BOOKS

Warm heart, warm blood

Alastair Forbes

BOB BOOTHBY: A PORTRAIT by Robert Rhodes James John Curtis/ Hodder & Stoughton, £20, pp. 476 In St Margaret's, Westminster last week, where I was amongst the many friends commemorating the late Catherine Amery, by far the most delightful, amusing and beautiful of Harold and Dorothy Mac- millan's daughters, I found my mind, perhaps not surprisingly, going back several decades to the winter morning in 1954 Bob Boothby had delivered before the largest congregation I have ever seen packed in there his eulogy of Duff Cooper, who had died at sea the week before. Sir Robert Rhodes James has done well to reprint his text on that occasion for, as he points out in this long and discursive book — a full- length portrait indeed — it was inexplicably ignored both by John Charmley and Philip Ziegler in their respective biographies of Duff and Diana, whose own autobiogra- phies were so markedly superior to either. Boothby, picking up a theme from my own earlier Sunday newspaper threnody, spoke most truthfully of Duff's 'gift, amounting almost to genius, for friendship', adding that he was

absolute for friendship; and at his best in the company of friends. When he came into a room you felt a glow. You said to yourself: `This is going to be stimulating and jolly' and so, unfailingly, it was.

I must say that I felt very much the same whenever Bob Boothby hove into sight, as he did so gratifyingly often over many years of my life in all sorts of places in all sorts of weather. (How, for example, could I ever forget the expressions on the faces of the bishops at the next table as, in the company of myself and his two White's Club sponsors for the Upper House, Lords . Sherwood and Stanley of Alderley — the latter having just been served with a writ for long-standing non-payment for his Baron's robes from Ede & Ravenscroft Bob warmed to hilarious and scabrous topics in their Lordships' dining-room?). But Rhodes James was not even yet a young Clerk of the House of Commons that morning in St Margaret's, so he did not hear Bobbety Salisbury's lisping remark as he shuffled out of the church — 'I supppose they'll have to weconsecwate the place now!' — a pretty accurate reflection of contemporary Establishmentarian sentiment about Boothby. In this case it was reinforced by Betty Salisbury's taking it upon herself to remain adamantly censori- ous of the man whose brief marriage to her sister Diana Cavendish had proved the worst possible way for the couple to consol- idate their remarkable compatibility as affectionate friends, which was nevertheless to prove touchingly lifelong. There have always been Cavendishes and Cavendishes, and not the least of the mer- its of Rhodes James's book is the light it throws on the wholly admirable personality of Diana, today the widowed Viscountess Gage. She and George Gage could even be seen contentedly and convivially breaking bread with Bob and the remarkable Sar- dinian `childbride' Wanda, whose tender loving care gave him 20 years of uncovenanted-for extra life before he wast- ed away in hoary old age.

Rhodes James, after a remarkable start as far back as 1959, has proved a rather

curate's eggish biographer. A year ago he retrospectively spoilt his admirable study of Lord Randolph Churchill by nonsensically writing to the Sunday Telegraph to say that it was not the General-Paralysis-of-the- Insane final stage of syphilis that had car- ried off Sir Winston's father, citing an unnamed retired venereologist nowhere mentioned either in the acknowledgements or source notes of his book. This fantasy was accepted as fact by a couple of eccentrics, but not by Sir Winston's surviv- ing issue Lady Soames who, in one of her own many excellent books, had already clearly captioned a photograph of her grandfather as being a syphilis victim.

Then, in what Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, in a belated amende honorable for some utterly aberrational earlier praise, had called his 'kindly whitewash' of Sir Anthony Eden, he could be said to have joined the `Piano Legs Cover-up' school of biography, totally concealing from his readers that his subject had been, until his felicitous second marriage, a womaniser on an Asquithian, even Lloyd Georgian scale. In this Author- ised Version he bowdlerised both Suez and Sex. What Rhodes James reader could guess, for instance, that Sir Winston had, with a characteristic choice of idiom, once complained that he had had 'a terrible week, what with Rab's principles and Anthony's cock', or that his designated suc- cessor had threatened suicide when the late Lord Beatty had proposed to cite him as an adulterous co-respondent in an action for divorce?

In the present volume he does a sort of now - you- see -it- now-you- don't striptease act with the piano-legs, unveiling them only very occasionally. He deals justly with Bob's courageous, some might think politically foolhardy efforts from 1954 on to bring about in Parliament the removal of the Labouchere amendment of 1886 mak- ing homosexual relations between consent- ing adults a criminal offence, and quotes the Commons speech in which he stated, inter alia, that 'subconscious bisexuality is a component part of all of us and that the majority of males pass through a homosex- ual period of their lives', adding that 'this was true in his case'. It certainly was. No special importance need be attached to his grandmother once telling him he was 'a queer little fish', but then again, 'Of course I meant Boys', he answered when, in my own perhaps rather naïve youth, I asked him to elaborate on his statement that at Oxford he had slept with someone differ- ent every night. From his visits as an excep- tionally good-looking young man to pre-Hitler Germany he had certainly got as

much pleasure of the same kind as, say, Sir Stephen Spender or Sir Harold Nicolson, the latter in a quoted letter honestly outing himself as an 'old queen'.

