Portraits and Miniatures (42 page)

Then we have forty pages that cover everything from the author's birth in 1931 to his entry into active Conservative politics a third of a century later. He began in the small railway junction town of Carnforth (where Gladstone was anxious to discover the politics of the stationmaster after the Queen's famous
en clair
telegram on the murder of Gordon - ‘these news are too dreadful' - had passed through that functionary's hands). Parkinson does
not tell us about this, being more concerned in those days with his membership of the Labour League of Youth than with high Victorian politics. He writes frankly and well about this period, although he allows his parents to remain very shadowy figures.

In 1952, having just attended as a Bevanite supporter the most blood-letting of all Labour Party Conferences at Morecambe, he went to Cambridge, and during three years in that university underwent an unexplained transformation from slightly truculent left-winger to excessively clean-cut runner and glee-singer who was happy to become a management trainee with the Metal Box Company. From there he elided into being a City accountant, a member of the Hertfordshire bourgeoisie, and a natural and neighbourly Conservative activist.

The rest of the book, except for a rather dignified six pages (‘manly' is the faintly mocking adjective which I cannot get out of my mind) about his parental and matrimonial troubles, is all politics, and politics seen very much from the level of the plain and not from the high peaks of questioning thought.

It is autobiography by manifesto, with party conferences (not the fratricide of Morecambe, which is left far behind, but the black ties of the Conservative agents' dinner and the gratifying embarrassment of the standing ovations) erected into stations of the cross. It was Blackpool that made him in 1981 when he had become party chairman, but it was also Blackpool that was the scene of his breaking in 1983, when he honourably and quickly decided that he should not go on as a liability to Mrs Thatcher. And 1990 at Brighton - ‘my final speech to a party conference' - was sufficiently
l'ultima lacrima
that it required extensive quotation, rarely a good recipe for memoirs.

The interesting question that remains is what was it that turned Cecil Parkinson, the railwayman's left-wing son from Lancashire, into the most perfectly attuned to the Home Counties machine politics of the Conservative Party of any of his contemporaries. He notes with faint worry that Willie Whitelaw, whom he half admires, hated being chairman of the party, whereas he loved it. (Rab Butler also disliked it, but he is a bit outside Parkinson's historical sweep.) And it must be stressed that
Parkinson did not, in my view, love the Conservative Party because he could not find anything else to love or any other role to perform successfully. The evidence from this book as from elsewhere suggests that he was a competent departmental minister, a bit dogged by dogma, but not more.

Parkinson's nearest rival for Conservative Associations' favourite of the decade was, I suppose, the man whom he constantly proclaims as his friend, Norman Tebbit. Yet Tebbit, more abrasive, more original and, in a curious way, more intellectual than Parkinson, is not really the man for leafy suburban garden fêtes in the way that is Parkinson. Tebbit is to be wheeled out occasionally for big and rough jobs, but not to be wasted. He is of course Essex man in a way that Parkinson is not. But while Essex man may be alleged to have provided the marginal votes of Thatcherism it is Hertfordshire man who has the more central position on the M25 and is cosier for the chairmen, the treasurers and the ladies' sections.

Politics have moved on, and Cecil Parkinson has not been so narrowly confined that he cannot enjoy the Bahamas, golf and skiing. Nevertheless, his book reminds me of a forty-year-old story of a politically obsessed Labour MP who on a delegation visit to Switzerland was shown a breathtaking view of the Matterhorn and said, ‘Ee, I wouldn't like to go canvassing up there.'

Parkinson's canvassing days and indeed his conferencing roller coaster days of triumph and setback are as much over as are mine. But I think he will have a niche in history that will have nothing to do with his troubles. He may well look in retrospect as quintessential a figure of the 1980s as was, say, George Brown of the 1960s or Selwyn Lloyd of the 1950s.

The Lives of Enoch Powell
by Patrick Cosgrave (The Bodley Head), reviewed by me in the
Observer
in April 1989.

