by Roy Jenkins
From this account of Servan-Schreiber’s first twenty-one years certain reflections flow. First, he cannot see a drama without imagining himself at the centre of it. He even writes about Roosevelt’s death as though he personally brought the news from Warm Springs to the White House. Second, America made a tremendous impact upon him. When he was offered a choice of there or England as a training ground he says almost as a manifesto rather than a bare statement of fact: ‘J’ai choisi les Etats-Unis.’ And he was long subsequently, and particularly during the Kennedy years, the man who tried to bring the clean-cut vigour of the New Frontier into the stale corridors of the Palais Bourbon. This had the effect of directing his Anglo-Saxon interest almost entirely away from Britain. When he was a BBC listener he had an uncritical admiration for Churchill, of whose determination to sink the Bismarck he writes a somewhat imaginative account, but thereafter shifts his gaze westward to where he thought the land was bright, and does not I think mention another Englishman in his remaining 340 pages.
Third, he insists on writing about his relations with women (in spite of putting her first he has not been too much of a mother’s boy to avoid them) with the cool precision and the faint suggestion that he was doing each one a favour that he applied to Madame Marcelle, the determined (but beautiful) Grenoble housewife. Even Françoise Girued, who was also his distinguished collaborator in the outstanding success of L’Express, the quality weekly he launched in 1953, is subjected to this treatment. This was none the less his finest hour. Apart from assembling an outstanding team of contributors which included François Mauriac and Sartre, as well as an in-house core of Girued, himself and Jean Daniel, he also associated Mendès-France, Mitterrand and Gaston Defferre with the paper. Its founding cause was the end of the war in Indo-China, which Mendès-France achieved with the help of Mitterrand as a Minister of the Interior at once subtle and determined. Its subsequent cause was the ending of the war in Algeria, which put Mitterrand on the other side and dragged on for another seven years, including a six-month period when Servan-Schreiber was re-embodied into the army and sent to take part in the ‘sale guerre’ on the edge of the desert. During these years he did not have to imagine his conversations or delude himself that he was at the centre of the stage. He really was there for once, and this shows in the quality of the narrative, which is, however, always easy to read because of both its pace and the simple directness of the French.
John Simon
This miniature is based on a 1992 review of Simon: A Political Biography by David Dutton (Aurum Press).
Simon Has been the biggest remaining gap in political biography of the first half of this century since 1977 when David Marquand handsomely filled the Ramsay MacDonald cavity. Simon was a pervasive if not exactly great figure of his day, and his day was a long one. He first held office under Asquith and he was still there on VE Day.
He was the only man in British political history apart from Rab Butler and James Callaghan to have been Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary (twice in Simon’s case) and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Palmerston would have made a quartet had he not refused the Exchequer when he was almost a boy, or at least so early in his career that he was still in 10 Downing Street nearly fifty years after he had declined to go to Number 11. After holding these three great offices of state, Callaghan became Prime Minister while Simon was thought lucky to be kept on by Churchill as a very disregarded Lord Chancellor who was never allowed to show his face in the councils of the war. The difference in their fates may be thought to illustrate the advantage of character (or, as some might put it, bearing) over intellect in politics.
Simon had a fine if sterile legal mind. All references to his success at the bar always stress the ‘quality’ of his practice, which I think can be interpreted to mean that he was best at the lucid exposition before a high-ranking judge (juries were much less his forte) of the complicated commercial affairs of those who could afford very large fees. His appearance was impressive and of an episcopal cast, which made him a worthy companion of Archbishop Lang of Canterbury in the common rooms of All Souls.
His personality was chilling but not impressively so, for he was ingratiating and unctuous, seeking a fellowship which nearly always eluded him. Asquith, when Simon was his thirty-eight-year-old Solicitor-General, christened him ‘the Impeccable’, and after a few chance social encounters with him complained that ‘the Impeccable’ was becoming ‘the Inevitable’. Nearly thirty years later Hugh Dalton (who in fact shared some of Simon’s characteristics including the look of a worldly prelate and an unfortunate tendency to call people by the wrong Christian names, but redeemed it by a rumbustious earthiness which Simon lacked) referred to him as ‘the snakiest of the lot’. Kingley Martin wrote an unforgettable sentence beginning ‘Many of those who have shivered as he took their arm …’. The 1930s Cabinet shivered when he invited his colleagues to call him ‘Jack’ and only Jimmy Thomas managed to do so. And Neville Chamberlain, not noted for warmth except to his sisters, complained that Simon ‘hasn’t a friend even in his own party’.
