by A. N. Wilson
Wilson’s distinctive contribution to the cultural debate, however, was not just to make higher education available to all but also to counteract the bias against science which had prevailed in British education ever since Matthew Arnold wrote Culture and Anarchy.
When Sylvia Plath was interviewed at Cambridge for her Fulbright Scholarship, she was asked her views of C. P. Snow. She had never read him, and felt ashamed, as if caught out not having read Tolstoy or Proust.
Charles Percy Snow (1905–80) is a vanished name today. The son of a clerk in a Leicester shoe factory, Snow proceeded from Leicester University, via London University, to Cambridge, where his work in the Cavendish Laboratory ended in failure. (Research into infra-red spectroscopy was based on an unsustainable intuition.) Having failed as a scientist, Snow threw himself into the pleasures of personal ambition and college intrigue (he was a Fellow of Christ’s), preoccupations which he thinly disguised as fiction in his cardboardy novel sequence Strangers and Brothers. When Snow, who had advanced his literary career by marrying a good second-rank novelist, Pamela Hansford Johnson, delivered a lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’, he advanced the technocratic creed which he shared with Harold Wilson. He thought it sad that so few scientists read literature, but equally sad that literary folk did not know the second law of thermodynamics.
The response by F. R. Leavis, the closest thing modern Cambridge produced to Savonarola, was characteristic.
‘The judgement I have to come out with is that not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.’ Thus, Savonarola. But, Leavis went further and in this he was surely completely fair and absolutely accurate. ‘If that were all, and Snow were merely negligible, there would be no need to say so in any insistent public way, and one wouldn’t choose to do it. But…Snow is a portent. He is a portent in that, being in himself negligible, he has become for a vast public on both sides of the Atlantic a master-mind and a sage. His significance is that he has been accepted–or perhaps the point is better made by saying, “created” he has been created an authoritative intellect by the cultural conditions manifested in his acceptance…he doesn’t know what he means, and doesn’t know he doesn’t know.’10 This completely deserved invective will be seen to apply to almost every sage, pundit, bestselling writer, poet and novelist of the age. When civilisations are in freefall, everything becomes inverted. It is the sages who say the most foolish things; those behaving with the deepest solemnity become like clowns. Snow’s pompous, leaden belief in ‘science’ was, and would continue to be, widely entertained, and matched Harold Wilson’s belief in the white heat of technology. The dangers inherent in industrial capitalist society, against which Carlyle and Ruskin had inveighed in the nineteenth century and D. H. Lawrence in the early years of the twentieth, were matters to which Snow and his many adherents were completely blind.
Leavis, a great critic, and, for all his undoubted absurdities, an obviously great man, denounced the political philosophy of our times. ‘It is the world in which, even at the level of the intellectual weeklies, “standard of living” is an ultimate criterion, its raising an ultimate aim, a matter of wages and salaries and what you can buy with them, reduced hours of work, and the technological resources that make your increasing leisure worth having; so that productivity–the supremely important thing–must be kept on the rise, at whatever cost to protecting conservative habit.11
Harold Macmillan had promised an ever increased ‘standard of living’. Under Harold Wilson it was ‘business as usual’, with government borrowing more and more money which it was unable to recoup in taxes, high as these were. Meanwhile, such questions as soul, What We Live By, the value of human life itself on the planet, was forgotten in a scramble for votes, a lust for more and more kitchen gadgets and television programmes, and trips to by now wrecked foreign resorts, and a mindless belief in ‘science’. Of all this, C. P. Snow was a worthy prophet and spokesperson.
Snow had his reward. Readers of his turgid novel sequence must often have wondered whether they were in an alternative universe, reading Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time rewritten by the plodding yet aggressively ambitious anti-hero Widmerpool. Wilson ennobled Snow (just as Widmerpool is ennobled) with a life peerage. Snow joined the Wilson government as parliamentary secretary in the newly created Ministry of Technology.12
The room in the ‘Corridors of Power’ (like Harold Macmillan, whose family-owned business published him, Snow had a genius not only for using other people’s clichés but for coining his own) and a title were not enough for the large-faced, hectoring, homburg-hatted Snow.
