First Confession Read online

  The Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith – while, so far as we know, not a cannabis habitué, but like me a man who enjoyed a tipple – once described Balliol men (he was one himself) as possessing ‘the tranquil consciousness of an effortless superiority’. Well, the college was never going to be renowned for the quality of its architecture, though the age of the college – the oldest in the university – was something about which we could and did brag. It felt as though we were celebrating half- or full centenaries with great regularity. Lord Peter Wimsey, a fictitious Balliol man, would presumably have matched Asquith’s description perfectly if he had governed a few colonies in between discovering who had murdered Professor Plum in the library and Colonel Mustard in the downstairs loo. I love Balliol but do not think that the ‘effortless superiority’ tag is very helpful; nor was it was very accurate. True, even in the last decades of the twentieth century, Balliol produced a lot of senior politicians, judges, lawyers, journalists and civil servants: Ted Heath, Roy Jenkins, Tom Bingham, Hugo Young, Murray Maclehose at the head of a long list. True, also, that the rise of a few alumni has appeared relatively effortless. In cases like that of Dennis Healey this was simply because he was so very clever; in others, like Roy Jenkins, it was partly because he took considerable pains to make things look so easy. On the whole, however, I do not believe that it helps much to pretend that success comes without breaking into a sweat. The overt, rather arrogant intellectual posing at Balliol which existed as late as the 1940s and 1950s, when some Balliol undergraduates cheered Balliol’s opponents on the river and the rugby field for fear that the college might get a sporting reputation, and when no one at the college could believe that Ian Gilmour could possibly be intelligent or interesting because he had been at Eton and in the Guards, had disappeared by my day. Now that Balliol is co-educational, the posing is unlikely to reappear since it always owed a great deal to testosterone swagger.

  I had two contemporaries whose superiority might have seemed effortless, though they both worked hard and were extremely modest about their success. One was Neil McCormick, president of the Union and a brilliant lawyer, who later became Professor of Public Law at Edinburgh University, a Member of the European Parliament, and a close and influential adviser to Alex Salmond. Had he not been a Scottish Nationalist from the cradle, I am sure he would have become in due course a senior Labour Cabinet minister, as good a debater as Robin Cook and cleverer than Gordon Brown. The only thing to hold against him was the fact that he played the bagpipes. Neil, who died far too young, was the nationalist (in my own country) whom I have most liked and admired; his nationalism was extrovert, generous and untinged by any xenophobia. The other very superior mind belonged to Edward Mortimer, a friend for life, a brilliant examinee and a beautiful and cogent writer. His book Faith and Power: The Politics of Islam was a tour de force and remains for me the most valuable book I have read on this now troubled and hugely contemporary or even just important subject. After All Souls and journalism, Edward went to work for Kofi Annan at the United Nations. Whenever I have been on the other side of an argument from Edward, I have paused to take stock of my position.

  Some of my peers went into politics. When I was Secretary of State for the Environment, my shadows in the House of Commons were Labour’s Bryan Gould, a Balliol New Zealander, and the Liberal Alan Beith (also Balliol), reputed to have quizzed the college chaplain once on the small size of the congregations in the chapel. The chaplain replied that he had never regarded Balliol Chapel as being one of God’s stamping grounds. While at Oxford I was not myself remotely political. I edited a satirical magazine, Mesopotamia, wrote and acted in revues, played rugby and cricket for the college, and lagged about in an occasionally industrious way. While we had some excellent sportsmen of our own age – a future international Irish forward in our college rugby team – our principal encounter with sporting stars depended on the late arrival at the college or the return to it of great sportsmen who had done their National Service, or been badly injured, thus delaying their arrival at university. Two of them in my first year were the Indian cricket captain, the Nawab of Pataudi (whose daughter, also a Balliol graduate, was many years later to star with my youngest daughter in a Bollywood film), and the former English fly-half, Richard Sharp. Sharp was the most elegant rugby player I have seen, slipping through defences like a blond wraith. Decades afterwards I saw an elderly silver-haired man at a Varsity match who introduced himself to me as the man who had preceded me as the Balliol fly-half. Such are fame and modesty. I did not play rugby with him – in the year that our paths crossed he was nursing a jaw broken by the Springbok wing-forwards – but we did play in the same college cricket team for which he kept wicket immaculately. Before our first game, he asked me what I bowled. I replied, ‘I’m thought to be pretty fast.’ He stood back for the first two or three deliveries; as I walked back to bowl the next one, I saw him closing up to the stumps. I bowled as fast as I could from an even longer run than usual. The batsman missed the ball and Richard stumped him. It was one of my greatest humiliations and it took me most of the summer to live down.