Between leaving the Woolsack in 1945 and his death in 1954 Simon spent many of his weekends at All Souls, of which college G. D. H. Cole, who combined being a too-prolific Left Book Club author of the 1930s with social fastidiousness, was then a professorial fellow. After one such weekend Simon encountered Cole on the platform of Oxford station and greeted him with excessive bonhomie. As the train came in, Cole, anxious to escape, said, ‘I must get along to my third-class compartment’ (it was before the days of standard class). Simon, eager not to be frustrated in his search for ecumenical companionship, said, ‘But I travel third myself,’ and loped after him. When the ticket collector came round they both, with varying degrees of embarrassment, produced first-class tickets.
Simon’s twenty-year performance as a minister was very uneven. He was indecisive and often lacked both courage and conviction. He was an advanced Liberal in his younger days; and as Attorney-General (in the Cabinet) hovered on the brink of resignation against Britain’s involvement in the 1914 war. A year and a half later, having become a very young Home Secretary, he did resign, against the government’s move towards conscription. But somehow his withdrawal, although it put him out of office between the ages of forty-two and fifty-eight, managed to look calculating rather than self-sacrificial.
During these occluded middle-aged years he moved steadily to the right; delivered a celebrated denunciation of the General Strike as illegal, which finally separated him from Lloyd George (with whom there had long been mutual antipathy and who contributed to the large corpus of anti-Simon invective the memorable thought that while ‘greater men’ had previously crossed the floor of the House of Commons they ‘did not leave behind them the slime of hypocrisy’); presided over the ineffective Indian Statutory Commission of 1927-30, which was chiefly notable for having Major Attlee, the future arbiter of the destinies of the sub-continent, amongst its quieter members; and, intermittently, earned still larger fees at the bar than even Rufus Isaacs or Edward Carson, Marshall Hall or Patrick Hastings had done or were doing.
Once he was back in office following the formation of the National Government in 1931 he was, like Charles II, although he did not have much else in common with that ‘merry monarch’, determined not to depart again on his travels. He had nearly fourteen continuous years in office, fluctuatingly esteemed by his colleagues, often dissatisfied with his performance and his life, but always limpet-like. He was worst as Foreign Secretary (until 1935), better as Home Secretary (1935-7), at first most influential as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1937-40) but looking increasingly hidebound as defence needs overwhelmed orthodox finance. As Lord Chancellor (1940-5) he was a distinguished judge and looked good upon the Woolsack, but was kept at such arm’s length by Churchill that he would not even put him in the normal-sized Cabinet of his ‘caretaker government’ of May/July 1945 (the War Cabinet had been much smaller). It was an unprecedented slight for a Lord Chancellor to be reduced, as t
hough he were a Minister of Pensions or of Overseas Development, to be a minister of Cabinet rank (that is not ranking to be in the Cabinet) as it is euphemistically and misleadingly described.
It was all too bad to be true, and there is an underlying feeling that Simon must have been better than this. He was dedicated to public service, devoted to his mother, and generous, not exactly in temperament, but in the donations and subventions that he quietly made and the help that he frequently gave to people who could be of no use to him. He would have greatly liked to be a popular and loved figure.
In 1992 we had a very good political biography, as the author himself described it, from David Dutton. He put all amateurs of twentieth-century political history in his debt by tackling a difficult even if nearly virgin subject and by telling us ten times as much about Simon as that statesman did in his own volume of prim and passionless memoirs.
G. M. Trevelyan
This is based on a 1992 Observer review ofG. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History by David Cannadine (HarperCollins).
