by Clive James
Diamond Jim McClelland knew all there was to know about the Labor Party, but only up until then. In the past, the Labor Party leaders had been men like Ben Chifley or H. V. Evatt: sometimes highly qualified, but never stars. In the future, the Labor Party leaders would be men like Bob Hawke and Paul Keating: stars even when they were not highly qualified. Whitlam was the transitional figure: the first star, and thus a man utterly unlike McClelland himself. McClelland had glamour, but it was not a pose: he was a man of the people. He was just one of those men who never have to think about dressing the part, because they have natural taste, and inspire awe for just that reason. Though both his parents were Irish, only his mother was a Catholic, which was a flaw in his Labor pedigree, but a minor one: in all other respects he had an impeccably underprivileged background, and the arrival of the Depression even ensured that his precocious admission to university would not distract him from a lifetime of doing it the hard way. There were no Commonwealth Scholarships in those days – they were introduced after the war, by Menzies – so the brilliant young man had to forgo his opportunity. He joined the work force, and was soon caught up in the radical politics raging within it. With capitalism so obviously on the point of collapse, he gave his allegiance to Trotsky, after the Communists in the Federated Ironworkers had shown him what Stalinism was made of. (The real news about what Trotsky had been made of was at that time harder to come by than it is now.) Having actually read the works of Karl Marx from end to end, he had no trouble arguing the Stalinists out of the room, but always from the premise that it was he who was the true proletarian. Although obvious officer material, he spent the war in the ranks. It was only after the war, with Australia unaccountably booming under the Menzies government, that McClelland enrolled in Sydney University’s Law School and began his ascent to the seriously well-cut jacket.
His immaculate grooming never had anything to do with social climbing. For one thing, it is possible, even today, for a man to climb a long way in Australian society while being no better groomed than the Man from Snowy River’s horse; and for another, he was too intelligent to restrict his views by forgetting his origins. As his Sydney Morning Herald column, written in his retirement, regularly revealed to an enchanted public, he had a capacity to take in the whole texture of Australian life, on all its levels and in all its aspects. He was the kind of natural democrat who charms an audience by treating everyone as a member of an elite, and his later writings – An Angel Bit The Bride is the essential collection – can be recommended for the insouciant manner in which they distil the generously sardonic vision that the left-wing intelligentsia in Australia still sorely needs to rediscover in order to be less repellently doctrinaire. He was particularly good about tracing the connection between the deterioration of the language and the corrosion of democratic values. The demagogic tendency to brand grammatical accuracy as elitism was one he spotted early. On the other wing, he was properly alarmed by the cosiness of the alliance formed by the media multibillionaires and the Labor Party hierarchy. Though the prospect of rule by oligarchy didn’t put him off a republic, it would have been interesting, had he lived until the 1999 referendum, to find out whether he thought that the same prospect had put the public off a republic.
Unlike many men who have enjoyed power, he had a deep and lasting suspicion of it. Really he thought its concentration should be limited by statute, and he might have pursued the point with more vehemence if he hadn’t also thought that the possession of great privilege was its own punishment. In a television studio green room in Sydney one afternoon, Diamond Jim told me the best story about Rupert Murdoch’s meanness (what the Americans would call cheapness) I have ever heard. The essence of the story was that Murdoch had stiffed him for the price of a hamburger, but what doubled me up was the way Jim conveyed Murdoch’s anxiety that the stratagem might not work, and that he, Murdoch, might actually have to part with money. Apparently Murdoch, to convey the proposition that he had forgotten his wallet, actually patted his pockets. Jim showed me how Murdoch did it: a kind of ritual palpation, as a man might caress something flat with fingers archly surprised that it isn’t full. A cat may look at a king, and Jim, always the coolest cat in town, had looked hard at a king among hustlers.
All his life, there wasn’t much Diamond Jim missed. But he did miss the significance of Whitlam’s overbearing personality: or anyway he missed it at the time, when it mattered. Perhaps, like many clever men – although lawyers are usually proof against this – he had trouble believing that another clever man might be blind to his own impulsiveness. Perhaps, in those hectic hours at the finale, he just lacked time to think: he was a cool customer, but there was fire in the corridors. Perhapses aside, the magnitude of his error is evident from what he could never bring himself to get angry about. He got angry, very angry, about Kerr’s failure to tell Whitlam what he had in mind. But he never got angry about Whitlam’s failure to ask. If Whitlam, instead of appointing John Kerr as Governor General, had appointed James McClelland, and then patronised James McClelland by not asking his opinion on the Supply crisis, James McClelland would have been no less likely than Kerr to deduce that Whitlam was living in a dream world. The difference between Kerr and McClelland is that McClelland would have raised the issue. But if Whitlam had not listened, McClelland would have had to dismiss him. If I could go back in time to our television interview, that would be the extra question I would ask McClelland: if you had been in Kerr’s shoes and Whitlam had ignored your advice, would you have dismissed Whit-lam? And if McClelland had said no, I would have asked: then why would you have taken the job?
