This is the material of history, naked and unformed.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, 15801
SITTING in his tower in the Dordogne in south-west France crafting his essay ‘Of Books’, Montaigne was writing about the power of rumour in the shaping of history. ‘Each man’, he declared, ‘can make his profit of it according to his understanding.’2 I have a natural appetite for rumour’s twin – gossip – as will become evident on several pages to come. But Montaigne’s line about ‘the material of history, naked and unformed’ is a fine description of all of us, not just professorial historians, the moment we spring from the womb. We live our own history even if most of us never write or otherwise record it. We are all human footnotes to our own times.
It is, I suspect, a fascinating exercise for anyone to find the morning paper which captures the previous day of their birth. Reading The Times for Saturday 29 March 1947 I am struck by how many of the themes it contains which will shape this book. Several of my particular frenzies were already there waiting to be distilled when I drew my first breath in the North Middlesex Hospital alongside the North Circular Road in Edmonton, Middlesex.
The lead story in the paper reported that the Foreign Ministers of the great powers were seriously falling out in Moscow about the future of Germany with the British Foreign Secretary, Ernie Bevin, taking on Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, Stalin’s grim, stony-faced Foreign Minister who turned being negative into an art form, as the chilling atmosphere frosted into a forty-year Cold War (‘Foreign Ministers Far from Accord’); the western powers were attempting to bail out Greece in the midst of its civil war (‘American Appeal to U.N.: Support for Aid to Greece’) as the cash-strapped British government handed over the lead external role in that country to the United States; the UK’s overextended imperial and global role produced a rash of stories from Palestine (‘Pipe-Lines Damaged at Haifa: Terrorists’ Attack with Bombs’), Egypt (‘Bomb in Cairo’), Hong Kong (‘Chinese Threat to Aircraft: Defence of Sovereignty’). There were some lighter imperial touches with King George VI and his family touring South Africa on the White Train (‘Royal Party on Fruit Farm: Labourers’ Greeting. From Our Special Correspondent ROYAL PILOT TRAIN, March 28’).3
Now the Cold War and the British Empire (a few, scattered residuals apart) are gone, though the overextension of Britain’s global commitments is not. But it is the economic news of Saturday 29 March 1947, the subject of the paper’s first leader, that offers (that day’s Boat Race and Grand National apart) perhaps the most enduring of our national frenzies – our shaky economic position.
On my birthday, the Attlee government had announced the appointment of a businessman, who had served in Whitehall during the war, Sir Edwin Plowden, to the new job of Chief Planning Officer and head of the Central Economic Planning Staff.4 The Times was deeply sceptical about the progress to date of Labour’s big idea of the day (justifiably, as it turned out), declaring:
Believing almost passionately in the virtue of planning they have so far failed to plan effectively. They have succeeded neither in realizing the symmetrical efficiency of their own theoretical propositions, nor in applying to peace-time requirements the practical lessons of civilian and service planning during the war.
Under the headline ‘Mr Attlee’s Opportunity’, however, The Times’ leader-writer allowed himself a burst of near-evangelical optimism about the possibility of eventual economic and productive well-being for the war-ravaged British economy if the Plowden appointment signified the getting of a grip:
If Mr ATTLEE and his chief colleagues have both the will and the capacity to seize the chance offered to them, they can transform the quality of government almost over-night. Their opportunity is nothing less than the salvation of Britain: it is in direct proportion to the magnitude of the difficulties with which they are confronted.
By Times standards, this was almost millenarian. (I say this as someone who was to write Times leaders in the early 1980s.)
Friday 28 March 1947 did represent a new birth – mine. Sadly, the same could not be said for the British economy. We still await salvation-level transformation and successive sets of ministers, from Attlee, Bevin, Stafford Cripps and Herbert Morrison onwards, have been denied the hosannahs of a grateful nation for setting us on an enduring and sustainable trajectory of economic growth and competitiveness.
I was born into a medium-sized Catholic family in north London though both my Mum’s and my Dad’s roots were in the north-west of England, Thornton-Cleveleys (near Blackpool) and Liverpool respectively. I had the great boon of being the youngest of four with three elder sisters to help bring me up, a factor to which my wife has always attributed what she regards as my overconfidence (I think she is probably right). The home was blessed with plentiful affection but not lubricated by a regular or adequate flow of money. Dad was an intelligent man, but he lacked application, and was not, I suspect, the easiest of employees. As a result, he did not reach the professional level to which his gifts might have lifted him. We relied a good deal on Mum going out to work as typist, sometimes on the evening shift at the newly nationalised British Road Services depot in Muswell Hill which laid on, I recall, rather good Christmas parties.