George Macaulay Trevelyan was the most widely read historian of the first half of this century. His first book came out in 1899, his last (of serious import) in 1944. But there was no question of his giving up because of fading response. This last volume (English Social History) sold 100,000 copies in its first year and 500,000 in its first six. Nor was this a flash in the pan. His British History in the Nineteenth Century (1922) had sold 68,000 and his History of England (1926) 200,000. He and the publishing house Longmans, Green kept each other rich. No writer of history had sold like it since Thomas Babington Macaulay. Macaulay was Trevelyan’s great uncle and the provider of his second name. So it was all tightly knit, particularly as Trevelyan’s father was George Otto Trevelyan, who served in all Gladstone’s governments and wrote a History of the American Revolution as well as the main biography of Macaulay.
All three, who between them spanned the years from 1800 to 1962, were regarded as quintessential ‘Whig historians’. What exactly this meant is far from clear. ‘Whig’, even in England, let alone if the American connotation is added to it, always has been a fairly imprecise word, giving out different beams of meaning according to the context in which it was used and the angle from which it was viewed. In all three cases, however, it meant that they regarded the Glorious Revolution as one of the best things ever to have happened in English history. G. M. Trevelyan, whether by design or coincidence, even had 1688 as his Cambridge telephone number.
In Macaulay’s case in addition it meant that he was infused by a liberal optimism which made him see history as the unfolding of a story of almost continuous improvement, and was saved from blandness only by the resonance of his style and a determination to see that the ‘Tory dogs always got the worst of it’. In G. M. Trevelyan’s case it meant that he started off from an attitude at least as partisan and rather more radical than that of his great-uncle. His early books on English history could see no good in Tories from Bolingbroke to Wellington and his three volumes on Garibaldi were not merely anti-Bourbon and anti-Papist but anti any form of religion as well. But he was always a somewhat ‘pi’ and even priggish radical. Although he respected Keynes’s intellect, he disliked Bloomsbury in general and Lytton Strachey in particular, disapproving of the irreverence of Eminent Victorians.
Bertrand Russell’s life he found a little rackety for his taste, and also thought him a weak walker, for when they once went on a West Country tour together Russell stipulated that they should do no more than twenty-five miles a day, which Trevelyan accepted until the last day when he insisted on going off on his own for a serious walk. (Professor Cannadine also tells us that when going on his honeymoon Trevelyan insisted on getting out of the train at Truro and walking the last forty miles to the Lizard. This story is however vitiated by the fact that the distance from Truro to the Lizard is under thirty miles; the Russell one is better authenticated.)
With Russell, however, after an intermediate coolness there was a later reconciliation (which death if nothing else precluded in Strachey’s case) and Trevelyan was moved and satisfied by Russell’s BBC eightieth birthday tribute to him. With Beatrice Webb he achieved the remarkable feat of making her half mock him for his over-planned self-discipline. Meeting him when he was nineteen, she wrote: ‘He is bringing himself up to be a great man, is precise and methodical in all his ways, ascetic and regular in his habits, eating according to rule, “exercising” according to rule, going to bed according to rule, and neither smoking, tea or coffee drinking, nor touching alcohol.’
This somewhat self-regarding youth of 1895 turned into George Trevelyan the radical of 1900-14. By 1925, however, he had become a quiet Conservative, well attuned to the age of Baldwin, whom he greatly admired, because he thought him country loving, the ‘kindest of Prime Ministers’ and not at all a cad, unlike Lloyd George, F. E. Smith, Beaverbrook, and probably Churchill as well. Trevelyan, in the 1930s, although greatly disliking the dictators, became a rather depressed supporter of appeasement. Once Baldwin had gone John Simon and Walter Runciman became his favourite ministers. He lost his early optimism as well as his early radicalism, believed that most things in the world were getting worse, and that the best thing was resignedly to make them do so as slowly as possible. This did, however, make him a dedicated and effective supporter of the National Trust.
