When a leading statesman is also a model of decorum
Good manners are an outward sign of inward grace, a harbinger of nicely judged moral actions, warmly reflecting decency in thought. And by good manners I do not mean Osric-like flourishes or Chesterfield’s polished insincerity. Good manners involve taking trouble, a degree, however slight, of self-sacrifice and unselfishness. They are the trade goods of civilisation and, as Yeats observed, civilisation is an exercise in self-restraint. Lockwood wrote of Sir Walter Scott, ‘He was a gentleman even to his dogs.’ I have often puzzled over this remark, for it is sometimes difficult to be goodmannered to dogs, with their bottomless servility. Cats are a different matter, having a superfine dignity which a dog can never attain. Dr Johnson, not by customary standards wellmannered, was certainly a gentleman to his cats, especially Hodge, being careful to say nothing in his hearing which might offend.
Good manners flourish when the example is set from above. I wish our royal family had better manners. They have usually been dreadful in this respect. The Duke of Wellington said that the sons of George III ‘have, between them, insulted every gentleman in the kingdom’. Victoria used to eat her food greedily and quickly, knowing that the dishes were all removed the second she had cleared her plate — until ‘Harty-Tarty’ (Lord Hartington) snatched his plate back and remonstrated loudly. Edward VII and George V were liable to make devastating personal remarks which the recipients remembered all their lives, and George VI, though more civil in this respect, was subject to sudden outbursts of temper. His secretary Sir Alan Lascelles, whose diaries have just been published, referred to these occasions as ‘Nashville’, since the king literally gnashed his teeth, like an old Hebrew prophet, and raised his clenched fists to heaven. Lascelles compared him to King Lear, and went so far as to consult Lord Dawson of Penn about these paroxysms. The Duke of Edinburgh’s rodomontades and bêtises are notorious, but I suppose can be dismissed as ‘quarterdeck’. The Queen does not use bad language or lose her temper. The criticism always made is that she is ‘chilly’ and ‘cold’ — warmth of feeling is an invariable sign of good manners. However, the essence of manners is consistency.
With no one setting a good example from the very top, we must look to the Prime Minister. And what do we find? Of the ten premiers I have met and/or known, Tony Blair is by far the best-mannered. His behaviour, on and off stage, his greetings, his handwritten letters, his thoughtfulness and his constant kindnesses, often to humble people, are exemplary. However, in general, No. 10 manners are not tender. Theodore Roosevelt said of Winston Churchill, his younger contemporary, ‘That young man has no manners. He does not stand up when a lady enters the room!’ He could do worse than that. After sacking a senior figure, none too gently, he was described as marching up and down the cabinet room, clenching and unclenching his fists, and saying: ‘I want them all to feel my power!’ Good manners prohibits any open display of authority. (I often tell editors, ‘Never shout. It is demeaning and unnecessary’.) On the other hand, Churchill was often capable of memorable displays of exquisite courtesy. A certain noble lord, still delightfully with us, was a youngish man in 1951 when Churchill was forming his first peacetime government. He phoned the lord at his country house to offer him junior office, and was told he was out shooting. ‘Good. Tell him to phone No. 10.’ When the lord called back, Churchill said: ‘And how was the shoot? Now I want you to join my shoot.’ Attlee’s manners were not, strictly speaking, bad. They were limited. Like Coolidge, he grudged every word he uttered. He was sparing in praise, whereas good manners steers the line of gold between flattery and meanness. Few grew warmer in his silent presence. But, though abrupt, even sharp, at times, he never lost his temper. That, alas, could not be said of poor Eden, who sometimes behaved, as ‘Bobbity’ (Lord Salisbury) observed, ‘like a beautiful but hysterical woman’. Lascelles in his diary describes how he felt obliged to write an official letter of rebuke to Eden, then foreign secretary, after an outburst at a royal dinner. (His own manners were none of the gentlest.) Macmillan, by contrast, had reasonably good formal manners, and though irritable at times, never allowed himself to vent his wrath noisily, being sly by nature. His problem was talking. A courteous man is quick to sense declining interest in his audience, and shuts up. Supermac did not realise when he was becoming a bore. (And to be fair to him, some people never found him tedious.) As for Alec Home, he had exactly the manners you would expect from the Border laird who went to Eton but married the headmaster’s daughter.
Ted Heath had the worst manners of any public man I have ever met, anywhere. He was churlish by nature and added to his stock of ungenial habits and repellent rebuffs by many years of assiduous application in the art of being surly, which he had brought to a worldclass level of perfection by the time of his none-too-premature death. There is a page in Jim Lees-Milne’s diaries which describes vividly what it was like to spend an afternoon with the monster. Heath’s one virtue was that he made Harold Wilson seem a paragon of politeness, though Harold’s endless pipe play and Yorkshire asides, muttered in a conspiratorial undertone, lost him marks in the manners stakes. Margaret Thatcher was quite unclassifiable, since her manners were ad hominem (not ad feminam; she had an altogether lower level of courtesy when dealing with women). If you got good manners from Mrs T, that almost certainly meant she approved of your views. As for Jim Callaghan and John Major, I recall nothing special about their manners: nondescript is the word. And that is necessarily condemnatory, for a man in great place should always be memorable for his courtesy and consideration.
That Tony Blair certainly is. He is always thinking of other people, and that is a characteristic so rare at the top of politics as to be worth noting. It was almost the first thing I grasped about him, before he became Prime Minister. Long years in power, so corrupting at the edges and sometimes at the centre too, have not diminished his unusual lack of selfcentredness. A tendency to see the world through the hermetic prison of your own wellnourished ego is the déformation professionelle of top politicians, and to find a man without it is so refreshing as to make me offer up a prayer of thanks to Jesus the Meek. In the last year or so Tony Blair has had to put up with a degree of vicious personal abuse rare at any time in politics and unprecedented for a man who has tried, so hard, for so long, to do the right thing by his country. Some of the cartoons published about him surpass by far, in enormity and cruelty, anything I remember to have been directed against Hitler in the last world war. Blair has taken all this with philosophical resignation and without a tinge of bitterness, so far as I can judge. True good manners are not only a rare and delightful quality, they are also an armour against abuse in times of trial. Whatever becomes of Blair, and however his reputation is finally assessed, I shall always hold it to his everlasting credit that he has been throughout a model of decorum. God bless him!
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