Writing from Millbank Tower on 11 December 1965, Widmerpool/Snow requested not merely a car, but also a chauffeur. ‘I do not really want to worry the Prime Minister, when he is so very busy, but, hoping it is no great nuisance, I should like to trouble you a little with the matter of having an official car made available for my use…I do need to get around socially and otherwise more than most Parliamentary Secretaries and it would diminish my usefulness if I could not do this freely… The official car pool is helpful but when I make last-minute arrangements–and most of my arrangements are last minute–it often happens that they just do not have a car available. I hate being so heavy-footed over a matter like this but the sheer mechanics of driving are rather difficult just now.’13
‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality.’ And in the political sphere it takes a while for reality to sink in. Macmillan’s six and a bit years as Prime Minister and Alec Douglas-Home’s postscript had permitted these ageing men of the 1930s to nurse the illusion, as they negotiated with foreign statesman, that Britain’s place in the world was still as it had been before the Suez fiasco. Harold Wilson would only be able to demonstrate to the world that Britain had become at best an impotent spectator of world events (as far as the American crusade against communism was concerned) and, at worst, a powerless ‘leader of the Commonwealth’ when the former colonies in Africa began the inevitable post-colonial backlashes.
Wilson’s most conspicuous foreign policy failure was in Rhodesia. Ian Smith (1919–2007), the son of a Scottish butcher and cattle dealer who had come to Rhodesia in 1898, became Prime Minister on 13 April 1964. His political position was clear: ‘the preservation of justice, civilization and Christianity’ in Rhodesia by means of white-only government. Seeing the way that other African countries had gone, ‘good old Smithy’, as he was known by his supporters, saw no reason to appease world opinion just because the rest of the world was ‘too corrupted, too prejudiced, too subverted to perceive the advantages that white rule gave to the peoples of Rhodesia’.14 He asked Alec Douglas-Home to grant Rhodesia independence and the request was refused, unless Smith ended the policy of racial discrimination, and adopted a policy of majority rul.15 Wilson’s attempts to impose such ideas on good old Smithy were as unavailing as had been Home’s. On Armistice Day 1965.16 Ian Smith’s government declared UDI–a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. They swore loyalty to the Queen, and continued to fly the Union flag, but they would no longer take orders from London. Smithy’s government was composed of some distinctive figures, including the 7th Duke of Montrose, who had bought his 1,600-acre farm for 16s. per acre. Six foot five inches in height, the Duke opined, ‘It is a common observation that the African is a bright and promising little fellow up to the age of puberty. He then becomes hopelessly inadequate and disappointing, and it is well known that this is due to his almost total obsession henceforth with matters of sex.’17
While Harold Wilson felt paralysed by the situation, the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed the view, ‘If Britain has to take over the government and administration of Rhodesia, then the British government is bound to consider the use of force as the ultimate sanction. One could not quarrel with the use of force in such circumstances.’18 There was an uproar, nearly all of it hostile, against the Archbishop. Several hundred white Rhodesians burnt their Bibles and sent the ashes to Lambeth Palace. An Angli
can priest in the Low Veld wrote to the Archbishop to tell him his remarks had done more damage in five days than most could have done in five years.19 One correspondent noted that, ‘All Britain’s emotions about a disappeared Empire and an ailing Commonwealth lie behind this story.’20
