After You, Prime Minister
by James Douglas-Hamilton
Stacey International, £14.95
The most enjoyable book I ever wrote was Election Rides, an account across 2,000 miles, with my wife driving, of the 1992 election. It took us from Eastbourne to Edinburgh West, where a day with James Douglas-Hamilton was highly instructive. He had survived in a constituency with a huge council estate (to which he led me straight off) by taking enormous pains, being trusted – and getting difficult. Trying to visit a municipal old people’s home, we faced one of those council bureaucrats who, denying access without prior written approval from some other bureaucrat, make the heart sink. James, normally polite to the point of courtliness, and still polite, squared up and went in.
When your family first enjoyed clout in the 12th century and the royal family seems slightly arriviste, soft words convey purpose. James outlived most Tory MPs in a bitter, tribulated Scotland by demonstrating his value to some of the least deferential people on earth. Yet this book is studded with affection for the Scottish Labour politicians amongst whom he has spent so much of his life, the people we miss: Donald Dewar, Robin Cook and John Smith.
He saved Conservative bacon when, in November 1994, his admired Uncle Geordie, Earl of Selkirk, died. By complicated genealogical rules, James was the heir. But the Tories, having suffered a horrendous run of deaths, scandals and by-elections, could have been thrown out at the next vote on road-widening. James was appealed to. The new earl disclaimed the title.
What will catch most readers’ notice is another family matter, the wartime flight to the estates of his father, the Duke of Hamilton, of Rudolf Hess. At the heart of this episode stood Albrecht Haushofer, a brilliant, quarter-Jewish academic, Anglophile and muddled patriot, protected by Hess. Haushofer, desperate for British neutrality, wrote proposing his own private meeting in Lisbon, something promptly reported by the duke to Whitehall. Into this crazy idea Hess, on the strength of having met the duke at the Olympics, yet more crazily took flight. The 22 page account here is as enlightening as melancholy.
Rather less so is the Scottish Assembly to which James, after ultimate Westminster defeat, indefatigably transferred. In 1707, the Hamiltons had been prime movers in that end of an auld sang, the Act of Union. As Scotland, following Nationalist pressure and Donald Dewar’s pre-emptive wisdom, moved to devolved authority and possibilities of statehood, it was the astute impulse of this Hamilton to get a foot in the door and, under Labour-made rules, he was cheerfully elected as Lord Selkirk!
Edward Pearce
