Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  That is to be expected. The most difficult stage in any career is always likely to be the first, and nothing helps more than family connection. When Harold Macmillan in the 1950s allowed hereditary peers to disclaim their titles and sit, if elected, in the House of Commons, where power is, it was widely and wisely predicted that it would enhance the aristocratic element in British politics. The prophecy was briskly vindicated in 1963, when Macmillan resigned the premiership in favour of the fourteenth Lord Home, who was elected party leader, promptly disclaimed his peerage and entered the Commons as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. On the other hand he only lasted a year, to be succeeded by Harold Wilson who (socially speaking) came from nowhere. Douglas-Home dubbed him the fourteenth Mr. Wilson, which is just as well, since it is the only witty remark he is remembered to have made, and every head of government should say something quotable before he leaves office.

  ____

  Do good families count for more in England than elsewhere?

  It is sometimes suggested that a monarchy creates respect for hereditary titles, but that is dubious. Americans often show a greater respect for titles than the British, and a peer of the realm is more likely to be treated deferentially in America than at home. Familiarity breeds – well, if not contempt, at least more familiarity. Lionel Trilling in ‘Manners, Morals and the Novel’ remarked that snobbery, or pride in status without pride in function, is the vice not of aristocratic societies but of bourgeois democracies, instancing Hollywood as a supreme example. That was a bold, forward-looking point, and it foreshadows the celebrity-culture we are now in. Money in itself is simply not interesting enough to hold attention for long; status, on the other hand, is. Could anyone ever get enough of it?

  It is easily forgotten – and would be all the more easily forgotten if professional historians, in their pitiless way, did not obstinately unearth evidence conveniently buried and ignored – that America has its own age-old tradition of hereditary gentility which is faded, to be sure, like the European, but by no means abandoned. George Washington married into a country estate; Jefferson built himself a mansion in Virginia called Monticello; and Andrew Jackson, uncouth as some of his followers were, lived like a country gentleman. In The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Gordon S. Wood has shown how Franklin, a tradesman, eagerly adopted the attributes of gentility in his middle years, acquiring a coat of arms and having himself painted as a country gentleman in a curled wig and frilly silk sleeves. Lord Palmerston, who died in office as prime minister in 1865, bought himself an estate in Ireland, though land was known to be an inferior investment to the money-market; and Gladstone, who was of Liverpool merchant stock, made his name as a man to be trusted with high office by getting his wife’s estate out of debt. The social differences between the two continents are often remarked on, and often overdrawn. But how about the similarities?

  Now the tables are turned, and royal celebrities can hope for more uncritical admiration in America than at home. Bill Clinton is an ardent admirer of Queen Elizabeth II, and interest can warmly attach to humble barons and even humbler knights. I remember dining with Mary McCarthy in Paris, where she spent her last years, and being asked with tremulous excitement and after several glasses of red wine whether I was Sir George Watson. That was our first meeting, and some fault in the Parisian telephone system may have turned a slight hesitation in my voice into something that sounded like an S. At all events it was good to know her, even as a humble mister, and even if I owe the occasion to a fortunate misunderstanding.

  The moral is plain. If you want to abolish a respect for rank, do not abolish titles. Abolition only increases the rarity-value of what remains. International interest in the British royal family is strikingly higher than before the war, when monarchies were common; like rare postage-stamps they are valued more as they grow harder to find. Intrinsic interest has nothing to do with it. The Penny Black is not much to look at, but people will crowd around a glass case if it is the only one there is.

  ____

  So snobs may take courage. Do not relax, stay awake at the back and, whenever names are dropped, try to keep up. Snobbery has a future no less than a past – it is not just the relic of a dying order. It is a mistake to suppose that people nowadays are only interested in money. Wanting money means wanting the things money can buy, and they include social status, a fabled title or box-office renown. There is not much to regret here, even if the scramble can look vulgar and even downright silly, like the cult of Evita Peron or Princess Diana. Nobody, after all, has to join the race. Be amused and enjoy it. But stop pretending it is only other people, or other peoples, who are snobs. There are snobs all over the world.

