Portraits and Miniatures (37 page)

For most of his life Crossman was the better known. Indeed I once heard Field Marshal Montgomery do a put-down of Crosland on this ground. In 1951 a dozen or so MPs, including these two, paid a visit to SHAPE. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, received us with bland goodwill. Montgomery, who was deputy, treated us like a lot of slack subalterns. ‘Give your names clearly and keep your questions short,' he commanded. ‘Crosland, not to be confused with Crossman,' the later author of
The Future of Socialism
began in an even more disdainful drawl than usual. Montgomery said: ‘I would not dream of confusing you. I have heard of Crossman.'

Nevertheless, Anthony Crosland ended up with more lasting fame for what he himself had done, both as a political theorist and as the (brief) holder of the Foreign Secretaryship, the great office of state which Richard Crossman, then two years dead, had most desired. Crossman's chief monument was
Diaries of a Cabinet Minister,
mainly a recording of the words and behaviour of others. It was also what he increasingly came to care most about, even when he was still a minister, and overwhelmingly so between
1970 and his death in early 1974. It was not exactly for the sake of the truth, to which even his most devoted fan could not say he was peculiarly addicted. In argument he regarded ‘facts' as dialectical weapons to be forged as one needed them rather than as objective entities to be respected for their own validity. Yet his
Diaries
are in my view remarkably accurate. Harold Wilson, of whom Crossman had been a considerable friend and ally, used to claim that they were all imaginative fiction, stuffed with nonexistent meetings and encounters which never took place. I did not find this so. I often disagreed with Crossman's judgements and sometimes with his descriptive angle, but I could always recognize the events he was talking about if I had participated in them, and thought that they never diverged more from my version of accuracy than might the accounts of a motor accident seen by two men of different temperaments standing on opposite sides of the road.

Yet Crossman, although unlike Crosland he was never even in his own eyes a serious competitor for the party leadership, was a more dominant figure in Cabinet, more central for thirty years to the life of the Labour Party, and a more striking speaker both in Parliament and on a political platform. As a Cabinet member it was more the tone than the outcome of discussions that he influenced for he did not have a high reputation for wisdom and often changed his mind in the middle of the argument. He specialized in rumbustious iconoclasm. He asked questions that nobody else would. Although he dropped off to sleep in the Cabinet more frequently than anyone I ever saw, whenever he himself was awake he was very good at keeping others so too. I sat next to him in 1967-70 and greatly missed him in the dull Cabinet of 1974-6.

His party activity I mostly disapproved of. We belonged to different tribes. He was always a Bevanite, although a surprising one because he was neither particularly left-wing nor a natural hero-worshipper, either in general or of Aneurin Bevan in particular. I fear it stemmed from the facts that he could not get over having rather despised Gaitskell both at Winchester and at New College, and that Attlee (a family neighbour in Essex suburbia)
so deeply disapproved of his behaviour as a young man towards both his dry Chancery judge of a father and his more outgoing mother that he would not contemplate giving him a government job. Palestine and the ‘Keep Left' revolt he might have forgiven him, but not his bullying around the tennis court in the Buckhurst Hill garden.

As a speaker Crossman imported his Oxford teaching methods into politics. Yet his style was the antithesis of the austerely academic. His central desire was to grip the attention of his audience, almost to seize them intellectually by the throat, and to this end he would always prefer a slightly shocking generalization, whether or not well founded in the facts, to platitudinous verities. He was also a master of the art of keeping his audience on tenterhooks. I remember once comparing his speaking method with that of a trick motor cyclist who rode as hard as he could at the end of a cliff. Everyone in sight was held fascinated, waiting to see how on earth he was going to turn round before going over the edge. I was sufficiently impressed as a young MP that he was the only parliamentarian I ever consciously tried to emulate. I am not sure I had much success in this.