His answer would have been dazzling. Everything he said was a delight. Kerr died a broken man, and one of the things that broke him must have been his being denied the company of a friend who had always given him what he lacked himself – a pretty wit, lightness of spirit, the unfair ease of personal grace. The last time I saw McClelland was on a summer evening in Blue’s Point Road in North Sydney. I was walking down the hill to the harbourside apartment block where I often stay when I’m in town, and I found him lounging suavely at an open-air cafe´ with the beautiful television presenter Jennifer Byrne. If she had only her looks to go on, Jenny Byrne would be a prize, but she has excellent literary credentials as well, a virtue she had demonstrated by admiring the prose styles of both myself and Diamond Jim. To put it briefly, she was a prote´ge´e of both of us. Though I was old enough to be her father and Diamond Jim was almost old enough to be mine, here were two men who made no secret of their belief that helping to keep a brilliant young lady like this entertained with repartee was a reason for existence. Epigrams flew like darts. Aphorisms rose and fell like swords. Quotations were swung like clubs. It was as if the duty of redeeming fair Amoret had fallen not to Britomart but to Sohrab and Rustum. The names of Voltaire, Hume and Proust were being invoked as the sky grew dark. I remember thinking even at the time – this was years before the Sydney Olympics, although their spirit was in the air – that Australia would be the place to be in the next century. It had always had the substance, and now it was getting the style: and a lot of the style came from people who were fair-minded, fastidious and public-spirited beyond the call of the job – people like Diamond Jim McClelland.
The Monthly, November 2005
Postscript
Putting Denis Healey and James McClelland together in the same book has been a reminder to me that there is a question to be asked about cultivated politicians. In their profession, does a well-furnished mind help, or does it hinder? Certainly it works to better popular effect when well concealed. In the case of Australia, the people enjoy eloquence from their politicians but they seldom trust it. Gough Whitlam’s manifest educational superiority doubled the blame heaped on his clever head when events caught him out. The most powerful weapon Robert Hawke brought to his long reign as Prime Minister was the ability to persuade, which he learned in the crushingly boring meetings of the trade unions, and not from Cicero. Paul Keating, on the other
hand, had art-hungry tastes that all too often expressed themselves as contempt, which eventually dished him. The Australian intelligentsia as a whole, and the media commentariat in particular, could never detect John Howard’s most solid advantage as a leader: when he spoke, the people felt that he was one of them. Plainly he was clever, but he did not sound different. Somewhere in there a thesis lurks, which might be countered by the fact that Robert Gordon Menzies sounded as elevated as Pericles. There is a book in it. A measure of Australia’s total achievement as perhaps the most highly developed of the liberal democracies is that there would be plenty for the author to go on. Nor would it be a book deprived of colour, clashing characters, flashing dialogue and slapstick comedy. Many paragraphs could be devoted solely to the question of how Malcolm Fraser, the born-to-the-purple patrician among the Australian prime ministers, was caught in a hotel corridor without his pants.
EXIT JOHN HOWARD
There is a version of American cultural imperialism that infects even the supposedly liberal and artistic. In Newsweek recently, some confident dunce announced that France has ceased to produce any great artists who might impress the world. Bernard-Henri Le´vy, normally not one of my heroes, commendably flew the tricolour by pointing out that America was not the world, and that it would be enough for the French to go on producing artists who might impress France.
But on the political front, at virtually the same time, there was an even more patronising instance of this kind of cultural imperialism. It made less noise only because the victims didn’t realise they were being patronised. According to Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker, Australia’s long-serving Prime Minister John Howard lost his job in the latest election principally because he committed Australian troops to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This interpretation is hard to refute – one thing certainly came after the other – but it makes you wonder why, in that case, he didn’t lose his job in the previous election, in 2004.
A view less in thrall to geopolitics might suggest Howard lost this time not because he stayed too long in Iraq, but because he stayed too long in office. His successful opponent Kevin Rudd was clever enough to spot that no other issue really mattered except the incumbent’s hubristic estimation of his own indispensability. Howard had stepped into the same trap occupied for more than a decade by the Labor Party, which, in one doomed campaign after another, had made everything depend on the one leading role, recast periodically after the previous guy tanked. When Howard, despite murmurings from his own colleagues, decided that nobody except himself could win, he was unmistakeably announcing that he deserved to lose.
The question, now that the Liberal Party has paid a proper penalty for letting everything depend on Howard, is whether the Labor Party hasn’t bought a mass of trouble by letting everything depend on Rudd. Those of us who had long wanted the Labor Party to become electable again, but who think that Rudd has almost nothing to say, will be watching with interest to see how he comes good on the two main issues he said were crucial. These were not, as Hertzberg contends, Iraq and climate change. They were (a) the Future, which would demand New Leadership, and (b) the Educational Revolution. According to Rudd’s repeated announcements, the Future lay ahead, and not in some other direction that an older man might seem to advocate or represent. Australia’s continuing advance into this Future, featuring New Leadership, would be ensured by an Educational Revolution, in which every school pupil would be issued with a computer.