The Central thesis of a 1989 biography of Enoch Powell is that he alone and single-handed determined the results of two general elections: by his last-minute endorsement of Conservatism in 1970 he created the Heath Government, and by his anti-European ‘vote Labour' speech in the February 1974 campaign he snatched away the power that he had reluctantly given and allowed Wilson his ‘tit-for-tat with Teddy Heath'.

Hyperbole apart, this is an odd claim in a hagiographic biography, for these were the two most perverse and deleterious election results in recent British history. In 1970 Labour deserved to win and it would have been better both for its future as a party of government and for British interests in Europe had it done so. In 1974, by contrast, Labour did not deserve to win, Harold Wilson had little idea what to do with his victory once he had achieved it, and the course was set for both the weak leadership and the trade union excesses of the late 1970s which between them destroyed one of the two best instruments of left-of-centre government in the world (the other was the Brandt/Schmidt SPD) since Roosevelt's Democratic Party.

All this can of course be given some teleological justification by saying that it was a necessary vale of sorrows on the way to the sunny uplands of Thatcherism. But this will not wholly do, for Mr Powell is by no means a strict enough Thatcherite, and I am not sure that Mr Cosgrave is either.

However, Enoch Powell's role as an architect of misfortune is not nearly as strong as Cosgrave presents it, not because the misfortunes did not occur, but because he was far less in control
than this implies. His key 1970 speech did not take place until thirty-six hours before the poll, and it was for him in unusually convoluted terms. It requires a great deal of faith in the immanent power of every word of the hero to believe that these late words bestowed victory on Mr Heath. I think two jumbo jets in the May trade figures had more to do with it. And the most that Powell did was to cease during that campaign to be quite as much of a nuisance to Heath as he had been during the latter's not very skilful five years as leader of the opposition.

In 1974 Powell's ‘vote Labour' appeal was at least delivered so as to leave a little more time for it to sink in, and there was certainly something very odd that happened at the end of the campaign to Conservative expectations, particularly in the West Midlands. But there was a mismatch between Powell's power and his objective. His power sprang from the populist nature of his views on immigration. But he could not in his right mind have wished to shift votes to Labour on that issue. Heath might be bad from this point of view, but Wilson was worse. What made him want to move votes was the European issue, where his conviction was passionate but based on abstract and highly intellectualized views about sovereignty and the nature of national identity.

Inevitably there was some difficulty about using the shovel for a task different from the purpose for which it had been made. In any event he was markedly unsuccessful a year later in persuading Tories to vote ‘no' in the European referendum. I find it difficult to believe that they had found it easier a year earlier to accept his still more jolting advice to vote Labour on the issue.

The paradox of Cosgrave's book is that he is better on Enoch Powell as an extraordinary and interesting man than he is upon him as a politician. It is a paradox because the author is a devout political follower who is prepared to defend even the most perverse of his subject's swoops as being yet another example of his ‘logic and honour', while he appears to find some of his personal idiosyncrasies as mysterious as do others.

Even so, the book is not at all bad politically until it comes to the last hundred pages, when for some inexplicable reason (unless it be the dead hand of Ulster) it goes to pieces. It then becomes
inaccurate (a whole constitutional theory is created upon Barbara Castle's attempt to reform industrial relations in 1967, a year in which she was still Minister of Transport, and even the month of the European referendum is wrongly stated), without sense of proportion (there are pages on an allegedly plot-sustaining academic interview given by some obscure official in the Northern Ireland Office), inconsequential, and cloying. ‘Look upon him. Learn from him. You will not see his like again,' as the concluding passage of the book is the language of monuments, not of rational biography of someone who happily is still alive.

Three-quarters of the book, however, is much better than this. It is very well written in a measured yet gripping tone with a perfectly acceptable degree of partisanship which avoids both shrillness and the need to decry the hero's opponents. Occasionally a fairly breathtaking statement is slipped in, as when he says that there have been only two occasions when politicians have spoken with a full moral authority this century: the first was Churchill in 1940 and the second was Powell in 1970, this second authority stemming, as far as I can follow the argument, from the popular response to the Birmingham ‘River Tiber foaming with much blood' speech in 1968. This is odd, for while there are some things in this book and outside it that have made me think more highly of Enoch Powell than I did twenty years ago, that speech still seems to me a tawdry affair, stuffed with cheap sentiment and demagogic intent.

