Portraits and Miniatures (21 page)

Few thought he was even a starter
There were many who thought themselves smarter
But he ended PM, CH and OM,
An Earl and a Knight of the Garter

His reputation went steadily up and he and Macmillan were almost the only Prime Ministers who enjoyed themselves in retirement more than in active life. Not Lloyd George or Churchill, Rosebery, Asquith, Wilson, Eden or Heath. And I doubt whether Mrs Thatcher will be very content.

The government that Mrs Thatcher ran bore less relation to the three previous administrations I have considered than they each did to the other two. The comparison is by no means wholly to her credit. In terms of the quality of the other ministers, I think it must be regarded as the least illustrious government of the four. It is always necessary to be on one's guard against underestimating contemporaries compared to their predecessors. It is easier to admire those on whom the gates of history have slammed shut, and there is a fairly constant tendency to see things as always going downhill: to say that the younger Pitt was not as good as his father, that Canning was not as good as Pitt, that Peel was not as good as Canning, or Gladstone as Peel, or Asquith as Gladstone. Such constant regression is biologically improbable. But even with that warning I do not think that Messrs Howe,
Lawson, Parkinson, Tebbit, Baker and Hurd can be put in the same league as the Asquith, Baldwin or Attlee lists as outstanding political personalities, nor can they match the Asquith list as men of distinction outside politics.

To some substantial extent this goes with the dominant position within the government of the recent Prime Minister. She certainly did not leave ministers as secure in their offices as did Gladstone or Baldwin. She was not as addicted to the annual gymkhana of a reshuffle, almost for its own sake, as was Wilson. But she none the less wrought great changes of personnel in her eleven and a half years. It is remarkable that there was no member of the Cabinet, other than herself, who survived throughout her term. In addition, her changes had far more of a general purpose than did those of Asquith or Attlee. They were not primarily made on grounds of competence. They were steadily directed to shifting the balance of ideology, or perhaps even more of amenability, within the Cabinet.

As a result of these various factors, she must be counted the most dominating Prime Minister within her government of any of the four. Her control over the House of Commons I would regard as much more dependent upon the serried majorities she had behind her than upon any special parliamentary skill. Her combative belief in her own rightness ensured that she was rarely discomfited and never overwhelmed. But she brought no special qualities of persuasiveness or debating skill that enabled her to move minds where others would have failed. Even an unsuccessful Prime Minister like Eden had, in my view, more capacity to do this than she had. And the serried majorities were a direct function of having a split opposition with a voting system designed for only two parties. She never exercised any special command over a medium of communication as Baldwin did in the early days of broadcasting, and for much of her fifteen and a half years as Conservative leader, before and after 1979, she was personally below rather than above her party's poll rating.

Her stamp upon every aspect of her government's policy, on the other hand, was incomparably greater than that of any of my other three Prime Ministers. There was no question of her reserving
herself for major constitutional issues. Indeed, I doubt that she had much sense of what was a constitutional issue and what was not. There was no departmental minister who was able to sustain an area of prerogative. It was impossible to imagine her being asked for advice, and saying to Geoffrey Howe, as Baldwin said to Austen Chamberlain, ‘but you are Foreign Secretary'. She was equally interfering in the military, economic, industrial, social security, Commonwealth and law and order aspects of the government's policy. She sought no respite from politics, in the sense that did Asquith, Baldwin and Attlee. Her impact was bound to be greater by virtue of her determination and longevity in office. She reduced the influence of the Cabinet: if she had improved Britain's influence, that might have been taken as having been a fair exchange, but any improvement in this respect was distinctly temporary.

Over the nearly a century I have been considering, the scope of government obviously increased enormously. Public expenditure rose from approximately £170 million, perhaps £5 billion in present-day values, to about nine hundred times that in money terms and thirty times it in real terms. Great new departments, like Health, Social Security and the Environment, sprang up with an entirely different pattern of ministerial duties from anything remotely prevailing before 1914. The essential role of the Prime Minister did not change as much as this might lead one to believe. The function of a conductor is not greatly altered by introducing new instruments into the orchestra. The style is much more a product of a man or a woman than it is of the epoch. President Reagan at least showed that modern government need not be too strenuous. Mr Major would no doubt like to achieve a reversion to the calmer habits, if not of Asquith at least of Attlee, but that requires an authority which has so far eluded him.

