Part of the political failure of Britain since 2010 has been thanks to a series of prime ministers whose direct influence has changed little or nothing about our country. In this intelligent and thoughtful set of essays, the great upheaval in our national life in that period – the decision to leave the European Union – is attributed by Oxford’s Emeritus Professor of Government Vernon Bogdanor to Nigel Farage, and rightly so. The attempt by Boris Johnson to claim credit for it was yet another dimension of his charlatanry; Farage had been working for that outcome for more than 20 years and, by campaigning throughout that time up and down the country, had changed the mood of those previously ambivalent about Europe to one of outright hostility.
Bogdanor’s book about six politicians who did not hold the highest office but who still wrought serious change on British life is based on lectures he gave a few years ago at Gresham College, suitably updated where necessary. He knew five of his subjects, as indeed did I – the one exception for us both was Aneurin Bevan, who died in 1960.
Of the others, Roy Jenkins held high office but fell out of love with his party; Enoch Powell and Tony Benn both had spells as ministers, but were essentially tribunes of the people; Keith Joseph was designated, not least by Lady Thatcher herself, as the progenitor of Thatcherism, but was a hopeless minister; and Farage, his style based intellectually on Powell and tactically on Poujade (my comparison, not Bogdanor’s) engineered the greatest transformation of all, eight years before he was even elected to the House of Commons. As a guide to how political change is really effected in a democracy, Bogdanor’s book is revelatory.
It is in his nature to be generous – something rare among politicians themselves – and if this book has any fault it is that the author errs occasionally on the side of reasonableness. However, he does not shrink from presenting us with certain facts that might make us think less well of some of these people. Bevan emerges as a hypocrite of the highest order. Ordaining a National Health Service for everyone else, and apparently deeply resenting stuffing the medical profession’s mouths with gold, as he put it, to get them to co-operate – the stuffing was not least allowing them to continue in private practice – he retained a private doctor himself.
Despite wanting people not to buy their own homes, but to live on council estates whatever their social status in order to eradicate the class system, Nye kept a place in Belgravia and a farm in Buckinghamshire. Bogdanor explains that he had a stutter and a lisp that he sought to overcome by careful choice of words, but there was still an element of windbaggery about him that perhaps deserves more castigation, though the author points out the extensive damage done to Bevan’s own career by calling the Tories “lower than vermin”. The issue that one needs to ponder is one raised by Bogdanor that the NHS – Bevan’s great creation – has become a religion, and such a fundamentalist one that it resists essential change. As many have noticed, it is no longer 1948.
Bogdanor correctly identifies the massive social changes Roy Jenkins accomplished as Home Secretary, which largely invented the society in which, for better or worse, we live today. But the author is also candid about Jenkins’s failure to introduce social democracy into Britain, because of its many internal contradictions. Nor did Jenkins’s dream of a united Europe come to permanent fruition, partly for the reasons Powell cited (and that are outlined in the essay on him) of the refusal, in the end, of Britons to surrender sovereignty, but also because of Benn’s point that the EU was profoundly anti-democratic, which it still is.
These are two sides of the same coin and they explain what happened in 2016, though both protagonists were dead, and it was left to Farage to carry their flame. Bogdanor, who is no Faragiste, is right to conclude that his achievements in the political sphere were in their scope beyond those of anyone who had never entered parliament.
My one concern about the essays is whether much of what is attributed to Joseph, in terms of his influence over the formation of Thatcherism, should actually be credited to Powell. Reviewing my authorised biography of Powell in the Telegraph in November 1998, Lady Thatcher effectively said that her transformation of the economy started with Powell, and she was right. He was a Thatcherite, de facto, in 1957. In 1964, after the Conservatives had gone into opposition, Powell took Joseph to the Institute of Economic Affairs and started, with the help of Arthur Seldon and Ralph Harris, to make Joseph into the free-market guru he later became. Bogdanor quotes Joseph as saying he only realised what Conservatism was in 1974; but he had embraced Gladstonian liberalism a decade earlier. The beauty of all these highly authoritative essays is that they leave much still to be considered and discussed.
Simon Heffer’s latest book is Sing as We Go: Britain Between the Wars. Making the Weather is published by Haus at £22. To order your copy for £18.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
