The thrills of politics

DOUGLAS HURD

Who Killed Enoch Powell? Arthur Wise (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 30s) Chief the Honourable Minister T. M. Aluko (Heinemann 12s) Political thrillers are so fashionable nowadays that there is a risk that the form will attract writers more interested in the politics than the thrill. For example, the blurb says that Mr Wise is a student of 'violence as a form of communication', and his book bears this out. He kills Mr Enoch Powell in the first chapter, which gives him an excuse for relegating at once to the background those elements in our political life which practise other means of com- munication than violence. The whites set on

the browns and the blacks, an effete cunning Prime Minister summons a Fascist ex-officer to take control, and the rest of the book is largely an account of the bashing of one group by another up and down the country

spiced with a little trendy ideology. Because the basic political structure of the book is unconvincing it cannot carry the weight of violence which Mr Wise seeks to heap upon us.

There is a crucial difference between the political thriller and the political novel. The thriller relies on the contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary; the plot is the master and the characters secondary. The thriller writer is not concerned to illuminate the political scene as it is today, but to born- bard it with the improbable and fantastic and see what happens. The political novelist has a different role. It is his job to test the politician day by day, to see how he rec- onciles his public and his private life, his political statements and his personal behaviour—in fact to discover why he becomes and how he remains a member of his strange profession. This is a much more difficult and worthwhile task. So warm thanks to Mr Aluko for setting the pace

so far as Nigeria is concerned. Chief the Honourable Minister is a straightforward ac-

count of a West African headmaster who returns from a British Council tour to find he has been appointed Minister of Works. The political pattern of his country is still form- ing. and helplessly he watches it go wrong. Over-enthusiasm and ignorance lead quickly to corruption and electoral fraud. The British expatriate civil servants are snubbed and outmanoeuvred, the wiles of the Jordarmenian Ambassador succeed. The honest headmaster turns this way and that but cannot keep his honesty except by a break with his friends, his mistress and his surroundings which is beyond him. So he succumbs, and is murdered in the eventual revolution which results in military rule. There are no pretensions and not much ideology in Mr Aluko's tale, and it deserves success.

But where are the British political novels of today, or even of yesterday? Not since

Trollope have we had a writer of fiction who set himself to mine below the surface and flash light on the really fascinating problems of political character and motive. Harold

Nicolson, Maurice Edelman, Wilfred Fien- burgh and many others have written en-

tertaining novels about British politics without quite getting to the depth this milieu demands.

If their touch has been light, Lord Snow's has been too heavy. It is a tragedy that Evelyn Waugh did not manage a romantic affair with politics between the Church and the Army; he had exactly the right qualities of wit and charity. Our politics are not dull. at least not to the practitioner and the close observer.

The relentless decay of almost any ad- ministration, the penalties exacted for ill

health and eccentricity, the pretentiousness of the press and the polls, the disap- pointment of young men in waiting, the

sweep and confusion of a general elec- tion—there are dozens of themes lying fresh on the scrapheap for the scavenger with a

touch of imagination. We are more in need

of a sequence of first-class political novels than of expensive and predictable memoirs. On present form there is plenty of leisure ahead for several men with the right talents. Would Mr Richard Marsh or Mr Roy Jenkins please step forward?