafish than ‘Save the public schools.’ He became a chartered accountant. The cause of nuclear disarmament deserved more serious political and moral attention than it usually received. As a constituency MP in later years, I didn’t duck challenges to debate the issue with people like Bruce Kent.

  Revolution came no closer than this to my youthful days of cricket and rugby, Salinger and Isherwood, and inhaling tipped cigarettes behind the gym. But, just in case the revolution roared down the Central Line from Holborn to Ealing Broadway, I was in the school Combined Cadet Corps, an under-officer no less, with an Irish beret called a caubeen sporting a green hackle befitting my rank. I would not have been much good in the event of hostilities. I am the worst shot I know, embarrassingly bad, and would not have hit the barn let alone its door. When my sporting friends ask me whether I shoot, I have to respond, ‘Not to kill.’

  After all this, no surprise then that I have always viewed with a sense of wonder those politicians who seemed to emerge fully formed from their chrysalis as soon as they got to university, who moved seamlessly from school to debating clubs and dodgy political society elections. How remarkable to be that sure of oneself at eighteen or even much younger. Maybe I was a bit callow. I suppose that both the main political parties have been fortunate that so many clever young women and men sprang so early and so surely from the traps and stayed the course. Both Labour and Conservative leaderships have been replete with the best that Oxbridge in particular can offer, politicians who served their apprenticeships during their years at university, dreaming and scheming. The trouble is that some of them go on behaving like that when politics should no longer be regarded as a jolly game. At Oxford, I went to one Union debate which I quite enjoyed; Richard Crossman made a funny speech on a motion of ‘no confidence’ in the government. But it was not really my scene. All around me ambition was almost bursting a blood vessel. Anyway, while I felt sort of Conservative, largely because I distrusted systems and certainties, I was not wholly and adamantly sure about it yet. On some issues I have never had any doubts – capital punishment and gay rights, for example. But I was not prepared to sign up to the whole canon, left or right. Indeed it is a secret shame that I have carried guiltily throughout my life that I do not have views on everything.

  So what after university swung me moderately to the right? Trying to rationalize it a few years later, I concluded that there were three principal reasons for my decision which crept up on me on slippered feet rather than arriving with the clarity and suddenness of a bolt of lightning. First of all, studying history at Balliol I knew that the one thing which made me uneasy was a grand theory or over-arching generalization. You may recall my unwise early observations on Charlemagne. I found the Whig view of history – Britain’s inexorable rise to ever greater liberal triumphs – as unconvincing as Marxist efforts to fit everything into the straitjacket of class conflict. I liked history as sweeping narrative, at its best a real literary endeavour, but also admired the patient investigation of the lives of sugar barons, police informers or provincial French prostitutes. When offered a confident judgement about what had happened 500 years ago, or yesterday for that matter, I usually wanted to hunt out a ‘but’ or a cautionary qualification.

  Second, this wholesome scepticism disposed me to take seriously any political philosophy grounded in a hostility to the easy explanations offered by all-encompassing analyses of the world and its problems, explanations which in turn gave birth to exact plans about how to put everything right. The only thing as bad as a prescriptive plan was its mirror image: a plan to rebut plans. This point was succinctly made by the often beautifully obscure Michael Oakeshott, the greatest of modern Conservative political philosophers. His critique of Hayek makes this point very directly. ‘A plan to resist all planning,’ Oakeshott wrote, ‘may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics.’ This approach seemed to me to correspond to real life: managing one’s way around one predicament after another, never finding a ‘Promised Land’, eventually coming to terms with the fact that all political careers – especially those which begin with the assumption of the imminent sighting of sunlit uplands – are bound to end, as Enoch Powell observed, in failure. So, if you spend your years struggling through life’s swirling waters, you are bound like Eeyore to come out wet, unless, that is, you allow dogma to crowd out inconvenient facts and to colour reality. ‘Wet’ is usually the climate of the real world in politics.