  14. Educating the Prime Minister

  Since the Act of Union in 1707 there have been over fifty British prime ministers, and all but one of them were men.

  Or so, in modern parlance, we are content to say. Strictly speaking the famous title has been unofficial until recent times. ‘Prime Minister’ was simply unknown in statutes until 1937, when it slipped unannounced into a minor bill on physical education near the end of Stanley Baldwin’s premiership. In the eighteenth century ‘First Lord of the Treasury’ was among the commonest appellations; and though Prime Minister was a usual enough term in Victorian debate it seems to have begun earlier in English usage largely as a mark of disparagement, smacking as it did of the premiers ministres of French kings, like Cardinal Richelieu. Such men had been the favourites of tyrants, to freeborn English ears, and sometimes tyrannical themselves. To this day, in fact, as if to suggest how recent the post is, there are no seals of office, the new premier merely kissing the sovereign’s hand; and Anthony King, in his new introduction (1985) to The British Prime Minister, has complained that historians down the years have paid strikingly little attention to the occupancy of Number Ten Downing Street – compared, say, to that of the White House.

  ____

  The list starts in 1721 with Sir Robert Walpole, under George I. Their social origins would repay study. It is a moot point, and perhaps not to be publicly debated without impropriety, which of them can justly boast the humblest social origin. My own candidate would be David Lloyd George; but it must be admitted that two or three more recent contenders would run him close. Ramsay MacDonald clearly has his hat in the ring too, being a bastard, and the only British prime minister to have been one, at least in a technical sense.

  Nor, in terms of base social origins, need we stay in the present age. George Canning’s widowed mother became an actress, which counted for a good deal less in the years around 1800, in terms of respectability, than a Midlands grocer or a Welsh cobbler. Though British cabinet politics were fully aristocratic in style until the Liberal victory of 1906, they were based on the highly British principle of open oligarchy; and the parentage or grandparentage of leading figures could easily be upstart or alien, like Benjamin Disraeli’s. The social question, though fascinating, is perhaps too embarrassing to pursue. Here I shall fasten on an altogether safer and more readily quantifiable topic than parentage or upbringing: education – the intriguing place of universities on the long road to Downing Street.

  ____

  Since 1721 twenty-six prime ministers were at Oxford, fourteen at Cambridge, two at Edinburgh University and eleven at no university at all.

  That is admittedly an impressive total for Oxford; and the concentration is even greater than the bald facts would suggest. Individual colleges within the two ancient universities of England have fared very unevenly. Of the twenty-six Oxford PM’s, fourteen (including Gladstone) were at Christ Church, which easily leads the national field and, it is tempting to guess, the international too. That startling baker’s dozen and more, which included Anthony Eden and Lord Home, presumably illustrates the value of high social connection. Christ Church is a ‘good’ college, in the way that certain ancient families are good. It starts you well, and the hardest step to take in any political career is always likely to be
the first.

  The second runner, after Christ Church, is Trinity Cambridge – also ‘good’ – which follows with six PM’s, and might have had seven had Willie Whitelaw shown more dash in the leadership elections of the Conservative Party in 1975. For third and fourth place Balliol (Oxford) and St John’s (Cambridge) tie, each with three. St John’s used to claim a fourth in Lord Rockingham, friend to Edmund Burke – a claim I exclude here as disputed; and I believe it might be said to have done as well, with three, as could reasonably be expected; though it is disappointing to report that the last Johnian prime minister, Lord Palmerston, died in office as long ago as 1865, at the age of eighty, and there is no sign of another on the political horizon. (The previous Johnians at Number Ten were Goderich and Aberdeen.) Balliol, however, as headmasters used to say, could surely do better than three, and it certainly seems to have tried hard with Asquith, Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath. But there is nothing before or since. A Master of Balliol once remarked that with Jo Grimond, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins at Westminster, all Balliol men, it could only be a matter of quick time before his college scored a fourth, but the Master is still waiting.

