This is based on a 1992 Observer review of Lord Parkinson’s memoirs, Right at the Centre (Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
This Book is to me a disappointment. I thought it might provide a companion volume to the rich delights of the memoirs with which Lord Young of Graffham marked the completion of the economic miracle of the 1980s and his own decline into silence. However, Lord Parkinson is a much better politician than was Lord Young, and is not similarly addicted to strangulated jargon. As a result this is quite a good although intensely political book, with nothing much in it for those who are not enthralled by how Michael Portillo became ‘a deservedly popular minister’ or how ‘Eric Ward, our excellent Central Office agent in Yorkshire’ rearranged the order of a meeting so that Parkinson could hasten back down the motorway ‘with headlights on at full speed’ (but it was all legal, for the boys in blue were part of the plot) to be at Margaret Thatcher’s side within two hours.
There is, as might be expected, a great deal of Lady Thatcher in the book, and indeed Parkinson straightforwardly sums up his life as having been ‘a Thatcherite ministerial career’. He begins with fifty pages on her downfall, which moves him, with the literary assistance of Lord McAlpine, into the poetry of a Chinese proverb about ‘dragons in shallow waters being the sport of shrimps’.
Then we have forty pages that cover everything from the author’s birth in 1931 to his entry into active Conservative politics a third of a century later. He began in the small railway junction town of Carnforth (where Gladstone was anxious to discover the politics of the stationmaster after the Queen’s famous en clair telegram on the murder of Gordon - ‘these news are too dreadful’ - had passed through that functionary’s hands). Parkinson does not tell us about this, being more concerned in those days with his membership of the Labour League of Youth than with high Victorian politics. He writes frankly and well about this period, although he allows his parents to remain very shadowy figures.
In 1952, having just attended as a Bevanite supporter the most blood-letting of all Labour Party Conferences at Morecambe, he went to Cambridge, and during three years in that university underwent an unexplained transformation from slightly truculent left-winger to excessively clean-cut runner and glee-singer who was happy to become a management trainee with the Metal Box Company. From there he elided into being a City accountant, a member of the Hertfordshire bourgeoisie, and a natural and neighbourly Conservative activist.
The rest of the book, except for a rather dignified six pages (‘manly’ is the faintly mocking adjective which I cannot get out of my mind) about his parental and matrimonial troubles, is all politics, and politics seen very much from the level of the plain and not from the high peaks of questioning thought.
It is autobiography by manifesto, with party conferences (not the fratricide of Morecambe, which is left far behind, but the black ties of the Conservative agents’ dinner and the gratifying embarrassment of the standing ovations) erected into stations of the cross. It was Blackpool that made him in 1981 when he had become party chairman, but it was also Blackpool that was the scene of his breaking in 1983, when he honourably and quickly decided that he should not go on as a liability to Mrs Thatcher. And 1990 at Brighton - ‘my final speech to a party conference’ - was sufficiently l’ultima lacrima that it required extensive quotation, rarely a good recipe for memoirs.
The interesting question that remains is what was it that turned Cecil Parkinson, the railwayman’s left-wing son from Lancashire, into the most perfectly attuned to the Home Counties machine politics of the Conservative Party of any of his contemporaries. He notes with faint worry that Willie Whitelaw, whom he half admires, hated being chairman of the party, whereas he loved it. (Rab Butler also disliked it, but he is a bit outside Parkinson’s historical sweep.) And it must be stressed that Parkinson did not, in my view, love the Conservative Party because he could not find anything else to love or any other role to perform successfully. The evidence from this book as from elsewhere suggests that he was a competent departmental minister, a bit dogged by dogma, but not more.
Parkinson’s nearest rival for Conservative Associations’ favourite of the decade was, I suppose, the man whom he constantly proclaims as his friend, Norman Tebbit. Yet Tebbit, more abrasive, more original and, in a curious way, more intellectual than Parkinson, is not really the man for leafy suburban garden fêtes in the way that is Parkinson. Tebbit is to be wheeled out occasionally for big and rough jobs, but not to be wasted. He is of course Essex man in a way that Parkinson is not. But while Essex man may be alleged to have provided the marginal votes of Thatcherism it is Hertfordshire man who has the more central position on the M25 and is cosier for the chairmen, the treasurers and the ladies’ sections.
Politics have moved on, and Cecil Parkinson has not been so narrowly confined that he cannot enjoy the Bahamas, golf and skiing. Nevertheless, his book reminds me of a forty-year-old story of a politically obsessed Labour MP who on a delegation visit to Switzerland was shown a breathtaking view of the Matterhorn and said, ‘Ee, I wouldn’t like to go canvassing up there.’
Parkinson’s canvassing days and indeed his conferencing roller coaster days of triumph and setback are as much over as are mine. But I think he will have a niche in history that will have nothing to do with his troubles. He may well look in retrospect as quintessential a figure of the 1980s as was, say, George Brown of the 1960s or Selwyn Lloyd of the 1950s.