In the pre-war decade, however, his main role was to be the chronicler to whom the nation confided its past. As Cannadine puts it: ‘He was Britain’s unofficial Historian Laureate, the Hereditary Keeper of the Nation’s Collective Memory, combining - in terms of a later generation of practitioners - the popular appeal of Sir Arthur Bryant, Sir John Plumb, A. J. P. Taylor and Dame Veronica Wedgwood with the Establishment connections of Lord Blake, Lord Briggs, Lord Bullock and Professor Owen Chad-wick.’ In 1935 he wrote the Jubilee speech which King George V delivered in Westminster Hall. In 1937 he became a member of the Order of Merit. In 1940 Churchill, forgiving of his affection for Baldwin, his respect for Neville Chamberlain and his acceptance of appeasement, made him Master of that greater Trinity in the Fens. It was an appropriate appointment, for he was a quintessential Cambridge figure, and Trinity College, then even more than now, was the quintessence of that university. His combination of unworldliness, frenetic walking, blandness of style and disapproval of cruel wit in others, would have been difficult to imagine in an Oxford context.
Trevelyan’s reputation as an historian barely survived his death in 1962. He is now amongst the great unread, widely regarded by the professionals of a later generation as a pontificating old windbag, as short on cutting-edge as on reliable facts. Professor Cannadine has done a brilliant job of rehabilitation, the more impressive because it is surprising (to me at least) that he should have wanted to do so. He is in general irreverent and might easily have been expected to mock Trevelyan. The fact that he does not do so in no way prevents him being taut and entertaining.
Lord Young of Graffham
A 1990 Spectator review of The Enterprise Years by Lord Young (Headline).
David Young (or ‘Lord’ Young as he apparently wishes to be known to his intimates in the literary world) has been Mrs Thatcher’s substitute for Churchill’s (or ‘Winston’ as she respectfully prefers to call him) Lord Woolton. They both came to politics from a business background, although both admitted to a brief flirtation with socialism in their youth. They both entered the House of Lords to become ministers. And they were both attracted by the chairmanship of the Conservative Party, but the department store manager from Liverpool was one of the most successful occupants of that great office of state, whereas the property developer from Finchley found his way firmly blocked by Willie Whitelaw acting like a constable blocking the gentlemen’s entrance into the pavilion.
The differences between Fred, 1st Earl of Woolton, and David, Lord Young of Graffham, were, however, about as great as those between ‘Winston’ and the Iron Lady. ‘Uncle Fred’ had a wonderful even if sometimes unctuous politic
al touch, whereas ‘Uncle David’ (as he was not widely known in the House of Lords) had practically none, except for a certain ability to choose between competing firms of advertising agents. If Disraeli’s fame is summed up by ‘peace with honour’, Asquith’s by ‘effortless superiority’ and Churchill’s by ‘blood, sweat and tears’, so Lord Young’s must rest on his immortal phrase delivered in the darkest days of the 1987 election: ‘If these are the ads she wants, then these are the ads she gets.’
Since hearing that throbbing aria Mr Norman Tebbit has never been quite the same man. He recognized that his days as maître en titre were effectively over. For the most part, Mr Tebbit has taken his rejection with a stiff upper lip, although enlisting with Lord Whitelaw as a rather improbable joint guardian of the gentlemen’s entrance. He endured in silence the publication barely three months after the 1987 events of a short book by Rodney Tyler which seemed to draw heavily on Lord Young’s diary, and which indeed put into circulation the little phrase about the advertisements. It was only when Mr Tebbit felt that his noble supplanter had let down the Faerie Queene that he spoke out, although he has compensated for his three years of restraint by the force, not to say the viciousness, with which he has eventually done so.
I find it difficult to decide where I stand in this Young-Tebbit clash. It rather reminds me of my feeling about whether it is better that the Fayed Brothers or Tiny Rowland should own Harrods. But it is impossible not to sympathize with Mrs Thatcher’s persistent bad luck with favourites. It is easy to understand that she wanted a principal boy with more spring in his legs than Geoffrey Howe and more romantic-looking than Nigel Lawson. Tebbit (‘the assassin’, as he is apparently known to his admirers) has an air perhaps a little too menacing to play in anything except Treasure Island, but Lord Young (the minister who brought her ‘achievements rather than problems’) was surely cut out for a real Jack and the Beanstalk role. Alas, it turned out that even he was more interested in getting to the top of the beanstalk (and in indiscreetly revealing what she said to him on the way up) than in cutting it down in her service. So she was left with only Mr Cecil Parkinson to rely on. And he, like Mr Norman Fowler, Mr Peter Walker et al., may soon begin to find the call of spending more time with his family too strong to resist.