In 1937 Winston Churchill wrote Great Contemporaries, a set of biographical essays on various statesmen, in the course of which he remarked that the “one mark of a great man… is to have handled matters during his life that the course of after events is continuously affected by what he did.” The seed of this observation would germinate some eighty years later, in a lecture series by Sir Vernon Bogdanor on politicians who shaped modern Britain, from which this book is adapted.
Bogdanor is a lucid and intelligent writer whose work benefits from his having met most of the politicians under discussion. Here he is chatting to Harold Wilson about Nye Bevan, here dining with Enoch Powell at the Oxford Union, here debating Roy Jenkins about the Maastricht Treaty. His book stands tall for its good-humoured erudition, its lively interest in personalities, and its deep understanding of the business of politics. Six essays are included here, one for each Carlylean “great man”, covering biographical and ideological context as well as political analysis.
Bogdanor’s first essay is on Aneurin Bevan, perhaps the greatest statesman the Labour Party has produced, who is celebrated here for his contribution to democratic socialism. He was born in a Welsh mining village in 1897 and entered Parliament in 1929. His great achievement as health minister between 1945-51 was the establishment of the NHS, for which he fought tirelessly against medical staff who opposed nationalisation and Conservatives who opposed “state charity.”
Bevan was a warm, eloquent, unflaggingly hard-working man, but his character contained defects which grew dominant after he left office in 1951. He was a hypocrite: despite his principles of free healthcare for all, his personal health was attended to by a royal physician; and, while he advocated social housing to encourage the mixing of classes, he himself lived between a house in Belgravia and a farm in Buckinghamshire. After leaving office, he also made an especially vitriolic attack on his Labour rival Hugh Gaitskell: a newly elected MP recorded that Bevan “shook with rage and screamed… The megalomania and neurosis and hatred and jealousy he displayed astounded us all.” His rivalry with Gaitskell continued to divide the Labour Party in the 1950s and, though they were eventually reconciled, neither of them lived to see the party elected to office in 1964.
The essay on Enoch Powell is the best in the book. Powell – with his metallic eyes, strip-like moustache, hypnotic voice, and ruthless logic, wearing what Kingsley Amis described as his “familiar look of slightly resentful slight bafflement” – was a fascinating man. He is examined here for his theory of the sovereignty of Parliament, though he will always be remembered for his views on immigration.
In his youth Powell excelled at Cambridge; in Australia aged twenty-five he became the youngest professor in the British Empire; he entered the Second World War as a private and emerged as a brigadier, and was elected to Parliament in 1950. He established himself as “the finest mind in the House of Commons”, a brilliant orator who spoke most powerfully against the Hola Camp massacre in 1959. As a prolific writer he produced poetry, political theory, classical translations, book reviews, history, biography, and some excellent prefaces to the novels of Surtees and Trollope.
Then, in 1968, he made his indefensible “Rivers of Blood” speech against Commonwealth immigration. Having served in India just before Partition and visited America during the civil rights struggle, he was convinced that no two racial groups could live together peacefully, and in saying so he was merely being intellectually honest – that is the defence given by his supporters. It does not hold water. There is no excusing the vileness of his speech or the atmosphere of hatred he created, in which “racialism”, as it was then called, could flourish. His ruthless belief in the power of his own logic prevented him from seeing that, in Mrs Gaitskell’s phrase of a few years earlier, “all the wrong people are cheering.” Despite that brilliant mind and poetic eloquence, he had arrived at the same conclusion as any BNP skinhead – that mass immigration was a disaster, that migrants would “never integrate”, and that “voluntary repatriation” was the only solution.
Of Powell’s personal decency, and his freedom from prejudice, there can be no doubt. It is a matter of record that in Poona he had refused on principle to patronise a whites-only club which barred his Indian friend from entry; and that, as MP for Wolverhampton, he provided much “humanitarian help” to his Indian and Pakistani constituents by helping them bring their dependents to the UK. He was fluent in Urdu and chatted to his constituents in that language. There is no conclusive answer to the question of how this tolerant, intelligent man resorted in 1968 to such filthy rhetoric.
Roy Jenkins, subject of essay the third, was a much more agreeable figure, an intellectual and a gentleman in the old style – “the last of the civilised politicians,” as Bogdanor puts it. He did more than any other politician to shape modern British society; his slate of reforms as Labour Home Secretary in the 1960s ended theatre censorship, outlawed racial discrimination, and decriminalised abortion and homosexuality. The Guardian at the time called him the best home secretary since Robert Peel.