  King’s Cambridge, meanwhile, which produced the first prime minister of all in Walpole and which has since become known mainly for its Christmas choir-singing, has sent no one to Downing Street since Walpole finally departed in 1742. It should now look to itself and reflect, as Peter Shore once did, on what might reasonably be expected of it. But its failure since 1742 is after all accountable. For the first four hundred years and more of its existence it contented itself exclusively with Eton scholars, as its founder Henry VI intended; and scholars need to be poor in order to be scholars. So the failure of King’s is a counterpart to the success of Christ Church, and it illustrates the importance of early connection in reverse. Rich Etonians tended to go elsewhere, including Christ Church. But at least King’s has done better than Wadham College, Oxford – Michael Foot’s old college. Wadham has never produced a prime minister, and Foot’s foolhardy try in 1983 failed to break the spell. St John’s (Oxford), meanwhile, nurtured Tony Blair.

  The performance of Scottish universities before Gordon Brown is exceedingly disappointing, southern visitors apart, since their only clear instance, Lord John Russell, who was a student at Edinburgh from 1809 to 1812, resigned the premiership as long ago as 1866, having succeeded Palmerston only a year earlier. Descended from a Duke of Bedford he was not a Scot, and would have preferred Cambridge – indeed he told his parents so – having been schooled no further from the Houses of Parliament than Westminster, where he was born. That leaves St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen out in the cold – except that Lord Melbourne, balked by the inconvenience of the Napoleonic Wars, spent two formative years at Glasgow University after Cambridge; and Campbell-Bannerman, moving in reverse order, studied for two years (1851-3) at Glasgow before going on to Melbourne’s old college of Trinity.

  It is sad to report that the civic universities, so far as Number Ten is concerned, are an all-but-total blank. Neville Chamberlain was a Birmingham man, but he never attended the University in Birmingham as such, though he took commercial courses in his youth at Mason College which eventually turned into that university. His brother Austen, by contrast, who was designed by their father Joseph Chamberlain for high public office, was sent to Cambridge, but out of sheer modesty of temperament and a lack of jugular instinct he never became prime minister. And the new or ‘plate-glass’ universities invented by Lionel Robbins in the 1960s are in even worse case, though (being still new) they have better excuses. Britain still awaits its first redbrick or plate-glass prime minister. The record is blank, the tabula invitingly rasa, and their graduates have nothing to fear from the heavy hand of tradition or the chilling wind of precedent. So far as the highest elected office in the land is concerned, Sussex, Essex, Lancaster and Warwick – not to mention Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Durham and Southampton – have everything to make and a world to win.

  ____

  The studies pursued by future premiers are perhaps too random a matter, and too difficult to ascertain, to be worth much attention. Anyone who has ever attempted research into educational history will know that it abounds in evidence of flogging and still direr malpractices, but it offers surprisingly little for the serious enquirer craving intellectual improvement. It would be over-ingenious, surely, to connect one Tory ministry and its difficulties with Margaret Thatcher’s study of chemistry at Oxford, unstably compounded of Wets and Dries as her cabinet was; and few will think it other than coincidental that Eden, who studied oriental languages at Christ Church (Arabic and Persian), should have come adrift in 1956-7 over a crisis in the Middle East.

  For many, and perhaps most prime ministers before the twentieth century, the answer to the classic academic question ‘What did he read?’ is, in all honesty, ‘Nothing much.’ Shirley Williams did not demonstrate that Oxford PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) can take you to Number Ten, as it did in the Heath-Wilson era, and as it seems plainly designed to do. Nigel Lawson, once Chancellor of the Exchequer, read it at Christ Church, but with no thought to his future at the Treasury: strange to relate, he specialised not in economics but in philosophy.

