pick of the runners-up, The

THE LOST LEADERS by Edward Pearce

Little, Brown, L18.99, pp. 385

The best politicians enjoy playing games. One favourite is naming potential prime ministers (when I entered the Commons in 1976 the hot money was on Kenneth Clarke); another is selecting the names of those who had become prime minister but shouldn't have; perhaps the best of all is choosing lists of those who didn't and should have. Edward Boyle had another variation, inviting friends to list the most odious contemporary politicians on a card and then comparing notes; it was remarkable how the lists tallied.

Edward Pearce has chosen three leading politicians who had seemed destined for 10 Downing Street but never got there R. A. Butler, Denis Healey, and Iain Macleod. One could easily think of other names, but Pearce is right to go for three outstanding candidates, and not least because, although by no means uncritical, he likes and admires each of them.

It is curious how Rab Butler has eluded his biographers, and Pearce is no exception. What he fails to appreciate is what a wonderful House of Commons performer Rab was in his prime, as chancellor of the exchequer and then as leader of the House. He was rightly considered in the top rank of a House that included Churchill, Eden - whom Pearce consistently underrates, often nastily - Gaitskell, Bevan and Macmillan. Between them they provided the best theatre in London, when debates were properly reported and eagerly read, and reputations could rise or fall on a single speech.

Thus, when Gaitskell tore into Rab's hapless `pots and pans' budget in October 1955 he ensured his victory in the forthcoming Labour leadership campaign. But it was Rab who destroyed his principal challenger, Herbert Morrison.

Morrison was judged to be a superb Commons speaker, although he had been a lamentably bad foreign secretary. Labour had put down a motion of confidence on the Monday following Gaitskell's demolition of Butler. Morrison moved it in a packed Chamber with a speech of crushing banality. When he eventually sat down, to very muted applause from the opposition benches, Rab opened his counterattack with the feline observation that `we have just listened to a very thoughtful speech'. The rocking laughter that convulsed the whole House did for Morrison, and Rab's response to Gaitskell was as effective as had been the original attack on him.

The element of sheer luck in politics tends to be underestimated. Pearce, in my opinion, underestimates the shattering impact on Rab of the death of his first wife, Sydney, in 1954. It seemed to me, a close observer, that for all his continued brilliance at the dispatch box, the Rab of 1955-56 was a lost soul. He drifted through the Suez crisis more as an observer than a participant. Although he had, quite reasonably, expected the succession to Eden, he did not fight for it with a fraction of the cynical skill that Macmillan did. By the time of the next opportunity, in October 1963, he gave the impression that he did not care very greatly.

Perhaps Pearce is rather too kindly towards Healey -- probably wisely, as the old bruiser is very much alive and combative still - but we on the Tory benches greatly feared him, and were thoroughly alarmed at the prospect of him becoming leader of his party. We prayed for Foot, and our prayers were answered. We had been surprised, and rather shaken, by how good Callaghan had been as prime minister; we had the unpleasant expectation that Denis would have been even more formidable.

But, like Rab, although with a very different style, he had managed to upset and offend a lot of people on the way up. Pearce is excellent on Healey's genuine erudition and charm, but, again like Rab, his intellectual scorn for so many of his colleagues was not appreciated. Politicians are a sensitive lot.

Iain Macleod certainly was, and this is not only the best portrait in the book, very much warts and all, but the best I have read on Iain. But it was strange that although he was the best conference orator that moderate liberal Conservatism has had in modern times, and although he leapt from the back benches to the Ministry of Health by one speech in the Commons that flattened Bevan - and, fortunately, Churchill was present - he was not a wholly effective Commons debater.

He could be, at his best, which was superlative. His technique, when winding up a debate in a noisy after-dinner House, was to pour flattery over the previous speakers; and then, glancing up at the clock, at ten minutes to ten to tear into the opposition. By the time that they had woken up and were baying their fury the debate was over! He did this so regularly that I was baffled why the Labour party was so regularly taken aback.

But he was inconsistent. He attracted the mistrust of the Tory Right by his conduct of the decolonisation of Africa, and he was a surprisingly inadequate Leader of the House. Pearce only refers in passing to Macleod's biography of Neville Chamberlain. It was not only a rather poor book, but it was interpreted as a defence of Appeasement, and did him considerable harm.

His refusal, with Powell, to serve in the Home government in October 1963 was a great mistake - an honourable one, but a mistake nonetheless. His quite brilliant and never-to-be-forgotten Spectator article on the circumstances of Macmillan's resignation and Home's succession further enraged a party that was enduring something of a nervous breakdown. I was glad he wrote it, but it was, politically, suicidal.

Although he became, tragically briefly, chancellor of the exchequer in 1970, he never really came back. The moment had passed, as it had for Rab and Healey. If the political Fates had smiled on each at the beginning of their careers, they withdrew their favours later on. It is by no means uncommon.

Pearce's book is by far the best he has written, but it is not without blemishes. It was, for example, Gaitskell and not Eden who compared Nasser to Hitler; it is absurd to write that Rab `had been hired by the Courtaulds'; it is not the case that Home `had no later reservations' about Munich; the Queen is accused of `torpor and lack of political alertness', which will surprise a considerable number of people; Kenneth Young becomes `Kenneth Younger'; it was Quintin Hailsham, not Macmillan, who coined the phrase 'unflappability' and it is odd to read that Macleod decided to send Butler and not Lyttleton to the Treasury in 1951; Pearce has it in excessively for Home as well as Eden, and it is certainly novel to read the former described as a liar and 'crooked'; Speaker Morrison was not called 'Shakes' for `his fondness for quoting Shakespeare' - it was his second Christian name. And to believe that Rab `had no small talk' is ludicrous.

This is compiled from a rather long list, but although these irritate, and the Pearce writing style needs further attention and editing, he has fully justified his venture, the Macleod section alone being an outstanding example of sensitive biography. Not only politicians will enjoy it, and perhaps draw some sombre lessons from his closing line: `Politics, after all, is too human (which may mean too stupid) to be left to merit.'

That barb will go down very well in a multitude of political households.

Copyright Spectator Dec 13,1997
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