In the 1970s he continued in the Shadow Cabinet, served a second term as Home Secretary, and became President of the European Commission. A social democrat, a moderniser on the left in the tradition of Gaitskell, he formed the breakaway Social Democratic Party in 1981, which seven years later merged with the Liberals to become the party currently led by Sir Ed Davey. In later life he became a mentor to Tony Blair as well as to Peter Mandelson (recently foiled in his dream of becoming Jenkins’s successor-but-one to the Oxford Chancellorship).
However, Jenkins’s vision of social democracy was inherently paradoxical. It required a small, centralised state if it were to function, but at the same time its ideals encouraged the dilution of central power through devolution or membership of the EU. This is a contradiction from which his followers have never quite recovered.
The most obscure of the six politicians who made the weather – undeservedly so – was Keith Joseph. He was a great intellect, having won a prize fellowship at All Souls, and he exerted more influence as a political thinker than any of the others in this book. Though he entered politics for the right reasons, “with passionate concern about poverty”, he was a terrible politician and suffered from what can only be termed an inferiority complex, an obsession with apology and self-correction and a tendency to refer to himself as “a convenient madman.”
He was like Powell in advocating a proto-Thatcherite market economy, which he saw as a remedy to the social decay caused by thirty years of postwar “statism.” Again like Powell, his diagnosis was wrongheaded and his proposed solution only inflamed the original problem. He even had his own “Rivers of Blood” moment in 1975, when he made his disastrous “Stop Babies” speech in Edgbaston, lamenting the threat to “our human stock” posed by teenage unmarried mothers. The nasty eugenic undertones demolished any chance Sir Keith might have had at a significant political career. All the same, he remained active in politics as the brains behind Thatcherism, and as “New Labour’s Secret Godfather.” Political economy today would be unrecognisable if he had not brought neoliberal economics to the fore.
The subject of the fifth essay, Tony Benn, was a born politician. “In my family, politics is like a hereditary disease, rather like the monarchy,” he once said – to the Queen. His father and grandfather had been in politics (his son still is) and he enjoyed the remarkable distinction of having known almost every prime minister from David Lloyd George to David Cameron. He was a great parliamentarian, whose recorded legacy spans millions of words of diaries and countless pieces of brilliant oratory. (The speech on Iraq in 1998 is perhaps his most powerful).
On the hard left of the Labour Party, his three great achievements were constitutional: securing the right of hereditary peers to renounce their peerages; the right of party members to elect party leaders; and advocating for the first time in British politics the device of a referendum.
The two years after his death in 2014 saw two vindications of his thought: firstly, the election of a hard left MP, Jeremy Corbyn, to the Labour leadership; secondly, the decision to leave the European Union, of which he, like Powell, had been a critic since the 1970s. A good academic article by Daphne Halikiopoulou, on “The paradox of nationalism: The common denominator of radical right and radical left euroscepticism”, explains more broadly why right and left populists are united in their Euroscepticism; and by implication why Powell and Benn, on opposite ends of the political spectrum, were in this case as closely aligned as opposite ends of a horseshoe. One was motivated by “ethnic nationalism” and the other by “civic nationalism”, but the conclusion, a desire to leave the EU, was in each case the same.
Bogdanor credits Nigel Farage as a great communicator and a man dedicated to his cause. A fair account is provided of his youthful racism (a source is quoted as saying “He was racist in a Churchillian sense” – as if that makes it any better), his exploits as an MEP and UKIP leader, and the final kicking aside of Richard “We’re So Attractive” Tice in 2024 to become leader of Reform Ltd.
Farage is in many ways an outlier among the six. Quite apart from being merely a vulgar hatemonger, he is the only one to have exerted his influence from outside Westminster and to remain unaffiliated with a major party. He is also the only one who was in no sense an intellectual: Bevan edited Tribune in its George Orwell heyday, Powell was a professor, Jenkins a biographer, Benn a political diarist, and Joseph an economic theorist. There is probably some inference to be drawn here about the decline in the mental competence of our political class – but I won’t draw it, because it is possible that my objections to what Farage represents are like those of Keith Joseph to the political system of his own day, “apt to contrast the best of the past with the worst of the present.”
Making The Weather: Six Politicians Who Changed Modern Britain by Vernon Bogdanor is available now in hardback.
