Hugh the holy
Alan Watkins
Hugh Galtskell Philip Williams (Cape £15) Biographies are to us what sermons were to our 17th-century ancestors. 'Oh, but I read a great deal of biography', people (generally women) will say when they are concerned to stake a claim to intellectual or moral seriousness. We expect to derive a message or a lesson from them, we celebrate and reward their authors, and some of these authors, like Stuart of Jacobean sermonisers, lead exciting and even dangerous lives. The last cannot be said of Mr Philip Williams. He is a bachelor don at Nuffield College. He is an agreeably 19th-century figure not only in this respect but also in that, though little-known outside Oxford, he attracts an intense personal loyalty both in the University and in the People's Party. He belongs unequivocally to the revisionist — what has misleadingly come to be called the social democratic — wing of that Party. His Life of Gaitskell is dedicated to his friend and admirer, Anthony Crosland. Crosland it was who, with his coliterary executor, Mr Roy Jenkins, selected Mr Williams to write the book. There were several competing claims by Political journalists, not including the pre: sent reviewer. 'My only doubt about Philip', Crosland later said, 'is whether he Will be able to get the sex part right.' In the event Mr Williams has not chosen to deal with the sex part at all, except to make scattered and general references to Gaitskell's love of dancing, predilection for night clubs and general liking for social life, in particular that provided by Mrs Anne Fleming and Lady Pamela Berry (as she then was). These last activities were, Mr Williams tells us, disapproved of by Crosland, who, however (Mr Williams does not tell us this), would instead dispatch his wife Susan to the soirees in question to 'pick up the gossip'. The balance of the book is odd. it is, to be sure, sub-titled 'A Political BiograGaitskell was a politician; Mr Wilhams is a political writer with works on P°st-war France to his credit. But there Were four experiences which made Gaitskelt what he was: his schooklays at Winchester; the General Strike, when he was a, t New College; lecturing for the WEA in the Nottinghamshire coalfield; and the vielent suppression of the workers .in Vienna. These take up 59 pageS Ot a book with 787 pages of text. A more Specific example: Winchester is given five ,Pages, while the Crossman-Padley corn Promise which, in the event, did. not C,?Itle off, is given six. This is biography with a vengeance! But oh, what memories it stirs for us gnarled old hands in the trade! CrossmanPadley: the name is like a knell. It became like Jarddyce v. Jarndyce, the Schleswig-Holstein question, Hodgkinson's amendment, or the Town and Country Planning Act, 1947. Indeed there is a political journalist (again, not the present'reviewer) who judges the fitness of people to engage in serious discourse on the Labour Party not so much by whether they can remember the details of Crossman-Padley — for that was beyond the participants even at the time — as by whether they can recall the episode at all. Reading Mr Williams on Crossman-Padley, as on much else, is rather like coming upon one's old notes, if, that is, one had bothered to take any; discovering a forgotten textbook; or, most daunting of all, being asked to sit an examination in one's middle years: "[Crossman's] aim was not to win a conference majority by the skilful blurring of differences but specifically to isolate and injure Gaitskell. (P.M. Williams)".,Discuss.'
Actually it is not a bad question. For a few pages later on Mr Williams writes that 'political acceptability, not a coherent defensive policy, was Crossman's primary purpose'. Both propositions can admittedly be true in a broad sense. Yet Crossman can scarcely have had two primary purposes. A primary purpose is, after all, a primary purpose. Even if we admit political acceptability rather than the isolation and injury of Gaitskell as Crossman's aim or primary purpose during this period, 1960-61, it does not conclude the question of the fairness of Mr Williams's interpretation. When it comes to the Common Market, a year later, Mr Williams praises Gaitskell for making his aim political acceptability. Gaitskell typically went overboard on one side, in this case that of those opposed to the Market. Mr Williams, equally typically, contrives to suggest that Gaitskell would have changed his mind had he lived, and come down on the social democratic side. On Vietnam, similarly, he says several times that Gaitskell would have been opposed to American intervention, He says this on the evidence of some general observations of Gaitskell's during the 1950s. But this conclusion — or rather this most hypothetical of predictions — is hardly justified, If Gaitskell had one overriding political principle, it was of the supreme importance of the AngloAmerican alliance. There is no very convincing reason to suppose that, in this respect, he would have behaved any differently from other serious Labour polite cians during the middle and late 1960s.
With Gaitskell, who died at 56 — Mr Williams is specific and definite though brief about the mysterious disease which killed him — it is inevitable that people should play the unhistorical game of if only ' But Mr Williams has managed to settle an argument that partakes of both a real and an 'if only' character. Gaitskell was not only a socialist but, what is not the same, a Labour party man. He was unjustly traduced in the party during his lifetime. By the same token, he is hailed now, on if only' principles, as the man who would have broken the mould of British politics, sent the Left packing and inaugurated the new social-democratic party. Mr Williams will have none of this. But, if Mr Williams is supremely successful at showing Gaitskell both as a socialist and as a good, occasionally ruthless, party man, he is less so at explaining' why he was so disliked, even hated, during his lifetime. On the Conservative side, naturally, he was disliked for class betrayal. But the dislike on the Labour side is more difficult to explain.
It will not do to say that he was patronising and paternalistic: for, as Mr Williams convincingly demonstrates, he was neither, though occasionally he appeared to be both. Mr Anthony Howard perhaps came nearer the truth in his recent television programme, in which a participant mentioned Gaitskell's incapacity, once he had arrived at a conclusion, to understand how anyone else could honestly and honourably differ from him. In other words, he lacked the gift, which Aneurin Bevan possessed in abundance, of imaginative sympathy. This is true as far as it goes but it is not the whole truth.
For the assumption constantly made, by Gaitskell himself, as by his numerous admirers such as Mr Williams, was that he was almost invariably 'right' in some absolute sense — that his failures and misfortunes were due to his clumsiness in presentation, to his ineptitude in timing, to the malice and uncharitableness of his enemies, above all to the wickedness of the world, for which he was clearly too good. Such an assumption simultaneously exalts and distorts the nature of political rightness. It is also unjustified by those lower standards of rightness which would be accepted and applied by practising politicans. For example, Bevan was in retrospect clearly right both about the level of re-armament in the early 1950s and about the Soviet 'threat', and Gaitskell was wrong. It is surely better to admit this honestly rather than attempt, as Mr Williams does, a complicated and disingenuous ex post facto justification. Gaitskell, in short, was something of a Holy Willy, a kind of Gladstone, disliked for much the same justified reasons. Mr Williams has written a scholarly though — as with Morley's Gladstone — biased book about him. It is required reading for devotees of This Great Movement of Ours though scarcely of interest to anyone else.
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