We also depended on the welfare state, which Dad, as a high Tory, affected to disdain as he did pretty well everything a Labour government introduced (though the wartime coalition and the Attlee administration which followed were post the Beveridge Report,5 responsible for first putting in train the reforms on whose benefits and services we relied as a family). As a result, I’ve always sustained a tendresse for those 1940s welfare statutes and for the politicians across the parties who enacted them. I remember hearing Barbara Castle recalling Nye Bevan saying to her of the welfare state in the late 1940s: ‘Barbara, if you want to know what all this is for, look in the perambulators.’ Rob Shepherd and I were filming her for our 1994 Channel 4 television series, What Has Become of Us? That’s me, I thought. And it was. And I increasingly became aware that we were the best-provided-for generation in the history of our country (of which more in the conclusion to this book).
The state was quite a shaper of mine, and most people’s, postwar childhoods. So, in my case, was the church, as it still is (I lapsed from the Catholic Church from between the ages of seventeen and fifty-four; but never ceased to believe). My mother ran the Brownie pack associated with St Mary Magdalene in Whetstone. The parish priest, Fr Gerry Ryan, was a great family friend. He would slip me a few bob at jumble sales in the scout hut to buy a parking lot’s worth of second-hand Dinky toys. The Cubs he would take to London for the annual Tyburn Martyrs Walk. As we marched we would stamp on the stretches of black rubber in the road which, in those days when the traffic passed over them, would cause the lights to change, causing a pleasingly rapid pyrotechnic effect of red, green and amber. This was followed by a service in Westminster Cathedral and refuelling in a Lyons Corner House before we caught the Northern line home to Finchley Central and points north to High Barnet.
There is a frustrated sailor in me which might flow from Cub pack trips down the reeking Thames, oil smeared and jetsam littered, from Westminster Pier to Greenwich through a Port of London groaning with freighters at their moorings. More likely it comes from Fr Ryan taking us to Navy Days in Portsmouth. HMS Victory, naturally, but also, in 1954, the last of the Royal Navy’s battleships, HMS Vanguard, huge and fascinating. Fifty five years later, there in the Ward Room of the Trident submarine HMS Vanguard (I was on board with friend and producer Richard Knight for the making of The Human Button documentary for BBC Radio 46) was a photo of the very Vanguard on whose deck I had trodden as a seven-year-old. When I mentioned this, the younger officers gave me a look as if I’d come from a deep and distant past somewhere between their deterrent patrols and the Battle of Jutland (which, in a way, I suppose I had).
Perhaps most subliminally of all, our journeys to tea with Fr Ryan’s family in Fareham took us on the ferry from Portsmouth to Gosport and past HMS Dolphin crowded with its squadrons of submarines, several of them, no doubt, veterans of World War II. How I wish I’d looked more closely and freeze-framed the scene in the pictorial section of my hippocampus more effectively than I have.
Church was not just a significant element in mine and the family’s social life (my older sisters were Brownies, then Girl Guides, then members of Catholic youth clubs). I believed, too. The lot. Looking back, there was no room for caveats in the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church. When we sang ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ at Benediction, I really meant it. Until puberty, I fancied becoming a monk. And, as much as I have come in later life to admire the sixth-century Rule of St Benedict as a guide to the use of time7 (very patchily applied in my case), I would not have thrived in the cloister. My appetite for gossip alone would have represented, as we Catholics used to say, a constant ‘occasion of sin’.
As to the autobiographical antecedents of other ingredients in the book, I have to confess that although memory stretches back to 1950, it is largely confined to my pram when outdoors and our flat in Granville Place in Finchley alongside what further up its path mutated into the Great North Road. It did not, to my great regret, embrace my one political hero, Clement Attlee, then the occupant of No. 10. I certainly absorbed the Churchillian presence during his last premiership as I did, in vivid terms, the Coronation of 1953. I can recall the blue posters in Finchley during the 1955 general election for Sir John Crowder (Mrs Thatcher’s predecessor as MP) and Sir Anthony Eden, then in the brief spring of his short and tragic premiership. But the first Prime Minister I watched carefully was Harold Macmillan (of whom more later). Indeed, my record as a political forecaster peaked in January 1957 when I was certain Mr Macmillan would emerge (which is what Leaders of the Conservative Party did until 1965) as Eden’s successor rather than Rab Butler, largely, I suspect, because our household newspaper, the Daily Express, encouraged me to think that way.