Why, with all his verve and talents, did Crossman as a politician never get into the league of Wilson or Callaghan? There were two major reasons. First, he really was the classic example of being his own worst enemy. Ernest Bevin never applied his famous ‘not while I'm alive, he ain't' to Crossman, bitterly though he accused him of the ‘stab in the back', perhaps because he recognized that Crossman's self-destructiveness needed no assistance. Crossman had an extraordinary penchant for gaffes. The major ones were well spaced: 1952, 1957, 1969. But they were buttressed by a host of minor ones which bespattered almost every year. ‘I have measured out my life in howling gaffes,' he could have written towards the end, paraphrasing Eliot.

Second, penetratingly though he wrote about it both in his
Diaries
and in his 1963 preface to Bagehot, Crossman was remarkably bad at operating the Whitehall machine. He believed civil servants were instinctively disloyal, which they are not, and as a result, despite his sparkle and exceptional intelligence, succeeded
in making them almost uniquely so towards himself. I will never forget a pensions meeting which as Chancellor I had with Cross-man as Social Security Minister accompanied by a galaxy of his officials in 1969. It was a pushover. He was jumping about from one intellectual position to another, and his officials wanted to see him lose. I never saw a departmental minister so badly supported. It almost made me rally to the side of his expenditure claims.

Yet, in spite of the weaknesses, Crossman was by no means wholly a bad minister. He was vigorous and innovating. It was merely that he was not as good as he ought to have been in relation to his talents. He was always a commentator first and an executant second. He was frequently more interested in the argument than in the result. But his
sotto voce
remarks made him an irreplaceable companion.

Part of his desire to shock, out of which he never grew, may have stemmed from a persistence of his adolescent bullying. But there was also a much more amiable side to it. He was as natural a teacher as he was a commentator. An aggressively conducted seminar, with himself in the chair, was his idea of paradise. And his early and continuing conviction was that the best way to open closed minds and to keep open minds engaged was to shock them. Of the time when I first met Crossman (fifty-six years ago) I wrote in my autobiography: ‘The visitor [to my parent's house in South Wales] who most dazzled me was without doubt Richard Crossman. His brand of verve and paradox I found very exciting at sixteen.' In later life I did not exactly admire him, but I enjoyed his company to an extent matched by that of only three or four other politicians.

This piece started life as a 1991
Observer
review of Garret FitzGerald's autobiography
All In a Life
(Macmillan).

I Have Long found Irish politics both fascinating and mystifying. From the Phoenix Park assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish in 1882 to the Easter Rising in 1916 they provided a crucial and mostly unhelpful background to the careers of my main biographical subjects, Dilke and Asquith. In my second period as Home Secretary (1974-6) terrorism of Irish origin was obtrusive, and I provided a
locus classicus
for the permanence of the provisional by introducing the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act, which is still on the Statute Book nineteen years later.

As President of the European Commission three years later I had dealings with three Taoiseachs, paid a dozen or more visits to Ireland, and leant over backwards, as any British President should have done, to cultivate my Dublin relationships and to encourage and enjoy the Irish pleasure at leap-frogging over Britain's semi-detachment into the mainstream of full European commitment. I did not find this difficult, for my natural prejudices, such as they are, are much more green than orange. I am a poor unionist, believing intuitively that even Paisley and Haughey are better at dealing with each other than the English are with either.

This does not stem from any condescending view that the Irish should be left to work off their perverse provincialism on each other. Indeed, on the early occasions when I met Garret FitzGerald it was his cosmopolitanism which, together with his charm, most struck me. It was he who made me feel provincial. I remember a day in Strasbourg for the opening by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing of the new European Parliament building, which in fact
belonged to the Council of Europe and was merely graciously loaned to the Parliament. FitzGerald, as Irish Foreign Minister, was currently president of the Council of Europe's ministerial group. After a Strasbourg civic banquet he responded to Mayor Pflimlin's somewhat florid oratory with an elegance of French diction that matched the style of the eighteenth-century Hôtel de Ville. At the afternoon ceremony, again in French, he was the only speaker who was neither too long (like Giscard) nor too fractured (like me). There, I thought, spoke the Ireland of Joyce and Synge and the Countess Markiewicz.