  That is not to deny that many British prime ministers have been highly educated. But few, apart from Harold Wilson (late of the Oxford Department of Statistics), have been educated in a specifically academic way. Sir Robert Peel had a carefully trained mind, as much by his father as by any academy; and Gladstone, exceptionally, seems to have been inducted into great ideas at Oxford in about 1830. In My Life as an Author (1886) Martin Tupper vividly described an Aristotle class he attended at Christ Church. It numbered among its students Gladstone, the Duke of Newcastle, and three future governors-general – Elgin of Canada and Canning and Dalhousie of India – and half a dozen fledgling professors, not to mention Liddell and Scott, ‘even then conspiring for their great Dictionary’; Liddell was destined not only to become the greatest Greek lexicographer of his age but the father of Alice in Wonderland. Sidney Herbert of Oriel sometimes dropped in, Tupper reports – a future minister of war and colleague of Florence Nightingale; and George Cornewall Lewis too, whom Palmerston was to prefer to Gladstone in 1855 as Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is plainly impossible, at this distance, to judge how much such a classroom of young talents learned from their instructor, how much from one another; but that room by the great staircase of Christ Church in Oxford must surely have witnessed a series of youthful intellectual exchanges hardly to be equalled in the history of nations, though now forever lost to view. The book they all read together, as young men, was Aristotle’s Rhetoric, illustrated by each member of the class (so Tupper relates) with his own apt quotations.

  It remains tempting to suggest, nonetheless, that the real influence of universities in the field of political training is not strictly intellectual at all. It is more a matter of whom you meet while you are there. And such contacts can recur for the rest of a lifetime, as if in an Anthony Powell novel. Canning and Liverpool, for example, who were to share Number Ten in the 1820s, first met as undergraduates at Christ Church in the preceding century.

  ____

  The eleven British prime ministers who attended no university at all perhaps deserve a special word of commendation here. The last were James Callaghan, who surely counts here, even though he once spent a brief spell at Ruskin College in Oxford, and John Major.

  Behind them, however, the list stretches monotonously backwards in time, one Oxford man before another: Jesus (Wilson), Balliol (Heath), Jesus (Wilson, again), Christ Church (Douglas-Home), Balliol (Macmillan), and Christ Church (Eden). And then, at last, one arrives with a sigh of nostalgia at Winston Churchill, who finally resigned office in 1955. Like Disraeli, who was one of his heroes, he was never at a university, to his regret. Like Disraeli, again – indeed they are the only prime ministers of which it can be said – he published a novel. His parents, supp
osing him to be deficient in whatever it is that makes a university man, sent him to the military academy at Sandhurst. But he trained his mind through books in early manhood – partly under the willing tutelage of his lifelong friend Lady Violet Bonham-Carter – to become the master of a celebrated literary style, and he remains the only prime minister ever to have won a Nobel Prize for Literature. And as for universities, he eventually won enough honorary doctorates to stuff a mattress with.

  Perhaps Churchill, then, stands to all time as the most striking instance of the non-academic in British parliamentary history, an abiding example of what universities, of themselves, cannot do.

  15. The Indictment of the Germans

  The lively controversy provoked in 1996 by Daniel Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners showed that the past of the German people is still contested.

  The book gave no quarter to the notion that many civilians during the war might have been ignorant of the mass extermination of whole peoples, and evidence that the holocaust was a secret programme in intent and in fact was simply dismissed or ignored. It was Germans against Jews – all the Germans, more or less – and any claim that they did not know about the death-camps was treated as self-excusing. They knew, they knew, and what is more they wanted it.

  ____

  The assumption is ultimately unconvincing, however, and it is not wishful or facile to say so. Ignorance is not innocence, and some who did not know might, if they had thought harder and looked longer, have realised that what was happening was no ordinary persecution. To say that most did not know, what is more, is to imply that some did; whether they approved as well as knew is a further question. The 37% of the German electorate that voted Hitler into power in January 1933 may not have understood what it would mean, but they had manifold opportunities to do so. Mein Kampf (1926), after all, was plainly a call for racial purity and a one-party state.