What has changed permanently, however, is the necessary involvement of the head of the government of this or any other comparable country in external affairs. The interdependent world, not to mention the European Community, has changed that for ever. The calm insularity of Asquith and Baldwin, even to some extent that of Attlee, must equally have permanently disappeared.

(With Some Reflections on Oxford and Other Universities)

This is a lightly edited version of the 1988 Rede Lecture delivered in the Senate House at Cambridge on 10 May of that year.

The Last time a Chancellor of Oxford delivered a Rede Lecture was when Curzon gave it in 1913. In many ways he was a rasher man than I am, as he showed in India and then at Oxford, where in his first year as Chancellor he moved in, asserted his undoubted right to preside over the Hebdomadal Council, and generally set about ruling the university and not merely reigning over it. As in Calcutta and Delhi, his Oxford assertiveness ended in a mixture of achievement and chagrin.

In Cambridge, however, he behaved more circumspectly than I have boldly undertaken to do. His lecture was on
Modern Parliamentary Eloquence.
I would now find that a difficult subject. However, it would have been a much safer subject here to have lectured upon than my Oxonian view of Cambridge. When I first suggested it to the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge I think he was apprehensive. My understanding of his fears increased when, a little later, I told a distinguished Oxford historian of somewhat polemical temperament who recently retired from a seven-year spell as a Cambridge Head of House, that I was committed to this subject in this place. ‘If by chance,' Lord Dacre said
con amore,
‘you feel at all unwell as the occasion approaches, do not hesitate to send for me as a substitute. There is no subject on which I would rather talk before an audience in the Cambridge Senate House, if necessary unprepared. I could do it spontaneously.' But I feel reasonably well, and intend to devote myself not to polemics or even to Oxford flippancy (of which more later) but to looking at the interaction of our two universities upon each other and to a glance at their relationship to others at home and abroad.

Exploring the history of Oxford and Cambridge for the purposes of this lecture I have been struck by the symbiotic nature of the relationship between the two universities. Over eight centuries they have greatly influenced and cross-fertilized each other. They have been more pacers than rivals. At times one has gone ahead (indeed it could, I suppose, be argued that in the Middle Ages Oxford was fairly consistently so) but the other has then caught up or overtaken, frequently building on a development initiated in the first one. The result has been an historical relationship a great deal more fluctuating and interesting than the average course of the sporting event for which we are best known in the world. During these fluctuations certain differences of style and even ethos have developed. About them one can generalize with mild amusement and a modicum of accuracy. But the similarities have remained much greater than the differences. Increased influence and prestige for one has usually meant the same, perhaps after a time-lag, for the other and neither has ever significantly gained from the other's misfortune.

We are clearly both federal universities, with great power and individuality residing in the colleges. I do not think such a degree of decentralization exists in any other geographically concentrated university in the world. California, yes, even London, but they are not concentrated geographically, and certainly not Harvard or Yale, which are. Harvard houses are merely dormitories with resonant names. Yale has colleges, but they are concerned only with living and not with teaching. Oxford and Cambridge are both highly collegiate universities, some would say Oxford marginally more so than Cambridge, in spite of the longer-term and
more full-time nature of the Oxford Vice-Chancellorship (until 1991 when Cambridge accomplished a leap-frog in this respect), because the colleges in Oxford appoint many of those who are subsequently paid by the university. This being so, however, it is surprising that the history of both of them contradicts the normal pattern of federations, where, as in America, Switzerland, Australia, the component states came first and the federal authority was very much an afterthought. In Cambridge as in Oxford, on the other hand, the university was there nearly a century before the first colleges and it was not indeed until a good three hundred years after the beginning of the universities that the colleges came into their full insolent authority.

