A History of the British Labour Party
by Andrew Thorpe
Palgrave Macmillan, £19.99
JOURNALISTS are contemporary historians who write for newspapers and historians are journalists who, with the hindsight of time, write books. Journalists, on the whole, are more readable and more wrong. Historians, often, cull the colour from their subject, becoming less readable but with fewer mistakes. Professor Thorpe’s latest revision of his history of the Labour party is freely admitted to being a chronology of its life, rather than an illumination. All the colour of that life has been bled. For those of us who were young in 1945 when Labour swept to its first majority “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” but there’s no sense of that here.
I am a fan of the anecdotal form of history. For example, whether it is true or not, the story of Abe Lincoln being outvoted 5-1 by his cabinet and announcing, “Gentlemen, you lose,” displays his strength and character more than any dull recital of the facts ever could. Thorpe purposely has no anecdotes. And anyone who can write, with a straight face, of the last Liberal Democrat leader but one on taking office, “Kennedy took time to find his feet” might lack a sense of humour, too.
But for those who want the facts about the Labour party, this book is a handy, even indispensable reference. They are charted from pre-birth and the impossibly Utopian ideals of William Morris. However, if you want to know what so excited the early pioneers to devote themselves to a long and often hopeless struggle to give it strength, what was the source of its inspiration, what made it a cause to live for, then look elsewhere. Thorpe does not go in for hyperbole. “The state of the party which Blair bequeathed to Brown was not terribly good” may be an accurate and measured judgment, but it doesn’t make for a compelling read. I found I was mentally reminding myself of more interesting stories to lighten the pages.
Of Aneurin Bevan’s searing gibe that it seemed the “right kind of leader for the Labour party is a desiccated calculating machine” Thorpe mildly remarks that “it was seen as a swipe at Gaitskell”. If it were, it was much more than a “swipe”, though Harold Wilson always maintained to me that it was he, not Gaitskell, that Bevan had in mind. He repeats the generally held view at the time that Wilson went for an early election in 1970 (June, rather than February 1971) because he held a seven-point lead in the polls. Not true. The election was decided on in the first week of March, on the eve of the 1970 Budget, because decimalisation was being introduced the following February and Wilson calculated it would be so unpopular that an election then would be lost. How he led the cabinet to propose the decision he had already taken – so that he couldn’t be blamed if it went wrong afterwards, as it did – is for me the stuff of party political history. As is the fact that a mole in Conservative Central Office had told Wilson of that party’s spending plans for autumn 1970 which Labour couldn’t possibly match.
The late Alan Clark wrote of the importance of trivia in politics. Ellen Wilkinson is briefly mentioned, but not her affair with Herbert Morrison and subsequent suicide. Nor Clement Attlee’s order to the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, to instruct the BBC not to broadcast news of her death on the one o’clock news because it might upset Morrison, who was in hospital at the time with thrombosis. Nor Morrison’s trysts with her at an hotel off The Strand, having first dismissed his Home Office minders.
Victor Grayson’s “eccentric behaviour” is the only reference to a still fascinating and still not explained disappearance. Nor of John Stonehouse’s “disappearance”, either. There is nothing about Lady Falkender (Marcia Williams) whose importance to Wilson shouldn’t be erased. Nor of Enoch Powell’s secret collaboration (via his close and loyal friend, Andrew Alexander, and me) with Wilson in the first election of 1974. Whatever one’s view of Powell, he was a towering figure in British politics for 25 years and more and his willingness to help Labour in that election was probably crucial to our eventual success and thus to Labour’s history.
For a student detached from the party, a bare reading of the facts won’t be favourable to the trade unions. They won’t enjoy, I imagine, the chronicling of the miners’ hostility to the party which led to their not affiliating to it until after the First World War. One could easily read that they have been a drag on the party time and again, even if it couldn’t do without them.
I was surprised to read Thorpe’s commendation of Kenneth Morgan’s biography of Jim Callaghan – Callaghan: a Life – as arguably second only to David Marquand’s biography of Ramsay MacDonald in the books written of Labour leaders. Any author who could describe, as Morgan did, Cecil King as editor of the Daily Mirror, among other errors, doesn’t deserve Thorpe’s accolade. King, in many ways, was a monster but he was never so common as an editor.
Many Tribune readers will no doubt be horrified at Thorpe’s kindly, on the whole, conclusions about Tony Blair but I, for one, have found distasteful Gordon Brown’s attempts to distance himself from a Government in whose decisions he played an equally eminent part. Thorpe says Brown “was no more a friend of the unions or the left than Blair had been”. I think that’s right. I believe Brown will prove to be Blair without the charisma or oratory. When Blair departed from office, I recalled to friends Robert Walpole’s description of the public’s reaction to a popular war: “They’re ringing their bells now; they will be wringing their hands later.”
I still believe that to be true. But Thorpe doesn’t tell anecdotes like that.
Joe Haines