  My closest friends were not remotely interested in politics either, beyond a broad disaffection from anything that looked like the conventional establishment opinion. Of the four men with whom I spent most time, one became a successful film producer, another a solicitor and high court judge, the third (surprisingly) an entrepreneur and the last a teacher in Mexico. None of us was superior and none of us was particularly effortless, though we did do just enough work to keep our tutors at bay. The only sportsman of the four was the judge-to-be, who kept goal for the Balliol soccer team. His charm was as huge as his laugh. The entrepreneur, Arnold Cragg, was another son of the cloth; his father was the Church of England’s foremost expert on Islam. Arnold has a house near ours in France. We meet most summers resuming conversations that have been going on for almost half a century, almost serious but not for long, each of us slightly surprised by what the other has done with his life.

  The revues that I mentioned consumed a good deal of time – writing them, learning parts, performing. The greatest fun came from our annual fortnight’s summer tour with the Balliol Players. We performed our own heavily rewritten versions of Aristophanes’ Attic comedies, our scripts bearing only the most vestigial of relationships to the original plays. We added music so that things would go with a bigger swing. The Players performed at public schools, house parties, the Inns of Court and so on. The scripts teetered on the edge of vulgarity, occasionally tumbling over into it, weighed down by double-entendres which from time to time got us banned from future appearances at some schools like Shrewsbury. The boys, needless to say, preferred our version of Aristophanes to his. I suspect that political correctness might well these days have erased large parts of our scripts. But they were certainly funny, or at least so we thought.

  So did Balliol make me? In some ways ‘yes’, partly because of the opportunity I got to go to America after my final exams. Above all it made me because of the historians who taught me to think for myself and the friends I met. Balliol made me less conventional and more open-minded than I would otherwise have been. I became more curious, more able to argue without being quarrelsome, more able to marshal a case, more prepared to dare. By the time I graduated I was less – well, a bit less – of a wimp. I grew up with the fingerprints of my teachers and friends all over the process. But what had really made me was the fact that I got to Balliol in the first place. I was a pretty classic example of the scholarship boy, for whom Rab Butler’s 1944 Education Act had provided a way of combining hard work, the influence of good parents, inherited wits and some luck in order to clamber on to the first rungs of Britain’s meritocracy.

  The cover of the Balliol Players dinner, signed by some who became lifelong friends.

  I did not arrive at this ladder into the establishment because of my birth, nor because of my social connections, although it is obvious that the contacts I began to make at Oxford hel
ped to secure my onward and upward passage. Without undue vanity I also assume that those who gave me a helping hand along the way thought reasonably well of the jobs I had done at various stages of what became my career. As a nation we tend to be pretty obsessed with class, meritocracy and the existence of an establishment, which is said to run everything. The part of this trinity which should most concern us is class, not because it should be or is at the heart of a continuing struggle. ‘The whole question,’ Lenin said in 1921, ‘is – who will overtake whom.’ Trotsky and Stalin used the shortened ‘Who? Whom?’ formula. This 1920s preoccupation with class should no longer be an obsession in the twenty-first century. In Britain, the greatest Labour leader, Clement Attlee, attempted to end the class war, not to win it. The challenge today is that, despite seventy or more years of welfare democracy, inequality is too high in financial terms (though with more employment among lower income groups it may have recently fallen a little) and it has not diminished as much as it should have done in education. This is in part because the class warriors have often chosen the wrong targets. In education, why have setting, marking and discipline been in their gunsights, alongside selection and of course grammar schools? Why have they consistently behaved as though the principal beneficiaries of public services should be those who provide them, not those who need them? Why have they acted and spoken as though attributes and aspirations like thrift, prudence, family responsibility and ownership are middle-class qualities not classless ones? They help create the very conditions in which sluttishness and yobbishness tend to be associated exclusively and wrongly with those from working-class backgrounds: yet there are sluts and yobs in every walk of life and from every class. The most important issue domestically facing contemporary Britain is not aggressive class politics, but the policies that have allowed so many to fall behind educationally and financially while others thrive. That is the result of bad policies, not class politics. Moreover, the most serious bias in policy making tilts advantage by age not class. The elderly are favoured at the expense of younger families and individuals.

  There is, however, one reservation that I would add to those arguments. We do have an establishment in Britain – that is, a group of people who very often know one another, have been to the same universities and sometimes schools, have often worked in the same professions, who run much of the country and many of its institutions. There is similarly an establishment which runs the media. Those who are renowned simply for their celebrity (and are therefore likely to be unknown to me) arrive at the top of whatever it is they do to acquire their fame by a more random process. But the way people arrive in the top flights (or lower flights for that matter) is far more flexible than in, say, France, where the majority of jobs everywhere are secured by those who graduated from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration or the Ecole des Mines, with their fiercesome examination culture, or in the United States, where the system combines the motors of our own establishment creation with prodigious and often dynastic money making. The British system is not, as was argued in a book of best-selling absurdity by Owen Jones – an Oxford graduate – an intellectual conspiracy hatched and sustained by disciples of the free-market prophet Friedrich von Hayek. Men and women on the social democratic left, for example, embraced some of the disciplines of market economics because authoritarian socialism did not work and because it had the grave disadvantage in a democracy of being hugely unpopular because it was unsuccessful as well as bossy. On the political flipside, men and women of the right accepted the importance of the welfare state and occasional government intervention because these things were required for a successful and harmonious society. Where there was a consensus it was based more on sense than ideology, and of course like every other human enterprise it sometimes made dreadful mistakes. They were not, however, the sort of mistakes that undermined pluralism and created gulags.