Yet, as Powell has always been such a contradictory figure, that has not been incompatible with fastidious scholarship and noble actions. The meticulousness of his scholarship, the range of his knowledge, and the (maybe somewhat mechanical) quality of his linguistic skill all leave me gasping with a mixture of admiration and intimidation. So do his self-sufficiency and harsh self-discipline. When Powell went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1930 he worked, mostly shut up in his rooms, from 5.30 in the morning until 9.30 at night, and refused an invitation to dine from the Master's wife on the ground that he was too busy. He took an hour off for a walk each day, but did it unvaryingly to the station and back because that was the right distance.

In personal relations I find him as unpredictable as did Lady
Thomson of Trinity (for it was the great J. J. Thomson, the discoverer of the electron and the presiding genius who made the Cavendish Laboratory the world centre of experimental physics, who was then Master). I assume Powell has mostly deeply disapproved of me. But when I published a rather light biographical essay on Baldwin, he wrote a review that was not only very friendly but also the most perceptive of what I was trying to do. Equally at the Cambridge Union in 1984, after I had been ill for a couple of months, he suddenly launched into a public tribute that was way beyond the call of politeness. I was rather moved and thought it an appropriate peg on which to improve relations, for we had previously stalked past each other without acknowledgement in the corridors of the House of Commons. On the next occasion I made to speak. He stalked even more rigidly than usual.

This is based on a 1990
Observer
review of Sakharov's
Memoirs
(Hutchinson).

I Met Sakharov only once, in June 1989, six months before his death. He came to the Oxford Encaenia to receive an honorary degree. I did not alas sit next to him at the luncheon. I did, however, drive him home in the evening, but by then he had become too tired to manage much English and we did not have an interpreter. I regretted at the time that I did not have more talk with him. Now, having read his
Memoirs,
I do so a great deal more. Although inelegantly constructed and sometimes written like a catalogue, parts of this massive autobiography give Sakharov a greater vividness for me than either his fame or his presence did fifteen months ago.

The early part of the book, broadly the first eighteen chapters (out of fifty), which takes us through the first four decades of his life in the Russia of Stalin and Khrushchev, is the best. This was all before the death of his first wife and his second marriage to the formidable but adored Elena Bonner, before any significant break between him and the Soviet establishment, and before his world fame as a dissident and protector of dissidents. It is essentially the story of Sakharov's childhood and education as a core product of the liberal intelligentsia which somehow persisted, sometimes hazardously but also often patriotically and respectfully, in Stalinist Russia, and then of his crucial and undismayed contribution to the making of the Soviet H-bomb.

Sakharov came of a background as intellectually rarefied and well educated as Keynes or a member of the great Cambridge scientific cousinage. There is indeed a remarkable symmetry between the relationship of his intellect to that of his father, a physicist and talented amateur pianist who was the author of a
successful scientific text book, and that of Maynard Keynes with his father, John Neville Keynes, who was Registrary of the University of Cambridge and nearly became Professor of Political Economy at Oxford. Sakharov had a less physically urbane early life than did Keynes (Russia in 1941-5 in particular was a rougher place than Edwardian Cambridge) but he was just as immersed in Pushkin and Tolstoy as Keynes came to be in Bloomsbury.

Sakharov then spent twenty years (from 1948-68) making thermonuclear weapons. During this period he had few doubts about the work. At first he might have wished to assist Soviet nuclear superiority. In 1953, when Stalin died, he wrote: ‘I am under the influence of a great man's death. I am thinking of his humanity.' Then he developed a more sophisticated theory of nuclear balance. He believed in MAD (mutual assured destruction) and very sensibly became an opponent of anything that made it more difficult to achieve, from anti-ballistic missiles to SDI. But it was on the nuclear test issue that he began his break with the military-industrial complex, which perhaps even more in the Soviet Union than in America melded seamlessly into political power.