On the eve of the millennium, two men confided their anxieties to their diaries. Chris Mullin wondered what kind of a world his (as yet unborn) grandchildren would inherit. Alec Guinness asked ‘Oh Sceptre’d Isle set in the polluted sea, where are we heading?’ They voiced a more general feeling of awe at the scale of change that had come about in Britain in the twentieth century and of what lay ahead (though they had no inkling of how close 9/11 was).
‘Events, dear boy, events’, the phrase attributed to Harold Macmillan, makes the point that the unexpected can ruin the best-laid plans. In Macmillan’s own time, the abdication of Edward VIII, Dunkirk, the 1945 election, Suez, the Profumo scandal, all challenged expectations and sometimes derailed governments; thirty years later it was the poll tax riots, the Maastricht Treaty, the 9/11 attack, Iraq and the death of David Kelly, the credit crisis, MPs’ expenses. There were many straws in the wind to warn of these events, but often straws are ignored until a crisis overtakes everything. Diaries, with no firm idea of what the significance or conclusion might be, record the unfolding events together with all the incidental observations and confidential thoughts of their authors.
The invitation to edit a ‘political diary of Britain’ was irresistible, not least because tweets and blogs and social networks may have put an end to diary-keeping. It coincided with an exhibition on Identity at the Wellcome Trust in which over a hundred volumes of diaries were on show and the Trust very generously allowed me access to the collection. It included the wartime diaries of General Alan Brooke, Joyce Grenfell and Noël Coward, the ‘prison diaries’ of both Jimmy Boyle and Lord Longford, A Year with Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno, the Alec Guinness volume, and a host of other treasures to augment my existing shelves of political diaries and memoirs which ranged from Harold Nicolson, Tony Benn and Violet Bonham Carter to Gyles Brandreth, Paddy Ashdown and Oona King. The definition of ‘political’ thus became more and more elastic as Events, Dear Boy, Events took shape. No one could appreciate the pressures facing Churchill without reading Brooke’s masterfully edited account of the Second World War; or understand the evolution of the Labour Party without the diaries of Beatrice Webb, who had probably the greatest influence on the character of the Labour Party besides Ramsay MacDonald. I read all of these volumes of diaries, and produced a list of just over seventy diarists. Omissions included, regrettably, several whom a different editor of the same book might have considered essential – C. P. Scott, for example, James Lees-Milne and Anthony Powell.
Inevitably in a book of this nature, there are gaps and simplifications – the independence and break up of India, for example, which had long-term consequences still felt today; or Rhodesia’s declaration of ‘UDI’ in 1965 which occupied so much of Harold Wilson’s time. It is not a history – there are many fine historians who have interpreted the twentieth century in all its aspects. Nor is it intended to be a nostalgic account of Great Britain. It is an impressionist view of politically changing times – of two wars, loss of the empire, the rise and fall of socialism, devolution, a civil war, global migration, European integration – during which Britons and their institutions have been stolidly resilient. The monarchy, trade unions, love of animals, the BBC, the House of Lords, the established Church (just), horse-racing, shooting and fishing, all-pervasive class differences, the parliamentary and party system, have all survived. And the period began and ended with a coalition government.
It has been a much harder project than I imagined it could possibly be, but made huge fun by John Davey, who has guided me through the book from the start, and Andrew Franklin and the team at Profile Books. It could not have been done without the help of Tony Benn, James Goddard, Jen Laney, Jayne Bryant, Patricia Moberly, David Wedgwood Benn, Christina Weir, Roger Luxton-Jones, Laura Rhode, Tom Arno, Ken Edwards and my remarkable mother Joan Marigold. I am indebted to all those editors whose hard work on the original diaries I have plundered, and who are listed in an appendix (not Brian Eno’s!). Readers should be aware that I have retained the style and idiosyncracies of punctuation and spelling of my diarists, hence the inconsistencies from entry to entry; but I accept all blame for editorial errors.
Ruth Winstone
August 2012