Portraits and Miniatures Read online

  ROY JENKINS

  PORTRAITS

  AND

  MINIATURES

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  R. A. Butler

  Aneurin Bevan

  Iain Macleod

  Dean Acheson

  Konrad Adenauer

  Charles de Gaulle

  John Henry Newman and the Idea of a University

  Changing Patterns of Leadership: From Asquith via Baldwin

  and Attlee to Margaret Thatcher

  An Oxford View of Cambridge

  Glasgow’s Place in the Cities of the World

  The Duke’s Children: High Victorian Trollope

  Two Hundred Years of The Times

  Bologna’s Birthday

  Anniversaries in Pall Mall

  Ten Pieces of Wine Nonsense

  Should Politicians Know History?

  Oxford’s Appeal to Americans

  The British University Pattern

  A Selection of Political Biographies

  The Maxim Gun of the English Language

  Croquet Taken Too Seriously

  Leopold Amery

  David Astor and the Observer

  Beaverbrook

  Richard Crossman

  Garret FitzGerald

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Valéry Giscard d’Estaing

  François Guizot

  Nigel Lawson

  Selwyn Lloyd

  The Longfords

  François Mitterrand

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  Cecil Parkinson

  Enoch Powell

  Andrei Sakharov

  Herbert Samuel

  Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber

  John Simon

  G. M. Trevelyan

  Lord Young of Graffham

  Harold Wilson

  Introduction

  The Core of this book is formed by the six medium-length portraits, three British and three foreign, with which it opens. They were conceived as a sequel to a somewhat larger and longer group of profiles which I wrote twenty years ago for three-part publication in The Times and which subsequently constituted a 1974 book entitled Nine Men of Power.

  The nine I chose then were Ernest Bevin, Maynard Keynes, Stafford Cripps, Edward Halifax, Hugh Gaitskell, Léon Blum, Adlai Stevenson, Robert Kennedy, and Senator (Joe the bad rather than Eugene the good) McCarthy. McCarthy was the black joker in the pack, for he was the only one of the nine for whom I did not have considerable respect and/or sympathy. For him I had none, but I did not think that this mattered in the case of one limited length essay, although I would regard it as depressing, almost corrupting, to spend several years of one’s life writing a full book about someone for whom it was possible to feel no empathy.

  This time there is no black joker. The three British politicians I chose as front-rank figures about whom I had never written anything substantial before. From Bevan I had been divided during the last ten years of his life by Labour Party tribal disputes, but in retrospect wished that I had known him better and felt that I ought now to be able to look at him free of these old prejudices. In Macleod’s case too my judgement of him at the end of his life, although not I think earlier or subsequently, had been clouded by the fact that he was my ‘shadow’ when I was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and one who was made unusually partisan by a combination of pain and impatience, feeling that office was the only worthwhile experience in politics and that time was running out for him. There was no comparable difficulty with Butler. I had always liked and been amused by him since 1949 when I first came to know him. I might have doubted whether he had the cold steel which is mostly necessary to become Prime Minister, but I found it easy to sympathize with this deficiency.

  Adenauer and de Gaulle were obviously the two dominant leaders of continental Europe in the twenty years after the war. The question was whether they were not exhausted seams to mine. In the case of Adenauer in particular, however, any such hesitations soon disappeared. Except for German specialists the history of the early years of the Federal Republic has become unfamiliar to a British audience, and this applies still more strongly to Adenauer’s Weimar Republic activities and wartime experiences. Even with de Gaulle there is a considerable fog of forgetfulness over anything before the beginning of the Fifth Republic in 1959 and much opportunity, particularly following the English publication of Lacouture’s biography, for reappraisal even after that. Acheson was sharp about Britain’s post-imperial lack of direction (a deficiency we have hardly repaired thirty-five years after he made his ‘not found a role’ remark), but as first Under-Secretary and then Secretary of State under Truman he had done more than anyone else to make effective Ernest Bevin’s central foreign policy aim for getting America firmly committed to European security and prosperity. He was also an interesting example of the species of East Coast pro-consular gentlemen, now nearly extinct, who ran American foreign policy in the plenitude of their country’s power.

