The Light’s on at Signpost

by George MacDonald Fraser

  Our conversation came back to me when I heard the news of his sudden death in Malta; it reached me in hospital, where I was recovering from a heart attack of my own. At such times one naturally conjures up memories: I saw him again, sweeping his Musketeer cloak round his shoulders and telling Frank Finlay to “kill the fellow and come after us”; sitting, sad and heavy, with Michael York, intoning in that beautiful voice “There was a man once…”; pronouncing sentence of death on Faye Dunaway with a sudden catch in his throat; bellowing a welcome with that gleaming grin through his beard when we met again in Spain—and our final meeting, at the Return of the Musketeers premiere, when he told me he was making Treasure Island with Charlton Heston: “I’m playing Billy Bones, playing him as a Jock, what d’you think?” I said I was sure Stevenson would have had no objection.

  And for some reason his last words to me after the premiere have stuck in my memory: “Right, George, you know where the sausage rolls are?” before the photographers hauled him away to pose, bearded and beaming and slightly dishevelled.

  I was lucky to get the chance to write parts for him; very lucky indeed. He was a remarkable screen presence, and among those for whom I’ve been privileged to write, he ranks with any, Heston, Harrison, Scott, Lee, Brando, and the rest.

  Last thought: if he had been born twenty years earlier, what a war he might have had, for he was the very marrow of those mad, outrageous, insubordinate subalterns one encountered now and then in the forties, wild men frequently in trouble, admired almost to worship by their platoons who thought them hell of a fellows, bull-at-a-gate reckless in the hour of battle, tolerated by an Army that knew when it was well off and when to turn a blind eye, and all too often ending up as names carved in marble. I think Oliver might have been such a one; in his own words, he was true blue.

  * There had been a minor crisis when Equity had objected to Henry Cooper playing an acting role, since he wasn’t a member, but it was smoothed over and he gave an excellent performance.

  * Oliver certainly had an impressive physique, but I was told that when he managed to get hold of the shirt worn by Errol Flynn in the 1937 version of The Prince and the Pauper, he found to his astonishment that it was too big for him.

  ANGRY OLD MAN 4

  The Day of the Pygmies

  THERE MAY HAVE BEEN worse governments in our history than New Labour, but offhand I can’t think of one. Ethelred the Unready was less of a ditherer, Henry VI was useless but never actually had much chance to govern, Tumbledown Dick Cromwell at least made way for the Restoration, and James II had the sense to know when he wasn’t wanted. Which leaves us with Lord North, Clement Attlee, and Heath’s railroaders of the early seventies who not only brought about the European fiasco, but clashed disastrously with the miners, reduced us to a three-day week, and gave me the humbling experience of flying out from a power-cut London where people were reduced to pinching candle-ends in darkened restaurants, and arriving in a Moscow ablaze with light. It takes a real talent for disaster to go one worse than Communist Russia.

  But bad as these were, they didn’t have the all-embracing, widespread incompetence, fuelled by conceit and ignorance, of New Labour, who rocketed to power on the strength of an Andy Pandy grin, a Tory administration which had long outstayed its welcome, and a gullible electorate who weren’t all old enough to know how awful Labour government invariably is. To be fair, New Labour has managed the economy well, thanks to Gordon Brown, a novelty among Labour Chancellors in that he knew what he was doing, and in mitigation it has to be said that the Blair Government has not been notably lucky.

  Even so, one searches our annals in vain for a record of bungling, dogma-driven amateurism to match that of the unhappy crew who in a mere five years achieved the atrocious mess of Kosovo, the mishandling of Scottish and Welsh devolution, the shameful episode of Pinochet, the hypocrisy displayed over Clause 28, the fox-hunting farce, the sleaze which (unlike the Tories’ back-bench scandals) was at the heart of government, the failure (shared by their predecessors) to stand up to Brussels, the mendacity of describing a surrender to terrorism as a “peace process”, the misguided and unnecessary intervention in Afghanistan, the weak reliance on unelected advisers, and the general impression given of middle-aged boys hopelessly out of their depth in a man’s job…it’s quite a catalogue. But all pales into comparative insignificance beside the irreparable wrecking of the Constitution.