The Bomb, and the question of Britain as a nuclear weapons power, was very live in the UK into which I was born but only on the country’s innermost and heavily secrecy-protected circuits in Whitehall. A few weeks before I drew breath, on 8 January 1947, Attlee and a super-secret Cabinet committee, GEN 163, had authorised the manufacture of an atomic bomb.8 Not until May 1948, in a carefully worded answer to a planted parliamentary question in the House of Commons, did his Minister of Defence, A.V. Alexander, announce that research into atomic weapons was under way9 with the press (Chapman Pincher on the front page of the Daily Express apart10) scarcely giving it a glance.11
The first British atomic test took place off the north-west coast of Australia on 3 October 1952. But my proper recall only begins with Chapman Pincher’s coverage of the vastly more powerful H-bomb tests, American and Russian, in the early 1950s with the photos of huge mushroom clouds that accompanied them. Harry Pincher, who became a friend of mine thirty years later, was enormously well connected in Whitehall’s Civil Service, military and scientific circles. Rather to my surprise in 2011 in his dramatically titled Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders and Cover-Ups, published at the age of ninety-four, Harry, in a special section on ‘sources’, names his helpers.12
You did not need a degree in physics to understand the immense surge in destructive power those mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki signified. Though it was not until the Lower Sixth at my Gloucestershire grammar school in Stroud did I first read of the US–UK–Canadian Manhattan Project, which led to those bombs (I simply can’t remember which book it was; but the nuclear question has fascinated me from that day to this).
The Bomb, its possession, its sustenance and, each generation or so, its upgrading is very much part of the wider debate about Britain’s attempts to retain a place in the world out of proportion to its geographical, demographic and economic size – its continuing aversion to slipping into the mediocrity of being a medium-sized power tucked inside a huge regional organisation called the European Union (about which it has harboured doubts from its very limited, early 1950s initial incarnation the European Coal and Steel Community – a national neuralgia that has persisted throughout my lifetime and which, I’m sure, will see me out).
The place-in-the-world question has gripped me since the Suez autumn of 1956. Apart from other factors, I have read the newspapers every morning since then. Being a devotee of the cinema as a boy (the Odeon, Temple Fortune in north London, seemed perpetually to vibrate to the sound of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine housed in Spitfires, Hurricanes or Lancasters), I had acquired the conviction that we Brits did not lose wars. It was not difficult, therefore, to glean from Radio Newsreel on the BBC’s Light Programme each evening or the Daily Express every morning that something was not quite right with our attempt to get back the canal from Colonel Nasser. One of the least cheering patches of my pursuit of the papers disgorged by the 30-Year Rule at the National Archives in Kew was working through the Suez files. And the tragic demise of Sir Anthony Eden, so gallant an anti-appeaser in the late 1930s, was, to my mind, made triply so when I realised that in his last appearance in the House of Commons on 20 December 1956, he had simply lied when Denis Healey pressed him about Anglo-French-Israeli collusion ahead of the invasion of Egypt a few weeks earlier. ‘There were no plans got together [with Israel] to attack Egypt,’ Eden said.13
Parliament did not impinge upon my imagination as much as it should have when I was a boy. To be sure, the newspapers reported the House of Commons with a length and a regularity that is now gone. But my generation grew up without the benefit of hearing Parliament at work (radio was allowed in on 3 April 1978) let alone seeing MPs or peers on their feet (the cameras first turned on 21 November 1989). Great parliamentary occasions would be reported on radio and television by oral sketch-writers, some of whom (the BBC’s Christopher Jones in particular) took it to an art form.
Not until as late as 1964 did Parliament as a functioning institution begin to bite into my curiosity. Bernard Crick’s classic The Reform of Parliament14 was first published that year and it did the rounds a bit in the Lower Sixth at Marling School. On 31 July 1964, the very last day of the 1959 parliament, my friend Bob Gardiner and I were given a day off school so that we could travel up to London and sit in the Strangers’ Gallery at the House of Commons.
