A WALK DOWN MEMORY LANE
The press: Paul Johnson
discusses the value of serialised newspaper memoirs
MEMOIRS or official biographies of famous men have long produced staple fodder for national newspapers, especially the Sundays. In its great days under Denis Hamilton, the Sunday Times specialised in the war-time commanders. The Telegraph group had a monopoly of the official Churchill industry. The Times made a corner out of Anthony Eden. Some of these purchases earned immense di- vidends. The Sunday Times's expanding circulation was to great extent built on the bickerings of generals, admirals and air- marshalls. I remember being flabbergasted to learn, in 1957, that Eden was being paid by the Times the then enormous sum of £100,000 for the world rights of his memoirs. I could not believe that the paper would ever get its money's worth in circula- tion or re-sales of rights. This view, one now learns from Robert Rhodes James's official biography of Eden, was shared even by the optimistic Brendan Bracken, who arranged the deal. But in fact, Rhodes James goes on to tell us, the memoirs were `a huge financial success'. The two parties shared profits equally after the £100,000 advance was cleared and by 1970 Eden had already received £185,000 and the royalties were still rolling in.
My hunch is that the public taste for the apologias of the high and mighty is not as strong as it was. This is partly due to a decline in quality. That in turn reflects the dwindling amount of fascinating detail that bigshots commit to paper. Official records continue to be made and are available to autobiographers, if they have held high enough office, even before the expiry of 30 years. But private letters and diaries are now rare. Diaries are particularly impor- tant. Without a diary to provide a back- bone of accuracy and the occasional flash of authentic, at-the-time colour, a memoir is unlikely to succeed unless the great man is a considerable literary artist. Eden, as Rhodes James says, was a dull man when putting his case for publication but his diaries 'reveal what a good, natural de- scriptive writer he was'.
A newspaper editor, it seems to me, should be very reluctant to buy a pricy memoir which does not include diaries and contemporary letters. To judge by the first extract, the reminiscences of Jim Prior, now being serialised in the Observer, fea- ture neither, and poor stuff they are in consequence. Most of his first chunk was devoted to a long grumble about Mrs Thatcher. This was entirely predictable from her one-time leading Wet, and could have been written at any time in the last seven years by almost anybody. Prior had an interesting character-analysis of Sir Keith Joseph, which struck me as entirely just. But it contained no detail not already known and we could all have written it for ourselves. There was only two 'revelations' of any interest. The first dates back to the 1970-74 government and tells us that Ted Heath, when Prime Minister, 'quite de- liberately' placed Mrs Thatcher, at the Cabinet table, on his right beyond the Cabinet Secretary, who was 'always lean- ing forward to take notes'. This made it as difficult as possible for Mrs T to catch Heath's eye and so severely restricted the volume of her observations. The other snippet of information, new at least to me, was that it was Prior who was responsible for introducing Sir Ian MacGregor to British public life as boss of the steel In a former life I was a documentary film-maker.' industry (though he was against MacGre- gor's subsequent transfer to the Coal Board).
Sir Ian's own memoirs, running in com- petition in the Sunday Times, likewise seem to be based primarily on memory and suffer accordingly. For instance, the first episode contained a textbook example of how not to tell an anecdote. MacGregor is discussing the Department of Energy under Peter Walker:
On another occasion, again very early on in my tenure, I remember asking for some particular thing to be done — only to be met with some resistance. Eventually I was told that it should not be done, because 'The Department' would not like it. I was told quite regularly that I would have to do things a certain way, because that was how 'The Department' would like to see things done. It called for a certain amount of self-control to deal with situations like that.
What situations? We have not been told. It calls for a certain amount of self-control not to stop reading at this point and throw the whole thing on the drawing-room floor. How many pounds per word, one wonders, is Andrew Neil paying for this fuzzy stuff?
On the other hand, MacGregor has a stronger and more recent story to tell than Prior and the first extract does contain one important and fascinating piece of news: that Mick McGahey, the Communist vice- president of the NUM, tipped off Jimmy Cowan, the deputy chairman of the Coal Board, about the actual timing of Arthur Scargill's coal strike, and the manner in which it would start. McGahey's motives appear to have been a humanitarian con- cern for Cowan and his wife, but the episode casts a curious light on McGahey's relations with Scargill. More importantly, it should kill for ever the myth, propagated by the hard Left, and actually believed by many on the soft Left, that Margaret Thatcher deliberately engineered the coal strike. It was, as some of us felt sure at the time, a planned operation by Scargill and his cronies — though, as MacGregor makes clear, a badly timed one.
The MacGregor serialisation raises another issue of authenticity. In the first extract he quotes, verbatim, substantial passages of a conversation he had with Mrs Thatcher 'in her study in Downing Street'. The extract does not say when the con- versation took place; nor does it make it clear whether the direct quotes were made from a shorthand note taken at the time, or a diary record made that evening. Diaries, to be accurate, have to be kept the same day or the next morning. That was the usual practice of Barbara Castle, whose diaries are the most reliable I have read in recent years. Dick Crossman's, dictated at the weekend, are as a result not at all dependable. If MacGregor's verbatim quotes are merely conversation recollected in tranquility three or more years later, then a responsible newspaper ought to tell us.
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