It’s tremendous fun. History having got it wrong, we redirect it in our heads. Horrid Henry VII replaced the age of chivalry with double entry accountancy and, via Empson and Dudley, introduced the Treasury view. We, however, can have noble, blameless, good Catholic Duke Richard, wise regent for a grateful Edward V, then Abbot of Rievaulx, saving us all from Dr Starkey. Giving a talk on Robert Walpole – arch-fiend of sensible Hanoverian oligarchy, bourgeois stability and capital accumulation – I had a chairman murmuring that the Stuarts were true blood and rightful kings. The facts of the Stuarts being failed absolutists then collaborationists nestling in the armpit of French power, and Mary Queen of Scots, a cack-handed murderess, never seem to weigh. The House of Commons itself, after the fourth Middlesex poll had re-elected John Wilkes, was equally obdurate, declaring that “Colonel Luttrell ought to have been elected.”
I had a go myself 12 years ago with The Lost Leaders, three 50,000-word essays on the actual careers of Rab Butler, Iain Macleod and Denis Healey, assessing what they would have been like in Downing Street.The spirit of “what if,” accentuated by “if only,” directs The Prime Ministers Who Never Were. Francis Beckett, intelligent grappler with so much contemporary history, has franchised 14 counter-historical premierships to a clutch of political obsessives. From Austen Chamberlain to David Miliband by way of Clynes, Halifax, Mosley, Morrison, Gaitskell, Butler, Brown (George), Tebbit, Foot, Healey, Kinnock and Smith, they essay alternative prime ministerships. A brilliant idea decently done, it will certainly sell to us other obsessives.Eric Midwinter, social historian and cricket enthusiast, once told me that, in retirement, he does the rounds of southern grounds supporting northern counties. Yet he opts for the ur-Cockney, Herbert Morrison, and sees him as Labour’s missed chance – largely out of dislike for Ernest Bevin’s pro-American foreign policy. This is surely the wrong point of departure. In 1945, Stalin was terrifying and encamped in Dresden. Read Denis Healey’s account of travels in Czechoslovakia just before Zdenek Fierlinger’s putsch. Any British premier, including stroppy Herbert, would have embraced the United States then. Then was then, now is now. Blame the Cold War for going on too long. Blame a fear of thaw by too many British politicians when sensible Germans embraced it.
More generally, he discounts the sheer awfulness of Morrison, resenting Attlee for the impertinence of being elected leader in 1931 when the great man was out of the House. Standing, reasonably enough, on re-election in 1935, being rejected and plotting coups, notably during the fuel crisis of 1947, Morrison was the Stuart rightful king in Labour politics, a one-man Morrison legitimist. Efficient indeed, as Dr Midwinter states, he was also sour, illiberal (pro-capital punishment) and signed up to Labour’s authoritarian tendency, a nicer John Reid.
Robert Taylor gets Hugh Gaitskell right. Credibly showing him sending troops to Vietnam, he also envisages all the humanitarian reforms of the actual 1960s enthusiastically promoted in a Gaitskell decade. But he aptly cites Denis Healey’s lucid insight. “I am worried by a streak of intolerance in Gaitskell’s nature. He tends to believe that no one can disagree with him unless they are either knaves or fools. He insists on arguing to a conclusion rather than to a decision.” This exactly defines the high-minded Manichee he was.
However, the ’60s left got Gaitskell as wrong as he got them. Witness Richard Hilton’s little teeth vampire picture. The trouble with Gaitskell and the left is that they were too much alike, principled beyond all sense. As to his projected fall, Brian Brivati’s biographic revelation, the liaison with of all unsuitable people, the socialite, Ann Fleming, gets out here. Apparently, Lord Hailsham’s fraught remark about adulterers on front benches had Gaitskell in mind; nudge, nudge – not taken up. Anyway, this is one of the two or three best pieces in a bright compendium. So is Stephen Bates’ account of the remote, stiff and unendearing Austen Chamberlain, his father Joe’s imitation son, skewered long ago by the great AG Gardiner of the Daily News for “filial servitude.”
He was part of that ugly triumphalist mood which suffused the Tories from Salisbury to the early 1920s. Salisbury is not admired by Andrew Roberts for nothing. They lost Disraeli’s charm, were seduced by empire, called progressive Liberals Jacobins, rejoiced at all harshness, were continuously celebrated by arguably the nastiest right-wing journalist of all time, Charles Whibley, and ran snobbery, nationalist rapture, social pride and public affront four-in-hand. Read Blackwoods.In choosing a Chamberlain premiership, Bates dissents from the “if only” and “wouldn’t it have been lovely” premise. He has imagined the Conservative Party without its idle good angel, Stanley Baldwin.
And how Chamberlain would have got it all wrong, approaching the General Strike with insensibility and troops, lengthening it and creating a financial crisis. The cliché is that “Austen always played the game and always lost.” Bates sees a man without flair or originality, nuance-free, and with the inflexibility of the weak.Another excellent essay, by Greg Rosen, does decent justice to Neil Kinnock and projects an election result which creates that Lib-Lab coalition so many third party toilers now lament unborn. Rosen has understood the crisis surrounding the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Neil has actually said – and he is someone you can believe – that he had made up his mind that, if faced with speculation against sterling in the ERM, he would have realigned as the Germans sensibly begged us to do.
Accordingly, the suppositious Prime Minister Kinnock recalls the failure to devalue in 1964, takes advice and decides “to take a lesson from history and embrace a realignment within the ERM envelope – devaluation by another name”. It works here, as it would have worked in reality. Accordingly, the mortal political wound suffered by John Major’s Government through misplaced loyalty to that cod Horatius, Norman Lamont, never happens.This directly contradicts a right-wing thesis by Peter Cuthbertson about Norman Tebbit who at Number 10 takes on inflation hard-handedly, pushes filthy Brussels to the margins and wins a big majority. Tebbit then wreaks vengeance on the hated liberal and European Tories – reduced by him to resigning in despair. Norman also settles Northern Ireland by having the IRA leadership machine-gunned by a mafioso called Freddie Scappaticci. What fascinating ids these people do have.
However, all politics – certainly all recent British politics – has been primarily about factions led by personalities and all the intestinal loathing which goes with them. Ernie hates Herbert; Herbert hates Ernie. Likewise Geoffrey and Margaret, Hugh and Nye, Austen and Stanley, Rab and Harold. It runs on posthumously.
For The Lost Leaders, I went to Saffron Walden and was fed kedgeree by the delightful Mollie Butler, Rab’s second wife; and did she hate Macmillan. But then Chris Proctor’s friendly account of a hugely successful Rab makes the pre-conditional assumption that Sydney Courtauld, first wife, did not die. She would have been really tough, driving him harder and, in the tradition of killer politics, doing down Harold. This is, however, a formidable piece in the way that it grasps Butler’s instincts, his rationality and freedom from the sickness of national amour propre. Proctor’s Butler “was never anti-American, but he felt little genuine warmth for the country.” He has him unimpressed by John F Kennedy and appalled by the Bay of Pigs episode. In a temperate way, he is dubious, contra Macmillan, about Europe. This leads to a wise view of the whole issue. Much was wrong with the specific system and de Gaulle was a great pain, but we had a choice of company and foreign policy, America or Europe, crusade or minimised engagement; and Rab knew what he wanted. Of all the pleasant non-happenings in this good little book, that is the one to cherish.