  No doubt there was a case, if something better could be devised, for reforming the Lords, but there was no excuse for New Labour’s undisciplined rush to abolish the only legislative body in the world that could truly be called independent—unbound by party discipline, free to ignore the whips, fearful of no leader’s displeasure, or of deselection. None of which, of course, endeared it to a premier impatient of the restraints of Parliament, who has shown disturbing dictatorial tendencies.* He undid at a stroke a Constitution it had taken a thousand years to build, through civil war, revolution, and national peril, breaking it like a petulant child with a toy he doesn’t like.

  A sensible reformer would have gone about it warily, taking into account, among other things, that the House of Lords embodied probably a greater variety of expertise, knowledge, experience, and talent than any other political assembly on earth. Name a calling, a profession, a qualification academic or practical, and you would likely find it in the old Lords, simply because it was composed not of politicians fit only for politics, but of people who lived and worked in the real world. Privileged indeed, aristocratic relics in some cases, but infinitely preferable to a House packed with cronies and placemen, or an elected assembly of party hacks who couldn’t get into the Commons or the European Parliament. For the time being at least the Lords should have been left alone; it might have been frustrating for a Labour government to have an upper house right of centre, but better that than the destruction of an admitted anachronism which was, paradoxically, a true bulwark of democracy. It was a long time since the Lords had been the Tory Party asleep; its restraints on the Commons more often than not had the approval of the country, however much they might infuriate the Left.

  But if the reforming (or rather, the deforming) of the Lords was New Labour’s most wicked act of mischief in its first term, it at least did not make me ashamed to be British—something I wouldn’t have thought possible. New Labour managed it, dishonouring my country and its people by behaving like savages and trying to pretend that they were doing something noble.

  I’m talking about Kosovo, a war crime by any standards, for which, in a civilised world, the Labour leaders would have been arraigned and convicted, a brutal slaughter for which the pathetic excuse was that it was necessary because “we could not walk away from a humanitarian catastrophe”—the ethnic cleansing by Milosovic. So they created another humanitarian catastrophe every bit as ghastly, blowing up children with cluster bombs, hammering civilian convoys, blitzing Belgrade (and the Chinese Embassy), acting illegally in defiance of the UN while telling the world that their beastly campaign was just and necessary—and successful, when in fact it failed miserably, with our bombers hitting just 2 per cent of their targets.

  And these are the people who demanded the trial of Milosovic* while posing as saviours. To paraphrase Fluellen, I was not angry till that moment.

  It can be argued that a cabinet whose training for office consisted mostly of union politics and student agitation, could have no real conception of the horror they were inflicting. But that won’t wash. True, they had no experience of war, and lacked the imagination to put themselves in their victims’ shoes (supposing they gave them a thought), but inexperience and ignorance are no excuse in today’s well-informed, graphically reported world. They knew very well what they were doing, and did it regardless.

  No old soldier likes to use the word cowardice, but that was one of the most distasteful aspects of the Kosovo bombing. We know that had there been the least possibility of Serb retaliation the heroes of the White House and Westminste
r would never have dared military action—the genuine and justified fear they showed of engaging the Serbs on the ground told us all we needed to know about the repulsive poltroon of Pennsylvania Avenue, for whom the campaign was a heaven-sent distraction from the scandals of his presidency, and the worth of our own government spokesmen’s mock-Churchillian posturing. (There’s a thought to brighten your nightmares: suppose New Labour had been in office in 1940…)

  For some reason which escapes me, there seems to be a feeling now that we have a moral duty to interfere in foreign disputes, and tell other countries how they should govern themselves, especially if so-called democracy is thought to be in danger. This has led us into costly misadventures in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan—where we had absolutely no right to be, sticking our nose into other people’s quarrels—and in Sierra Leone. But not, curiously, in Zimbabwe, where our people were actually being attacked and dispossessed by a most unsavoury tyrant. But then, one perhaps shouldn’t expect New Labour to worry about ethnic Britons in Zimbabwe, whom they probably regard as the despised remnant of a colonial era, and therefore unworthy of concern.

