When William Hague stepped down from the leadership of the Conservative Party and announced that he was going to concentrate on researching and writing the life of Pitt the Younger – the youngest prime minister in our history – there were one or two who suggested that this was an understandable form of therapy. Others expected a major book to be produced. They were right. With William Pitt The Younger (Harper Collins £25) William Hague has, at one bound, entered the league of major historical biographers. His Pitt is worthy of standing alongside Roy Jenkins’s Gladstone and Churchill. There can be no higher praise.
This is a work for the general reader but one that will equally appeal to the specialist. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written it succeeds in giving a vivid portrait of one of the most remarkable politicians in our history. When he died, sad and exhausted, at the age of 46, “of old age… as much as if he had been 90” – Pitt had dominated the political scene for 22 years, 19 of them as prime minister. He steered the country through a period of momentous turbulence, as Europe imploded. When he died many of his great ambitions had not been realised. British supremacy at sea had been established at Trafalgar but Austerlitz signalled Napoleon’s dominance of the European mainland. At home he had coped with the madness of his sovereign, but had not been able to see to fruition the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade led by the man who had been his closest friend at Cambridge, William Wilberforce.
Enoch Powell once famously remarked that all political careers end in failure. It is a mark of the achievement of William Hague to demonstrate that Pitt’s career, for all his personal disappointments, was a remarkably successful one. It could have been said of him, as it was of another very different politician, that he was the pilot who weathered the storm.
This is just the book to settle down with when the sisters and the cousins and the aunts have departed and most readers, when they close the book, will hope that William Hague, whatever his political future might hold, will, like Roy Jenkins, produce a series of such masterly works.
A very different book by another colleague in the House of Commons is Mark Fisher’s Britain’s Best Museums and Galleries (Penguin/Allen Lane £30). Mark Fisher has spent some years visiting museums and galleries around the country and has produced the most complete and comprehensive and reliable guide that I have ever come across. Don’t judge this book by its cover, which is anaemic and disappointing, and ignore the star ratings, which are arbitrary and unreliable. Just read the entries, each one of which encapsulates the character of the collection of the museum or gallery it seeks to describe in a wonderfully evocative way and in the most lucid and elegant prose. This is not, and does not pretend to be, a substitute for the guidebook you will buy at the museums but it is a wonderful introduction and a marvellous reminder. It is, in fact, so delightfully written that it is as suitable for the bedside as it is essential for the car. All the great museums are here of course but there are so many others that I had never heard of – museums like the Cliff Castle Museum in Keighley in Yorkshire – an important natural history museum, or Blackwell in the Lake District, a wonderful repository of arts and crafts furniture, metal ware and ceramics. Then there are the specialist museums like the Type Museum which I have made a mental note to visit and the Fan Museum which I did discover, with the All Party Arts and Heritage Group, shortly after it was founded a decade or more ago.
Mark Fisher’s technique is to tell you something of the museum and its background and to highlight items in the collection. The book is beautifully produced and extensively illustrated – almost every one of the illustrations would be better on the cover than what does appear there!
Anyone who possess this, together with Simon Jenkins’s volumes on Churches and Houses will have as good a three volume guide to the cultural heritage of this country as could be wished. I propose to get a second copy so to have one in each home – Indeed I think I will buy one for the car as well.
Another notable offering by a colleague is Tim Renton’s Chief Whip: People, Power and Patronage in Westminster (Politicos £25). Many of us remember Tim Renton – now, of course, Lord Renton of Mount Harry – as a civilised Arts Minister and a fastidious and meticulous Chief Whip, who for all his delightful sense of humour could become a bit rough with the colleagues if they were too independent minded.
His book falls into two parts. The first is a personal memoir of the final year of the Thatcher Regime. He concludes, very candidly, that things might have ended rather differently for Margaret Thatcher had he not been her Chief Whip during that critical final year – “Then the Whips’ Office could well have behaved differently during the Meyer election. The Whips could have been partial in favour of Margaret… and that would have paved the way for them supporting her in October and November 1990.” He goes on to speculate that had Michael Heseltine stood down rather than have persisted with his challenge he would doubtless have become Prime Minister in due course. But, as he remarks “hindsight is 100% vision.”
The second, and rather longer part of the book, deals with the office of Chief Whip and those who have held it over the last century and a half. It tells the story in a lively and fascinating manner and would be the ideal present for the aspiring member hoping to enter the House after next year’s General Election.
A dauntingly priced but magnificent volume deals with perhaps the most maligned and underestimated Prime Minister of the twentieth century. The Baldwin Papers: A Conservative Statesman 1908-1947 edited by Philip Williamson and Edward Baldwin (the current Earl) has been published by the Cambridge University Press at the astronomical price of £75.
I do not normally go on about the price of a book but it seems to me incredibly sad that a fascinating collection of papers put together with scholarship and presented in a most attractive format should be beyond the reach of most who would like to own it. There is no great Baldwin archive. He was sparing with his letters and left no diary or journal – and nor, of course, did he write his memoirs. But this collection of letters and memos and notes and extracts from others do give a rounded picture of a thoroughly decent man – perhaps the most quintessentially English prime minister of the last century or more. Do, at the very least, try to ensure that your local library has a copy.
I end with three very different volumes. Recently an All Party Group has been formed to foster interest in Liechtenstein, one of the smallest countries in the world. David Beattie, a former ambassador to that country, whilst he was our resident Ambassador in Switzerland, has produced a remarkably comprehensive history of the Principality (Taurus £25). It has clearly been a labour of love and is unlikely to be surpassed as a work of reference of this tiny but fascinating state.
Finally two humorous offerings. In Scone – A Likely Tale (Sinclair Stevenson £14.99) Adam Ferguson, formally a member of the European Parliament, has produced what the Father of the House, Tam Dalyell, has called “A timely, witty and powerful warning of the still unfinished business of devolution.” Many of those who believe that the changes of 1999 were long overdue and warmly to be welcomed will be sorely provoked. Those, like Tam Dalyell, who regarded July 1999 as a black month will be reinforced in their scepticism. But most will be entertained by a lively modern fairytale.
I cannot think of anyone who will not be entertained by Simon Hoggart’s latest small offering – The Cat Who Could Open The Fridge: A Curmudgeon’s Guide to Christmas Round Robin Letters (Atlantic Books £9.99).
Simon Hoggart brings all the talents of the sketch writer we know and love (sometimes!) to a genially ruthless analysis of those ghastly circular letters which so many people send with their Christmas Cards these days. Apparently Guardian readers have been sending him choice examples and this provoked him into writing this marvellously witty commentary on an anthology of extracts from the more bizarre and toe-curling. I give just two examples: “So, apart from Tom’s ear, Mathew’s kidney, my broken nose, and Fred’s castration, it’s been a good year. Fred has made an excellent recovery and hasn’t actually noticed that anything is missing.” We assume, says Hoggart, that Fred is a pet of some kind. But we are not told.
And I love the account of a meeting with the Queen when she went to distribute the Royal Maundy at Lichfield “As I said to James afterwards… not much, you might think… but when the Queen of England, gives you her undivided attention, even briefly it is a mind-blowing experience.”
This is definitely a book for the Christmas stocking.