  Third, I formed a pretty early dislike of the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, after the 1964 Labour Party election victory. A clever man, he managed to pull together an appeal embracing professionalism, modern classlessness and science-based economic advance that left Conservatives for a time looking like Wodehousian fuddy-duddies. It did not ring true for me, from the very beginning. Part of the political story of the 1960s and 1970s was about Wilson losing the moorings to his own carefully burnished public identity. From the pipe-smoking, no-nonsense, astute political manager and performer, he was portrayed (not least by some party colleagues) as turning into a brandy-swigging, paranoid conspiracy theorist, rather too many of whose friends sailed perilously close to the wind – or sometimes ploughed straight into it. To be fair to Wilson there did turn out to be conspiracies against him and he was certainly slandered by a nasty cabal of intelligence service members and their hangers-on. But from the outset I did not believe that, on the essentials, he would marry socialism to science and plan Britain to an economic miracle. The ‘planning’ was initially in the hands of the frequently inebriated but shrewd George Brown. It said most of what many people felt often unfairly about Harold Wilson that there was no great sense of outrage when a newspaper editor asserted that George Brown drunk was better than Harold Wilson sober. Attempts at Mr Wilson’s historic rehabilitation have made some progress. He tried to balance the needs of party management with saving the economy from decline. Most important, he kept Britain out of the Vietnam War. (Mr Blair could have learned from his experience when he signed up for Mr Bush’s war of choice in Iraq.) However, what seemed to be the more sensible aims of the Wilson government were taken from Harold Macmillan’s play-book: membership of the European Common Market and an attempt to house-train the unions by giving them a share of the keys to the economy’s front door with a place in modestly corporatist institutions like the National Economic Development Office, set up in 1962.

  So, in any contest for my affections, Macmillan beat Wilson hands down. This victory for the old Edwardian encouraged me to apply the test once suggested by A. J. Balfour and look at history before deciding which party to join. I wo
uld begin my tramp through the pantheon of Conservative heroes with Edmund Burke. The Conservative Party can probably be dated from the time that, hating what he saw happening in France, Burke crossed the floor of the House of Commons with the Portland Whigs to join the younger Pitt in the task of assisting the country to ‘weather the storm’ unleashed by the revolution of 1789. Burke wrote of the theorists of the Revolution, ‘In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.’ Since then there has been a continuous and definable Conservative tradition and party. There were three strands of thought that characterized Burke’s opposition to the French Revolution, and they have subsequently run through the whole history of the party. First, there was opposition to utopianism and political blueprints, hand in hand with scepticism about an excessively rationalist approach to life. Secondly, there was patriotism, and the defence of Crown, country and the national interest. Society was, in other words, a living collection of relationships bound together by traditions, affection and mutual dependency, not only a partnership between those who are living but a contract between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Carelessly uproot one value or institution and the consequences spread out with who knows what results. Thirdly, there was defence of property, of order and of an organic view of society.

  After Burke comes Robert Peel, arguably the statesman who created the modern Conservative Party, splitting it over free trade, setting out a generous programme of change in the Tamworth Manifesto (Conservatives should ‘reform to survive’), founding modern policing and emancipating Catholics. Peel is the last Prime Minister who was not photographed. He was opposed by the right – or rather by both the right-wing Conservative factions described by Douglas Hurd in his fine biography of Peel. There was the nostalgic right, lamenting the passage of good times, and the sour right, prejudiced against foreigners, immigrants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims. Peel, whose U-turns were as spectacular as they were right, repealed the Corn Laws (which maintained the price of corn, and so bread), in part in response to the Irish potato blight and famine. This split the Conservative Party he had created and sent it into Opposition for twenty years. It was rescued from the political margins partly by Disraeli, who knew how to appeal to working men as well as to his Queen Emperor. Though himself an exotic creature, he understood that gravity rather than levity was the attribute required of those who sought to govern a country wreathed in fog and with a large middle class. I pass by, with only a small nod of reverence, his truly awful novels, which are much mentioned in speeches by Conservatives who have wisely never tried to read them. I much admire Stanley Baldwin also, a great political artist, who was able to manage party arguments rather than turning them into knock-down ideological tussles. A man of generous sentiments, he was able to appeal across party boundaries from the centre left to the centre right partly because he was prepared to give serious attention to other points of view. He believed that Conservatives should ‘avoid all extremes’. England mattered much more to him than the Conservative Party. He had a real feel for the country – for its history, its landscape, its institutions and its language, which he used beautifully. Look up, for instance, the speech he made at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge in memory of the great explorer and hero, and his particular tribute there to the gallant failures of British history. Baldwin was a hero of one of my own paladins, though perhaps that description is too assertive for a man so ambivalent and even diffident about his own personal ambitions.