  Our own establishment has been based for fifty years or more principally on merit. That is not a pure and undefiled thing. Sometimes parentage, wealth and connections have helped; luck plays a part; so too willingness to take on the jobs offered that are sometimes well rewarded, sometimes lead to the award of a bauble or two, and sometimes bring with them nothing much more than the end of a private life and the derision of the media. It is also fair to say that there is little mercy when the merit that was assumed to exist in the recipient of an establishment position proves illusory. On the whole, however, the people who do the establishment’s jobs are in my experience qualified to do them by ability. (We can all count the exceptions that prove this rule). The trouble is that the number of them who wish to run this or that for the rest of us and are capable of doing so is steadily diminishing. ‘Jump into the pool with us,’ we shout, trying to disguise the growing number of sharks’ fins and the spreading pools of blood visible in the water.

  So on the whole I think it is brain and effort that win the day. There are a lot of Oxbridge graduates at the top of every profession, including Owen Jones, because they had to be clever to get to those universities in the first place. When Beethoven was asked whether the ‘van’ in his name suggested that he was a landowner, he denied it with the brusque retort that he was a brain owner. Brain owners are far more likely to be running things today than in the middle years of the last century. It is striking how the spying scandals of the wartime and post-war years were incubated and protected from discovery by silver spoon old-boy networks. No more. Would a drunk and oafish spy like Guy Burgess today survive his outrageous behaviour simply because he had a cupboard full of old Etonian ties? Would Philby escape undetected for so long because his father was a senior member of the Indian Civil Service? Yet there is a different challenge for today’s establishment. Meritocracy can be a pretty unattractive tyranny of the able, whatever its intentions, looking down on those whose merits are less visible or marketable. There is also an awkward truth about meritocracy in a society which is not growing or changing economically: for meritocracy to do what it says on the tin, some must go down the ladder as others climb it. This is not likely to be a message well received by middle-class parents. But if by meritocracy we mean above all advancement by ability then that is plainly better than other ways of ordering society today. Above all, to remain what it says it is, a meritocracy has to remain open; it must not become blind or indifferent to the importance of continuing to refresh itself by ensuring that talent can emerge from outside its own ranks and those of its families. The great American sociologist Daniel Bell argued for ‘a well-tempered meritocracy’. This point has been very well argued too by the contemporary historian Lord Hennessy, who believes that the members of the establishment should remember where they came from, how much support from the public sector they required to achieve their present eminence and why they should work to increase the number of well-repaired ladders enabling others behind them to climb. They should recognize that too few women are able to make this ascent, and do more to put this right. And they must always show equality of esteem and respect for those who do not choose to climb to the top of the ladder or fail in the attempt. The social mobility problem in Britain is not how many members of the establishment went to a small number of our best universities, but how we can give more young men and women the opportunity to gain places at these universities without lowering the qualifications for admission. There is nothing wrong with elite educational institutions – indeed we should build more of them – provided access is open to the best, regardless of their background, and provided as well that these institutions bang the drum for social inclusion through the raising not lowering of standards.

  4

  ‘The Last Best Hope of Earth’

  And not by eastern windows only,

  When daylight comes, comes in the light;

  In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!

  But, westward, look, the land is bright.

  Arthur Hugh Clough,

  ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’

  ‘The glamour of it all! New
York! America!’

  Charlie Chaplin

  I never, of course, fluttered any Volscians in their dovecotes. But playing cricket I did occasionally have a good opening spell as a fast bowler – there was for instance that morning on Balliol’s cricket pitch when I skittled the Gentlemen of Oxfordshire. A business friend of Dad’s came with us to that slap-up lunch at the Bear afterwards. I was just a few weeks from my final exams and departure from the dreaming spires. ‘So,’ the genial pal said, ‘now you’ve made it. The world’s your oyster.’

  But what exactly had I ‘made’? My parents were so proud of what their son had done at school that they had no real ideas of what should or could come next; and the son for his part was too comfortable coasting and too timid to do anything daring. I had actually got my unanticipated minor scholarship to Balliol at the age of sixteen, and could have gone off for a gap year to learn French at a lycée in Dijon or to study girls on a beach in Thailand. But no one ever really suggested this or pressed me to do it, so I wasted a real chance to broaden my horizons and stayed at school for another year, adding rather unnecessarily to my A Level count, captaining the cricket team and the school, writing rather mannered essays, and traversing the foothills of young fogeydom with a Stuyvesant between the ends of my fingers. Now I had no excuses. I had to take a plunge. The apprenticeship was over. Life did not end at twenty-one; as Dad’s friend Roy said, it began.