A private consultant
Victor Montagu
The Conservative Nation Andrew Gamble (Routledge and Kegan Paul £4.95) If a man is at the point of death he might conceivably be braced by a private consultant's clinical analysis of his predicament. Whatever fluke result the election brings Mr Andrew Gamble's first book should concentrate the mind wonderfully, and nothing could do the body politic more good in the present almost desperate situation than the patient's determined survival. This is a masterly little work for a young man of twenty seven to have produced. The writing is dispassionate and complex. Juvenility appears only in the brandishing of an original and favourite phrase. References to as many as seven hundred and thirty nine publications can be counted, excepting it seems only one — in my opinion a famous piece of post war mischief — Lord Franks' lectures on 'Central Planning in War and Peace.'
Mr Gamble makes generous references to those politicians inside or outside the House of Commons who have attempted since 1945 to form pressure groups of one sort or another. With all the many documents before him he is accurate as to facts but occasionally goes astray on general labelling. And mighty difficult the labelling must be, so Much so that it ought, perhaps, not to have been attempted. Lord Hails ham was a "Right Progressive" when he chaired the Tory Reform Committee. But Lord Butler is also put into that category and his success in destroying the TRC will long be remembered. Again there are subtle, inscrutable distinctions between the "New Technique Conservatives" and the "Progressive Conservatives." Twelve pages are devoted to this, but in the end Raison, Howell, Griffiths, Russell Lewis, Lawson and Schreiber stand individually apart as little but contributors to Crossbow.
Though he is at home with this esoteric society the author cannot prevent these twelve pages from constituting the dullest section of the book, as the theses themselves constitute the most boring period of political engineering in this century. Messrs Worsthorne and Maude did a good service in the Spectator and elsewhere by bringing the period to an abrupt end; and the author himself seems to sigh with relief that those ten years are over and done with. He turns with alacrity to the Monday Club and the New Right —*Biggs-Davison, Boyson and Law.
It would be a mistake to assume that the whole book is about the politics of the economy. The tide of social permissiveness is analysed. There are sections on Crime and Punishment, Broadcasting, Suez, Rhodesia and the EEC; and Mr Enoch Powell is examined against a backdrop of his own speeches. It is interesting that there is no other section in the book devoted to a single man. Except for the two cruficied with Mr Powell in 1958, Lords Rhyl and Thorneycroft, no name other than the master's occurs in the section. But this must be quite involuntary since there is no trace of hero-worship. Mr Gamble tells the story of the change of premiership from Macmillan to Home correctly, or ne,grly correctly. He refers also to Macleod's refus-Al to serve under Home and the famous remark, in which to my mind is embodied the total failure of the Tories since the war to reverse the slide towards Socialism, that Home's selection as Prime Minister would constitute a victory for the "magic circle," resulting in the Conservative Party being led "from right of centre for the first time since Bonar Law."
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