  Next there are two essays which started life as full-length lectures. The first is on Cardinal John Henry Newman and his 1852 Dublin discourses which became a book under the title of The Idea of a University, one of the most resonant of all nineteenth-century titles. This was part of a series of six Oxford 1990 lectures to mark the centenary of Newman’s death, and was delivered in the Examination Schools of the University with which he is indelibly associated despite the fact that he never saw it (except from the Birmingham to London train) between 1846 and 1877. My difficulty here was that all the other five lecturers were considerable Newman experts, whereas I started almost from scratch. Newman, however, was such a star, still more dazzling than pious in my view, that he easily drew me into an enthusiastic attempt to repair my deficiency.

  The second of these lecture/essays, first prepared for the Institute of Contemporary History, was a comparison between the styles of government of four long-serving twentieth-century Prime Ministers, Asquith, Baldwin, Attlee and Lady Thatcher. Of the first three of this quartet I had, at roughly twenty-year intervals, written biographies.

  The next section contains twelve pieces which are not about individuals. Two of these also began as lectures. An Oxford View of Cambridge for my 1988 Rede Lecture foray into the Cambridge Senate House. Glasgow Amongst the Cities of the World, an encomium prepared for that Scottish metropolis’s 1990 year as European City of Culture. This however was well after I ceased to seek the franchise of its citizens and should therefore be interpreted as a true tribute rather than as vote-seeking flattery.

  Amongst the others in this section are an introduction to the Trollope Society’s ‘edition of one of its eponym’s late political novels, a historical review of The Times, its proprietors, editors and policies, written for its bi-centenary; a socio-architectural view of Pall Mall clubs based on anniversary speeches made at two of them; and a couple of frivolous pieces about wine and croquet. There is also a piece, first given as a speech at the Library of Congress in Washington, about the decline of historical knowledge amongst politicians, and an appraisal of whether this matters.

  In the third section there are twenty-two ‘miniatures’, based mostly on Observer book reviews (although with a few from other stables) of recently published biographies or autobiographies. Seven of these are of more or less contemporary British politicians, and five of their dead predecessors. But there is also a clutch of reviews (done appropriately for The European) of Paris-published books, a category which is now little noticed in England - less so I think than sixty or so years ago - about dead or living Frenchmen: Guizot, Giscard, Mitterrand and J. J. Servan-Schreiber. Sakharov, G. M. Trevelyan, Garret FitzGerald and John Kenneth Galbraith (this an eightieth-birthday speech rather than a review) also appear, as
do two sharply contrasting moulders of sharply contrasting newspapers, Beaverbrook and David Astor.

  Apart from the six long opening essays, written as in 1971-4 for The Times, I cannot claim that there are great sinews of logic in the choice. What is consistent, however, is that all the subjects considerably interested me at the time I wrote about them, and continue so to do. And that this, while it is not a guarantee of interesting others, is at least a necessary qualification for hoping to do so.

  Roy Jenkins

  East Hendred

  December 1992

  R. A. Butler

  Although Miles away from being ‘a great man’ in the sense epitomized by the inner certainties of a General de Gaulle, Rab Butler was in many ways the most intriguing British political personality of those born since 1900. This stems from his ambiguity of character, from the paradoxes of his career and style, and from the fact that he was a richly comic figure, around whom anecdotes and aphorisms clustered, who was also capable of being extremely and intentionally funny himself.

  He was most famous for not becoming Prime Minister. There have been other renowned ‘near-misses’ - Austen Chamberlain, George Nathaniel Curzon, even Hugh Gaitskell - but no one quite rivalled Rab in making a métier out of being pipped at the post. He is also credited (semi-apocryphally) with sustaining Anthony Eden, one of the seven heads of government under whom he served, with an unforgettable declaration of support: ‘He is the best Prime Minister we have.’ This phrase, which rang around the political world, neatly illustrated nearly all the attributes possessed by Butler and previously described. But it missed out one, which was his gift for quiet constructive statesmanship. By his Education Act of 1944, at once boldly conceived and skilfully engineered, his deft tenure of the Exchequer in the early 1950s, and his frequent provision of the administrative cement which held disintegrating governments together, he showed himself a great public servant, with, for most of his career, some streaks of vision as well.