That Howard was unable to find the words to counter either of these vacuous propositions was in keeping with his inborn reluctance to talk tripe, but was also a clear indication that he had run out of tactical acumen. He should have had a few paragraphs ready to say that a government has no business providing a vision for the future. The job of government is to preserve the freedom and justice that have already been established, while furthering both to the full extent in which one of them does not interfere with the other. Beyond that, the vision of the future will be provided by the creativity of the people. He should also have found a few paragraphs to say that Rudd’s scheme of equipping every Australian child with a computer is less likely to guarantee an educational revolution than to provide an incentive for the children to multiply their illiteracy.
A real educational revolution would restore the erstwhile capacity of Australia’s young people to read, write and do elementary arithmetic in their heads. In the final minutes of his televised debate with Rudd, Howard started to make that last point, but he had nothing ready except an incoherent sentence, having relied once too often on his faith that the self-evident would make itself obvious. It was already all too obvious that he had forgotten how to fight anyone except the wiser voices in his own party, who had been too timid with their doubts. The voting public saw that the old lion was limping, and down he went. Democracy worked.
Democracy works better in Australia than almost anywhere. An American might usefully tell Australia that it needs a limitation on the number of prime-ministerial terms – if the governmental term remains at three years, then three terms for the prime minister should be enough – but on most other topics the Australians need no instruction from abroad about how to run a country, or about how they might be failing by international standards of morality. To the extent that international standards of morality exist, Australia is doing more to set them than to undermine them: Australia, after all, is the country where immigrant minorities have the best chance, and if the indigenous minority continues to be disadvantaged, it nevertheless has prominent leaders who would like to see their people granted a final freedom – the freedom from being patronised as natural victims. (It was interesting, as the election campaign period got into the home stretch, that Noel Pearson, the most formidable of the Aboriginal leaders and one of the most impressive political analysts in Australia of whatever background, went public with his opinion that Howard was more to be trusted than Rudd. Or it would have been interesting, if Pearson’s remarks had fallen into the category of those that the Howard-hating consensus could allow itself to hear.)
Most of Australia’s problems – seen by commentators on the spot as proof that the whole of Western civilisation is in deadly danger from the spreading influence of American imperialism – come from conflicting ideas about how to do the right thing. Institutionalised evil is hard to find, and even the corruption is on a small scale, although often inventive. Admittedly it is relatively easy to govern a country whose population is no bigger than that of New York state, but quite a lot of creative thought has been put into the job since Federation in 1901: the creative thought of a political class which has consistently been underestimated by Australia’s massed ranks of bien-pensant intellectuals, some of whom might have spent too much time bashing Hertzberg’s ear when he attended the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May 2007. Perhaps they stunned him with the orchestrated confidence of their monocellular opinion that Howard had ruled for eleven and a half years only by trickery. That opinion, with its implied insult to the intelligence of the electorate that had been tricked, helped to keep the Labor Party out of power for as long as its leadership listened to the pundits. When finally a man emerged who had the strength of character either to sidestep or to ignore virtually every issue the pundits had declared vital, his party won.
But let Hertzberg be certain that Rudd ignored him too. Whatever the New Yorker and Vanity Fair might say in the US – or the Guardian and the Independent in London – when Rudd is inspired to bring some of the Australian troops home from Iraq it will be because that country has moved closer to being a functioning and reasonably secure democratic state, and not because he disapproved of the invasion. He did disapprove of it, but in this election he didn’t make his disapproval a major issue, because he knew it wouldn’t fly. In leaving room for the assumption that Rudd thought otherwise, Hertzberg has put the New Yorker into the service of a fiction on the very topic about which it is currently most proud of speaking fact.
Fictions are tempting because they give fact
shape. Hertzberg has built the best part of his career on respecting the texture of reality, in which facts are recalcitrant. His excellent Penguin collection of political writings, called simply Politics, shows that he can pay due regard to conflicting ideas and emotions. During the Vietnam War he served his country in the navy: his war service didn’t affect his old-style socialist convictions – which to a large extent he still has, even though his fighting prose is now surrounded by advertisements for furs and jewellery – but it did help to give him the subtlety of nuance by which he could call anti-war polemicists to order if he thought their views simplistic.
With regard to Iraq he has allowed that subtlety to lapse, and it will be interesting to see how fast he can regain it if the news coming out of Iraq continues to improve. We should pay him the compliment of trusting him to greet improving news as welcome rather than otherwise. Hertzberg is a good enough reporter to know how alluring the temptation to shape the facts can be, and many a time he must have had to face the cruel moment when something that sounds good has to be struck out because it might not be so. On a final point, has he asked himself where he got the idea that Howard was ‘humiliated’ when Rudd spoke ‘perfect’ Mandarin to the Chinese leaders at the APEC conference in Sydney? Howard is a bit harder to humiliate than that, and would have been well aware that speaking the other chap’s language is often the reverse of a qualification: Anthony Eden, after all, spoke perfect Arabic to Colonel Nasser. Howard might very well feel humiliated after losing the election, his seat, and his reputation for infallibility, but all that will pass, and he will be remembered as an outstanding prime minister even by critics who could bring themselves to praise him for nothing except his cunning.