Nevertheless, the Dublin political and official world is one that is very close-knit and interbred, and FitzGerald was born and brought up at the centre of it, even though his mother was an Ulster Protestant, but one so dedicated to the Nationalist cause that she took the anti-Treaty side in the great Irish split of 1922 and deprecated her husband's participation in the first government of the Irish Free State under W. T. Cosgrave. Desmond FitzGerald, the husband and father, was half poet and half politician, with a cast of feature and cut of hair somewhat reminiscent of a less forceful Hugh Gaitskell, who as Minister of External Affairs presented the Free State's application to join the League of Nations in 1923, but who subsequently faded as a leading politician.

He brought up Garret FitzGerald (who was the youngest of a large family) in a large but socially indeterminate house on the southern edge of Dublin, sent him to a good Jesuit school and on to University College, Dublin, which as part of the National University was by the 1940s as much the core of Dublin's future intellectual and political life as the relatively alien Trinity College, Dublin, was its topographical core. Indeed my impression throughout these memoirs is that UCD was as effective in putting FitzGerald in the middle of a magic circle as ever Eton was in Harold Macmillan's heyday. It was FitzGerald's peculiar strength that while he was completely at home within this circle he never allowed himself to be bounded by it or to absorb too much of its values.

His first job was good training for not being narrowly bounded. He joined Aer Lingus and worked out the first schedules
of the nascent airline. This gave him a continuing familiarity with timetables which enabled him to confound his Russian hosts on a first visit as Foreign Minister during a logistical discussion of his provincial tour by pointing out that the 4.15 for Baku would just make it possible to catch the 7.30 to Irkutsk. In the interval, however, his twelve years with Aer Lingus had been followed by a sixteen-year abstention from flying. This should not be damagingly attributed to the inside knowledge he has acquired. It was in deference to the dislike for flying machines of his wife, to whose wishes and wisdom he constantly pays deserved regard.

When he became Foreign Minister in 1973 both FitzGeralds had to change their habits. The time when Ernest Bevin could be a sea-travel-only Foreign Secretary was twenty years past, apart from the fact that it would have been particularly irritating for an Irish minister to have to go everywhere through London. The sacrifice was well worthwhile, for FitzGerald's four years as Foreign Minister stand equal in my view to his two periods (one of nine months, the other of four years) as Taoiseach. In the higher office he tried to lay to rest more of the ghosts of Irish history than anyone for three hundred years, showed imaginative cross-border sympathy, moved the South away from the limitations of a confessional state, and after infinite patience got the limited achievement of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. But as Foreign Minister he made Ireland not merely an official but an integral part of the European Community, an honorary member of the somewhat exclusive club of the original six. His conduct of the Irish Presidency, which came within two years of joining, was a model example of triumphing over the limitations of small-power resources to exercise skilled and authoritative diplomacy. This was not the motive, but FitzGerald succeeded in making London look peripheral to Europe, while Dublin was metropolitan.

These two chapters of his life add up to major achievements of statesmanship, not seriously marred by an engaging tactical ineptitude in domestic politics. FitzGerald as Taoiseach was manifestly a goldfish of international class forced to swim in a fairly small bowl. But whereas most people in these circumstances
ineffectively bang their fins against the glass, it was his peculiar achievement that he seemed to make the bowl bigger, certainly temporarily for himself and to some extent permanently by his broadening of the horizons of Ireland and his strengthening of its international position.

This was a speech delivered at the eightieth birthday party of Professor Galbraith in the Century Club, New York, on 13 October 1988.

George Ball was ironically eloquent about Kenneth Galbraith's humility. But I do not think that he has ever emulated the feat of an English friend of mine, an earl, a socialist, the father of a notable brood of writers, who produced a quasi-religious book which was actually entitled
Humility,
who walked down Piccadilly, looked at the display in Hatchard's bookshop, went in, sent for the manager, and demanded, ‘Why have you not got my book on
Humility
in the window?'