  As to our “moral duty” elsewhere, isn’t it ironic that today’s liberals, who throw up their hands in horror at our interferences overseas in previous centuries, seem to approve of them in a modern context—no matter how unjustified, and no matter that they produce atrocities like the cluster bombs of Kosovo?

  If anything, the Pinochet affair was even more dishonourable than Kosovo, being a mixture of treachery and sheer bad manners. His arrest and detention were said to be justified by his crimes against humanity and the demand for extradition from a Spanish lawyer, but both in fact were irrelevant, and would not even have been considered if he had been a Mao or a Castro or even a Stalin with full Left-wing credentials, instead of a monster of the hated Right.

  The real issue was British honour, and New Labour’s failure to observe a code respected by the lowliest savage. Admit someone to your home, let him eat your metaphorical salt, and you are bound to treat him as a guest and see him safe. It doesn’t matter if he’s Hitler (or Stalin); if you found his crimes gut-churning (to use the felicitous expression of Mr Mandelson), you should have refused to admit him. To let him come in good faith and then seize him is simply despicable.

  In the event, as nasty a betrayal as we have seen since Quisling’s day turned out to be a monumental piece of bungling. For after months in which odium was heaped on the government, curious kangaroo procedures took place, Pinochet’s health and Chile’s political situation both deteriorated, vast amounts of time and money and credit were wasted—after all that, they had to let him go, having achieved nothing.

  No, I’m wrong, they had achieved something. They had ensured that a saying once proverbial and honoured in Latin America would vanish thenceforth, or be used only in sarcastic contempt: “Word of an Englishman”.

  I’ve confined myself to New Labour’s three worst offences because the others—the sleaze, the spin, the devolution fiasco, the foot-and-mouth debacle, the disgrace of having to send NHS patients abroad for treatment, the truckling to Brussels, the hypocrisy of waging war on Muslim terrorists while surrendering to Irish ones and even welcoming tham at No. 10 and Westminster—aren’t worth the waste of further words. The Pinochet affair was disgusting, the Kosovo atrocity enraging, and the assault on the Constitution appalling, but looking over this chapter my chief feeling is one of depressed regret. What a sorry tale to have to tell about a British government.

  And the most galling sorrow, to me and millions like me (not only my fellow-dinosaurs but more young folk than New Labour suspects) who love our country and its past and all that it has done for the world with a fervour and pride this government can never feel or understand, who hope and fear for its future, is that we can only stand helpless while unworthy nonentities spoil what generations of good and great men and women built and defended and died for. It’s hard to see the things you gave your life to broken, as Kipling said, and know that not all the tools in the world, worn-out or new, can build them up again.

  What a bitter irony that Britain, which fought so many giants and sent them packing, should be brought low by pygmies.

  Well, we must bristle our courage up, hope for better days for our children and grandchildren, and never lose sight of the glorious certainty that New Labour, too, shall pass away.

  * And incredible delusions of grandeur, if one can believe the extraordinary report that he said in a complimentary message to our troops: “No leader is better served by his armed forces than the British Prime Minister.” It is disturbing when a premier doesn’t realise that they are not his armed forces but the Queen’s and that while governments may make war and commit troops, those troops in the last analysis are the Queen’s men, owing loyalty to her, not to the government or its head. This relationship of the Services to the Crown is much misunderstood, but vitally important. Which is why the monarchy, not a presidential system, is essential to our security—but that’s another question.