  Amongst his paradoxes were his devotion to public life without the steel of ultimate ambition; his assuming the mantle of a deep-rooted Essex man, while representing in Conservative politics the antithesis of the values which have now come to be associated with that maligned county; and of becoming in some ways a grander grandee than Macmillan, because a less self-conscious one, without having a drop of non-bourgeois blood in his veins.

  As a very young man Butler had been for a year a teaching fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, but from his resignation there following his marriage into Courtauld wealth in 1926 until his forty-year-later somewhat weary return to Cambridge, this time to the splendour of the Master’s Lodge at Trinity, his attention never flickered away from the bright light of politics, and above all from the politics of office. He was in the House of Commons for thirty-six years and for no less than twenty-six of them in a government of one sort or another. He was the quintessential front bench insider politician. He once (in 1949) said to me with typically feline indiscretion: ‘The trouble with Anthony [Eden] is that he has no intellectual interests.’ Rab liked some non-political moorings such as his presidency of the Royal Society of Literature or the possession of his father-in-law’s fine collection of French Impressionist paintings, but it never seriously occurred to him to make a life away from politics or even away from office. His career went through a lot of fluctuations, and he suffered many indignities at the hands of both Eden and Macmillan. But he never responded to them by deciding he had had enough, or even with the serious threat of resignation. It was always better to be in than out.

  His marriage gave him not only his wealth but his Essex roots. Samuel Courtauld settled £5000 a year tax free upon him, which was a very considerable income in 1926. He also subsequently gave him Stanstead Hall, a substantial north Essex country mansion, into which he moved in 1934. On top of this he left him Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire, which Butler eventually sold to the royal family as a residence for Princess Anne, as well as a life interest in the pictures, with the residue of his fortune going to Sydney Butler, Rab’s first wife until her death in 1954 and Courtauld’s only child. The nomination to the Saffron Walden Conservative candidature, which Rab secured at the age of twenty-four and which gave him a secure constituency for four decades, although its safeness never prevented him cultivating it with skill and assiduity, also came through the Courtauld connection. And when he married again in 1959, as the result of a fine middle-aged romance about which his widow has written with a moving vividness, it was to another Courtauld, this time by marriage, who lived in another, although smaller, Essex country house in which he eventually finished his days.

  With Stanstead Hall, a substantial Westminster house in Smith Square and plenty of money to keep up both of them he lived in pre-war days on a scale that was lavish without being flamboyant. In 1935 he achieved the accolade of being host at Stanstead to a great Conservative fête with all the Essex MPs except for Churchill on the platform and Stanley Baldwin as the principal speaker and his guest for the weekend. Butler’s cup was made more overflowing by the fact that Baldwin, whom he insisted to the end of his life was the one of his seven Prime Ministers to whom he felt closest, assured him at the railway station on departure that his squirearchal way of life would underpin his political balance and future.

  Rab’s later grandeur, however, came to be based much more on his idiosyncratic indifference to appearance or discretion than to the affluence of his way of life. Mollie Butler (his second wife) described him as having an inherent distinction of appearance because he was tiré à quatre épingles. About the inherent distinction I agree, while regarding the use of that French phrase, which I think can best be translated as ‘in band box condition’, as clear evidence of the blindness of love. Rab could look a notable, even a superior figure with his cheeks half-shaven and with dandruff spilling on the shoulders of a shabby suit, but what he certainly could not do, for at least the last twenty years of his life, was win a competition for glossiness. He looked more like the Lord Derby of the 1870s, whom Sir Charles Dilke at first mistook for a tramp when he unexpectedly met him in a Surrey country lane, than like, shall we say, Lord (Cecil) Parkinson.

  I find more convincing shafts of illumination in two anecdotes about Rab’s year as Foreign Secretary, the last act of his twenty-six-year tour of half the departments of Whitehall. Sir Nicholas Henderson, his principal private secretary for this final phase, noticed on a foreign tour that Rab was wearing his none-too-spotless dinner-jacket trousers at breakfast, although with an ordinary coat above them. He hesitantly drew attention to this possible absent-mindedness but was assured by the Secretary of State that it was intentional and due to the downy wisdom he had acquired over many years. ‘I generally find it a wise precaution,’ he said. ‘You never know abroad how much time you have to spare before dinner.’