We thought it was to be Sir Winston Churchill’s last day in Parliament but, in fact, that had already taken place four days earlier.15 I was struck by the smallness and intimacy of the chamber; its physical atmosphere, the vacuousness of the last-day behaviour down below. We ate in the café where the policemen dined too. I can remember peeing into an adjacent pedestal to Manny Shinwell (a particular hate of my father’s – though this may be conflating a later experience when Bob and I visited Parliament in the early days of the first Wilson government). We travelled back to Stroud on a very late train from Paddington. I half remember thinking about a political life that day; but the path which eventually took me to the other chamber was, naturally, quite unforeseeable that summer night as Bob Gardiner and I talked about Harold Wilson’s prospects in the coming general election. Bob was staunch Labour. He was a contemporary of mine too at Cambridge and became first a schoolteacher and then a Baptist minister. I wasn’t a Labour man. In fact, I stood for the Conservatives in Marling School’s mock election the following October and won.
A proper immersion in Parliament had to wait until a brief spell in 1976 as the Financial Times’ Lobby Correspondent (I didn’t take to the lobby system of mass briefing and soon reverted to a more solitary operation on the Whitehall beat). After their creation in 1979, I took a continued interest in the government department-shadowing House of Commons select committees, which Bernard Crick’s 1964 volume had recommended and foreseen.16 The House of Lords I knew held high-quality debates and ran some very thoughtful select committees. But, for obvious reasons, I now wish I had followed its work more consistently and closely. Since becoming an independent crossbench peer in November 2010, I’ve found it the most agreeable form of adult education I’ve ever encountered as well as an exquisite provider of weapons-grade gossip on an almost daily basis.
There has been another, enduring stimulus for my interest in the governing and legislating institutions, the tribes that people them and the processes they deploy – Anthony Sampson and his early anatomies of Britain. Anthony brimmed with curiosity until the very end of his days (he died in December 2004). As I came to know him as well as his books (I received the second in the line, Anatomy of Britain Today,17 as a sixth-form prize in 1965) it dawned on me that Anthony’s secret as a super-successful operator behinds the lines was a special Sampsonian equation:
Curiosity + courtesy = confidences.18
As his fellow Observer journalist Neal Ascherson said at his memorial service in St Martin-in-the-Fields: ‘I never knew such an artist at questioning. Anthony was the most skilful, relentless listener in the world’.19 I have never matched Anthony at that. Never will – I’m too loquacious. But I’ll try harder in future. It’s a gold standard to which every scholar of his or her own time should aspire; part of the contemporary historian’s craft.
1. Donald M. Frame (translator), The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Volume II (Hamish Hamilton, undated), p.304. I am grateful to Ned Pennant-Rea for bringing this essay to my attention.
2. Ibid., pp.303–4.
3. The Times, 29 March 1947.
4. Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (Secker and Warburg, 1989), pp.152–4.
5. Social Insurance and Allied Services, Cmd 6404 (HMSO, 1942).
6. The fruits of the programme took written form in Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945–2010 (Penguin, 2010), chapter 8, ‘The Human Button: Deciders and Deliverers’, pp.310–59.
7. Abbot Parry OSB (translator), The Rule of St Benedict (Gracewing, 1990).
8. The National Archives, Public Record Office, CAB 130/16, GEN 163, 1st Meeting, 8 January 1947. See also Peter Hennessy, Cabinets and the Bomb (British Academy/OUP, 2007), pp.36–59.
9. Ibid., p.69; House of Commons, Official Report, 12 May 1948, col.2117 (HMSO, 1948).
10. ‘Communist MP Sees Atom Secrets’, Chapman Pincher, Daily Express, 13 May 1948.
11. Peter Hennessy, What the Papers Never Said (Portcullis Press, 1985), pp.24–7.
12. Chapman Pincher, Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders and Cover-Ups: Six Decades of Espionage, (Mainstream, 2011), pp.628–42.
13. House of Commons, Official Report, 20 December 1956, col.1493.
14. Bernard Crick, The Reform of Parliament (Weidenfeld, 1964).
15. Martin Gilbert, Never Despair: Winston S. Churchill 1945–1965, (Heinemann, 1988), p.1354.
16. Crick, The Reform of Parliament. See chapter 9, ‘What Is to Be Done?’ pp.192–203.
17. Anthony Sampson, Anatomy of Britain Today (Hodder, 1965). The first of the line appeared as Anatomy of Britain, (Hodder, 1962); the last as Who Runs This Place? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century (John Murray, 2004).
18. Peter Hennessy, ‘Foreword’ in Anthony Sampson, The Anatomist: The Autobiography of Anthony Sampson (Politico’s, 2008).
19. Ibid.