Wilson put economic pressure on the Smith regime. Rhodesia was expelled from the sterling area. Oil imports to Rhodesia were banned. For a small landlocked country dependent on foreign oil supplies and foreign trade, these should have been crippling blows. Wilson misread the courage and defiance of the white Rhodesians, and he did not realise that the South African and Portuguese governments would be only too happy to make fools of the United Kingdom by defying the sanctions. Wilson, five months after UDI, realised he was losing and summoned Smithy to talks on the British cruiser HMS Tiger, sailing emblematically, round and round in circles in the Mediterranean off Gibraltar.21 Wilson caved in to Smith, offering to accept his idea of white majority rule until the end of the century, but this was not enough for Smithy’s right-wing critics at home who wanted to introduce the Municipal Amendment Act (which passed into law in 1967) empowering municipalities to segregate parks, swimming pools, lavatories, hospitals, and to fade out any African representation in parliament. Rhodesia was destined to become a time warp of racial intolerance and neo-colonisation until Margaret Thatcher and Peter Carrington, at the Lancaster House Conference in 1979, gave the government of Zimbabwe to Robert Mugabe, leader of the ludicrously named National Democratic Party. Within twenty years, the most fertile country in Southern Africa was suffering from starvation, the economy was plagued by Weimar levels of inflation, Mugabe and pals grew rich while opposition politicians and journalists were tortured, killed and imprisoned. On 28 February 1979, Ian Smith had said to the Rhodesian parliament, ‘History recalls many cases of once great nations which have decayed and crumbled into ignominy, but none which have collapsed with such rapidity and completeness as far as Great Britain is concerned. For us in Rhodesia, it was a tragic stroke of fate that we came in towards the tail end of Britain’s expansion and civilisation in this world… Because of this, we lost out in gaining this thing called independence… Because of this, we have been left to the end, right to the bitter end, in that we have been dragged down in the morass of Britain’s decadence and decline.’22
It was in 1962 that the Americans began their ill-starred attempt to shore up the corrupt regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam against the incursions of Vietcong troops from the communist North. Following the example of the British success in Malaya during the 1950s, the Americans attempted to isolate ‘secure villages’, in which government troops protected the peasantry from the ravages of the communist guerrillas. However, under Diem’s generals, the villages had become little better than concentration camps, and it became clear that the Americans must choose between allowing Vietnam to go communist and intervening directly. By January 1962, the US had begun to fly helicopters to back up South Vietnamese forces. General de Gaulle advised President Kennedy to keep out. ‘You will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire,’ he sagely foretold. But Kennedy went in. By the time Harold Wilson had become the British Premier, and Kennedy had been assassinated, the new President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was waist deep in the quagmire. US warships regularly patrolled the North Vietnamese coast, and on 2 August 1964 their destroyer the Maddox was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Air support from USS Ticonderoga, an aircraft carrier, led to an engagement. The Maddox was saved; one of the torpedo boats was sunk. President Johnson could see the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin as an ‘unprovoked military action’ by the communists, justifying sending in yet more troops and military hardware. By early 1965, about four-fifths of South Vietnam was under the control of the Vietcong guerrillas. They were only twenty miles from Saigon, the capital city; Johnson responded by escalating the war. By the end of the year in excess of 184,000 US troops were engaged in Vietnam and 1,350 military personnel had been killed in action.
The Vietnam War occupied a comparable position in the collective imagination of the 1960s to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, with the difference that it was much further away from Britain, and the leftists of various colourings who felt exercised by it did not send even a token brigade or two to fight their cause. Instead, they identified with the struggle of the American left by playing Joan Baez and Bob Dylan protest records, and by growing their hair longer.