As for his trip to the Moroccan interior with the lecherous Archie Clark Kerr, later Inverchapel, and the even more lecherous Times Tangier correspondent Walter Har- ris, it sounds only marginally more inno- cent than that to Egypt by Flaubert, where the great heterosexual writer picked up his everlasting dose in a male brothel. Of course, Rhodes James is perfectly right to say that 'his dominant strain was hetero- sexual'. But why add that 'both he and I [sic] are very doubtful whether Sarah Macmillan was his daughter . . . the child bore remarkably little likeness to him'? What stuff and nonsense is this? Most peo- ple found Sarah to be on the contrary a jolie laide spit and image of Bob. The latter, pace Rhodes James, quite naturally did not name himself as 'father' on the Deed of Trust he drew up for her later adopted sons with Harold Macmillan, who also quite naturally loved Sarah just as much as the Duke of Rutland did Diana Cooper, knowing her nevertheless to be the fruit of Harry Cust's loins. Bob always spoke to me of Sarah as his daughter, and certainly nei- ther her Cavendish nor her Macmillan rela- tions ever thought of her as anything else.

Yet 'there is little serious doubt', writes Rhodes James, 'that he was the father of other children'. I should think not. Of at least one of them he was particularly proud to find that she had inherited from him quite a lot of the extraordinary talent, though never the star quality, as a golden- voiced performer that made him a house- hold name and favourite to millions in a way that could never have come to pass had his very short ministerial career not been permanently blocked off in 1941.

It is evident that either Rhodes James knew Boothby even less than he suggests in his Preface (which incidentally does not mention that he was neither the first nor the only writer approached to paint his portrait) or that he has once more gone off on another of his Miinchausen fantasies, such as that last summer which made him challenge medical facts about poor Lord Randolph, obvious even to a first-year stu- dent nurse. In store for him, however, shortly to read, in his favourite newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph, is its serialisation of the beautifully written memoirs of that exceptionally brave and literate journalist, Quentin Crewe. His chapter, entitled sim- ply 'Sarah', in 13 moving pages tells more about Dorothy and Bob and their 'parent- ing' concern for their ill-starred love-child than anything to be found in this thick book. I fear too it will make Sir Robert look a proper Charlie.

What Crewe has written will also leave a certain amount of egg on the face of Macmillan's biographer, Alistair Horne, who, miffed no doubt at being misspelt Alastair throughout, has been sniping away at Rhodes James, even descending to repeating bad taste jokes about Lady Dorothy's scarcely obtrusive moustache, an external secondary sexual characteristic very common in highly sexed women after the menopause, and one many males the world over would consider even in a young girls sure promise of satisfactory bedtime gymnastics.

Rhodes James is quite right to see Dorothy as from the start 'a sa proie toute attach& Boothby being the victim bewitched, bothered and bewildered, which in my experience is about par for life's course. But it became real Isolde and Tris- tan stuff all the same, the Prelude and Liebestod having anyway always been the best music for lovemaking. As for his claim that the pair, as time went on, became 'considerably more discreet', as someone who, during her husband's premiership, frequently found Lady Dorothy unsuccess- fully seeking a taxi on the pavement out- side Bob's Eaton Square apartment and gave her a lift back to her wifely, motherly and grandmotherly duties at No 10, not yet policed by any Thatcher Iron Maiden chastity gates, I can hardly accept it.

Pruriency apart (admitting pruriency to be, with the exception of Dame Cartland, the book trade's principal selling-point), the book is well worth reading for the polit- ical history in it alone. It ought to be made compulsory reading for beginners, at a time when so many of the themes espoused by Boothby, such as Arms and the Covenant, are being taken up again by John Major, some of them as recently as at the G7 Summit.

Rhodes James well describes the trans- formation of appeasement 'from a policy into almost a religion', though he is all at sea about the first anti-Munich, anti- Chamberlain by-election victory at Bridg- water, where Vernon Bartlett, whose side I never left for the duration of his campaign, was elected, but not as he seems to think re-elected, to Parliament. Boothby knew that the Czech army could have held in 1938, saving millions of later to be sacri- ficed lives, had Benes dared take Churchill's advice to 'Fire your cannon, and the rest of the world will stand with you.' Bob's loyal support of the Czechs was certainly not dependent on the commission he was expecting from one single and already rich beneficiary of his lobbying, but his suicidally silly failure to come clean on the matter before a bullying enemy in the shape of slimy John Simon cost him for ever after a second seat on a Government Front Bench. I heard his character- istically eloquent Commons speech of explanation before he went off to be an undoubted 'wingless wonder' as an RAF adjutant at a Bomber Command airfield handily situated for his active social and sexual life.

After the war I saw much of Boothby in the European Movement that led first to the Hague Congress of 1948 and then to the Council of Europe at Strasbourg in 1949, where I first fathered the jokey remark Ve suis Anglais et federaste', the latter label to be pinned years later on Nicholas Ridley by that extraordinary mould-breaking Fellow of All Souls, John Foster. Boothby's work on the Strasbourg Plan deserved better treatment than it received from the permanently purblind Treasury. But, take him for all in all, he combined being nearly always right on the great political issues of the day with being nearly always the best company. Of what other politician could that be said? Cer- tainly not of his lovable but moody earliest mentor Churchill, about whom, however, he became excessively and uncharacteristically bitter. As Lecky said of Charles James Fox ('I don't want Charles James Fox in my government ', said the foolish Eden of Boothby)

there is a charm of manner and temper which sometimes accompanies the excesses of a strong animal nature that wins more popularity in the world than the purest and the most self-denying virtue.