This was for the very good reason that the most lordly of them did not exist. Cambridge towards the end of the fifteenth century was a university almost as old as Harvard is today, was rapidly catching up on Oxford both in numbers and fame, but was still without Trinity (except in vestigial form) or St John's, as well of course as the late sixteenth-century trio of Caius, Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex, and with King's looking no more than a muddy building site alongside a gaunt and roofless shell which was to become the chapel. Yet it was undoubtedly a much better period for Cambridge than for Oxford, where the mid-fifteenth-century foundation of Magdalen and All Souls did nothing to arrest a half-century of decline. Erasmus was at Queens' (Cambridge) for some time around 1510, and much though he complained about his living conditions and the climate, although I cannot think that he had been used to much better in his Low Countries, his presence was both an indication of Cambridge's rising prestige and a formative influence on teaching developments. Just as the college as a community for living was an Oxford idea, stemming essentially from Merton, which spread to Cambridge at the beginning of the fourteenth century, so the college as an institution for teaching was a Cambridge idea which spread to Oxford at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Then in the second quarter of that century there came the outbreak of grandeur in both universities in the form of Trinity here and Christ Church at Oxford. Christ Church was born only
after two false attempts, which made it first Cardinal College, then King Henry VIII College and only finally Christ Church, all within thirty years. It is to the best of my belief the only college in the world that has a cathedral tucked away in its purlieus. But however firmly it may have the diocesan church in its embrace it has not got the university in this position. The original intention was perhaps precisely this - ‘a college which when finished will equal the rest of Oxford' was an early statement of aim. It has never quite achieved that, although it has achieved the worldly feat of producing more Prime Ministers than the rest of the university put together. So has Trinity. Christ Church indeed in some ways resembles a bit of Cambridge in Oxford. It was wholly appropriate that its first dean - Cox - should have been imported from Cambridge. Perhaps for this reason it is more detached than is Trinity. Trinity may be uncomfortably large and rich for the rest of the university - like a province of an African state with an unbalancing amount of the minerals and therefore the wealth, a Katanga or a Biafra, although not I hope a candidate for secession, but it is also part of the core of the university and therefore its middle kingdom. Christ Church, both geographically and psychologically, is much more like a ship - some would say a luxury liner - moored off shore. However, they have both exhibited a worldly exuberance and physical splendour which make them suitable monuments to their royal founder as well as major moulders of the shapes of their universities.

In spite of these great developments the sixteenth century was a pretty rough time in Cambridge. Five of its nine Chancellors were executed, including the great Fisher in 1535. This was a degree of hazard to which my predecessors have never been exposed, which is surprising for, more recently, the Oxford tradition has favoured the choice, after contest, of more controversial Chancellors than has been the Cambridge habit.

The seventeenth century was one of almost equally great turbulence and fluctuating, almost contradictory, fortunes for both universities. Until the Civil War their numbers were rising strongly. Cambridge grew from a total of 1600 in 1550 to 3000 in the 1620s and 30s. Oxford moved more or less in step. Their
influence rose proportionately. Oxford was particularly good at flattering the royal vanity of King James I. University MPs were introduced during his reign, but perhaps more significant was a very substantial increase to about a third in the proportion of the House of Commons that was Oxford or Cambridge educated.

The Civil War brought the increase in numbers to an end. Oxford became the Royalist capital, while Cambridge spawned the Earl of Manchester and Cromwell, although it was Oxford that had to accept the latter as its Chancellor in 1650. Cambridge saw ten of its sixteen colleges have their heads of houses removed from office - three colleges twice experienced the change - during the Civil War and Commonwealth period. Oxford took more enthusiastically to the Restoration and - a very Oxonian touch -led the way in establishing a one-day coach service to London and thus strengthening its links with court and government. In both universities, however, the long torpor of the eighteenth century was casting its shadow before it, numbers were falling heavily, and influence was declining. The intake of freshmen per year fell at Oxford from 460 in the 1660s to 300 in the 1690s. It became little more than a seminary for the Anglican church. Cambridge avoided such a complete retreat to a church bastion, but its total size was reduced by a third before the nadir of the 1770s.