  The second relates to an attempt by Lyndon Johnson half to bully and half to pour obloquy on Rab’s head. The British Government were irritating Washington by permitting the sale of Leyland buses to Cuba. Butler, paying a pre-arranged White House visit, was harangued by Johnson, who thought he could strengthen his point by pulling out a wad of dollar bills, fingering them derisively as though he might be about to toss them at Rab, and suggesting needlingly that if Britain was too hard up to behave as a proper member of the Western Alliance she should none the less cancel the contract and send the bill for compensation to LBJ’s Texas estate office. The culprit was intended to slink out in shame, with head bowed and his tail between his legs. No doubt Rab did leave with his head bowed, for that was its habitual posture. But so far from ingesting shame he regaled many a dinner party for months to come with accounts of the President’s extraordinary mixture of menace, vulgarity and naïveté, chortling and gurgling with pleasure as he further embellished each attempt to make him feel humiliated.

  Yet in this cultural clash, while Butler represented the forces of urbane civilized superiority and Johnson the raw brashness of the insecure arriviste, i
t was also the case that Rab was the natural servant of the state and LBJ the natural ruler. The Texan who clawed his way into the US Senate and then to the vice-presidency which became the presidency would never have let power slip three times through his hands in the way that Rab did.

  Butler’s provenance was half academic and half Indian public service. His father was in India for thirty-seven years, ending as Governor of the Central Provinces, before coming back first as Lieutenant-Governor of the Isle of Man and then as Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. But his great-uncle, Henry Montagu Butler, had been a dominating headmaster of Harrow and then Master of Trinity (in both of which institutions he ironically succeeded in flattening the intellectual enthusiasm of Rab’s hero Stanley Baldwin) from 1859 to 1918. Rab’s mother was a Miss Smith of Edinburgh, whose father had been editor of the Calcutta Statesman and one of whose brothers was Principal of Aberdeen University as well as a Moderator of the Church of Scotland, while another had been private secretary to the Viceroy. There was a hint of eighteenth-century Cornish parliamentary gentry in his father’s family, but the aristocratic influence was minimal, although the top of the upper-middle-class status was assured and constant. Rab’s father and three of his brothers became knights, although only the least academically regarded one made any money. Wealth was indeed a somewhat alien concept, and Sir Montagu Butler was distinctly shocked by the amount of money that Sam Courtauld settled on Rab. Although this separated him from the lifestyle of his parents and other forebears, making him at once broad-acred and more metropolitan, as well as less at home in the comfortable villas of the Cambridge academic clans, he remained a dutiful and affectionate son. I would guess he remained closer to similar parents than Maynard Keynes had done twenty years earlier.

  As a young Member of Parliament Butler pursued a course of great party rectitude. Almost his first action to attract any public notice was a May 1930 anti-Harold Macmillan letter to The Times, of which he was the author, but for which he organized three other MP signatories as well as himself. Oswald Mosley had just resigned from the Labour Government and issued a manifesto of economic and constitutional innovation against the hidebound complacency which seemed to be the approach of both the main parties to unemployment and other evils. It was the beginning of the road that was to lead Mosley to the British Union of Fascists, but this was at first by no means the obvious direction, and many respectable people, from Harold Nicolson to Aneurin Bevan, were attracted by his ideas. So was Macmillan, who had written to The Times supporting Mosley’s call for a change in the rules of politics. ‘… if these [existing] rules are to be permanently enforced, perhaps a good many of us will feel it is hardly worth bothering to play at all’, Macmillan rather rashly wrote. The Butler-drafted reply was intended both as a put-down and as a warning off the grass, and from the point of view of party orthodoxy was neatly done: ‘When a player starts complaining “that it is hardly worth bothering to play” the game at all it is usually the player, and not the game, who is at fault. It is then usually advisable for the player to seek a new field for his recreation and a pastime more suited to his talents.’ Macmillan stood rebuked by the prefects, who no doubt hoped the headmaster would be pleased, for lack of proper school spirit.