  * Personally, I’d shoot the bastard out of hand, but I come from a generation often regarded as homicidal by the liberal Left, and sometimes even reviled as Fascist. Which reminds me, it was fascinating to hear the then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, denounce Milosovic, in fervent tones, as a Fascist; he actually said it twice, presumably in case people found it incredible, which it was. Milosovic is not and was not a Fascist; he is and was a Communist, and while the two are closer together than political rhetoric will ever admit, there is a difference. So why did Cook talk nonsense? Because to him, as to all socialists, “Communist” is not an insult in the same league as Fascist; indeed it is not an insult at all.

  INTERLUDE

  A Writer, a Soldier, a Comedian, a Football Hero, a Beverly Hillbilly

  PARENTAL-FILIAL jealousy is a phenomenon worth studying. It’s natural, I guess, for a son to resent, or at least feel overshadowed by, a famous parent: I remember Maurice Macmillan, son of Prime Minister Harold, addressing a luncheon in Glasgow chaired by young Hugh Fraser, son of the celebrated old bandit who bought Harrods, and saying that he sympathised with young Hugh because he too knew, none better, what it meant to be the son of a giant. It is particularly hard when the son finds himself in the same field of endeavour as Papa, and is less successful.

  But more interesting is the case of the jealous father—or perhaps I should say the father who sees his son as a competitor. Douglas Fairbanks, Senior, is said to have discouraged film producers from employing Douglas Junior because “there’s only one Fairbanks”. It sounds like desperation, and was rather pathetic, for the truth was that Fairbanks Senior, while highly regarded in his day, was a posturing little ham unfit to polish the sabre of his son, the one and only Rupert of Hentzau. And there have been others who have seemed uncomfortable at the thought that junior might outstrip them.

  I believe this was the case with Amis père et fils. My first encounter with them was when Martin, then literary editor of the New Statesman, asked me to do book reviews for him. I did, and we had a most happy relationship by correspondence. What was odd was that my work, not noticeably left of centre, was appearing in a famously socialist journal.

  “Which is probably why my son is no longer literary editor of the New Statesman”, was Kingsley’s comment when we met for the first time at a Sunday Express literary thrash, and I mentioned that I had worked for Martin. The younger Amis was at that time beginning to make a name as a novelist, and I remember Kingsley remarking “I wish him well,” and adding, as he reached for another drink: “Not too well.”

  An odd attitude, if you ask me. I wonder if, being a Scot, I have that Caledonian lust of ambition for my children, and want them to do well, and better than I have done. When my son was appointed Sheriff in Scotland, my only regret was that his grandfather—and my grandmother, to whom I always felt that I was a disappointment—were not there to see it. I fairly burst with pride, as I did when my other son somehow mastermind
ed those enormous dinosaurs into the Natural History Museum. Ah well, it will be said, they weren’t in your line, they weren’t competing.

  True, but hold the phone; my daughter is on her way to becoming one of the leading women novelists, with nine books behind her, a growing readership, and a professional talent which I didn’t have at her age. She owes me absolutely nothing except perhaps that because of my work she grew up with the idea that writing was the natural thing to do; her career has been a one-woman show, and if I have a hope in old age it is that she will knock the old man’s socks off and become a name in modern literature.

  I’m not trying to make comparisons between my parental outlook and those of Fairbanks and Amis; I can’t help the way I feel, and that’s all there is to it. Indeed the subject has always been one for comedy in our family: let one of the children do well at school or in any intellectual pursuit, and somebody would invariably quote A. J. Cronin’s Mr Brodie: “It’s a great thing for a man to see his brains come out in his own child.” The jest is compounded by the fact, as the little blighters well know, that I haven’t even a vestige of an official educational qualification to my name.

  So I simply don’t understand Kingsley’s attitude—or the astonishing fact that he didn’t try to conceal it. To judge from his letters, he seems to have been above-average unpleasant, and even on brief acquaintance I saw examples of his rudeness and cantankerousness, but I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t have a soft spot for a man who was so enthusiastic about my work. At our last meeting, a lunch for Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, he surprised me by asking suddenly: “Which is the best of the Flashman books, then?”