Wilson had begun his career in the Labour Party with the statutory anti-American prejudices. ‘Not a man, not a gun must be sent to defend the French in Indo-China,’ he told a May Day rally in 1954, as the communist leader Ho Chi Minh was taking over what became North Vietnam. Yet as Prime Minister in 1965 he could tell the House of Commons (1 April 1965): ‘So far as Her Majesty’s Government are concerned, I repeat, that we have made absolutely plain our support for the American stand against Communist infiltration into South Vietnam…The people of South Vietnam, like the people of North Vietnam and every other area, are entitled to be able to lead their own lives free of terror, free from the danger of sudden death or from the threat of a Communist takeover, and the Government of South Vietnam are entitled to call in aid allies who could help in that purpose.’23 Although Private Eye had a cover drawn by Gerald Scarfe showing Wilson applying his tongue to LBJ’s rump,24 the Wilson slyness saved him from some of the more abject and dangerous postures into which later British Prime Ministers would contort themselves before American Presidents. He resolutely refused Johnson’s appeal for British troops to be sent to Vietnam, chiefly one must assume because he knew this would be electorally disastrous, and that the left of his party would not have tolerated it–such was their power in those days over their leader. Nevertheless, he did send 70,000 ‘peace-keeping’ troops to Borneo and Sarawak to defend Malaysia. Johnson knew perfectly well that Britain, isolated in the world, and with no real power of its own, felt itself obliged to tag along behind America, however many mistakes in foreign policy it made. In exchange for using Britain as a launch pad for its nuclear missiles trained on Moscow, and as an ally in the United Nations and elsewhere against an increasingly horrified rest of the world, America could afford to lard the Prime Minister of the day, whoever he happened to be, with the statutory comparison with the old warlord. ‘In you sir,’ LBJ told Wilson in July 1966 after he had won a second term in office, ‘England has a man of mettle, a new Churchill in her hour of crisis’25–the hour of crisis was, of course, a sterling crisis. Having spent his years in Opposition explaining to left-wing audiences that American domination of the British economy was disastrous, he immediately switched, when Prime Minister, to believing it to be necessary, as when the Chrysler Corporation bailed out the collapsing Rootes Motors which had been limping along under British management.26 If American money could be found to pay the wages of British car ‘workers’, then it was worth defending the deforestation of South Vietnam or the bombings of Hanoi, in which thousands of Vietnamese civilians got killed. Although he dissociated himself from the bombings, and carefully leaked an off-the-cuff remark to the effect ‘Johnson’s gone mad. We’ll have to find a new ally’27–he knew perfectly well that no such ally existed.
Whatever the twists and turns of Harold Wilson’s foreign policy might produce, he was able, in his second administration, to perform a comedic masterstroke by appointing George Brown to the Foreign Office. The appointment lasted nineteen Dionysian months, a period of particular happiness for cartoonists, headline writers, satirists and all who preferred to be amused by the antics, rather than concerned with the policies, of the Foreign Secretary. An early moment of joy came when Bill Lovelace, a photographer for the Daily Express, snapped the Foreign Secretary aboard the Queen Mary, on 22 September 1966, attempting a popular dance called the frug with New York publicist and cookbook author Miss Barbara Kraus. Lovelace’s photograph recorded George Brown, his eyes on a level with the bosomy front of the tall Miss Kraus. Though the eyes were on this l
evel, they were closed and the picture captured him in a swaying posture, as though on the point of collapse. ‘It’s the end of my marriage,’ Brown wailed, when he saw the Express. ‘Sophie won’t accept this, nor will the girls.’28 In fact the long-suffering Sophie put up with her husband until, on Christmas Eve 1982, he left her for a much younger woman, his secretary Margaret Haines. (He died in 1985 of cirrhosis of the liver, having become a Roman Catholic.29) As Foreign Secretary, the moment on board ship with Barbara Kraus was only one of many incidents where the accident-prone George behaved according to type. Diplomatic niceties were not his style. There was the occasion in 1967 when the Belgian government–their Prime Minister, Chiefs of Staff, Foreign Minister, Defence Minister–held a banquet for Brown at the conclusion of a European tour. As the meal came to an end and the diners made to leave, Brown barred their way, standing in the main door of the dining room and waving his arms. ‘Wait! I have something to say,’ he told them. ‘While you have all been wining and dining here tonight, who has been defending Europe? I’ll tell you who’s been defending Europe–the British Army. And where, you may ask, are the soldiers of the Belgian Army tonight? I’ll tell you where the soldiers of the Belgian Army are. They’re in the brothels of Brussels.’ British Embassy staff hustled him away, while the Belgians stared, frozen with incredulous embarrassment.30