A rage for justice
Each year at the Conservative Party Conference a lecture is given by some leading member of the party under the aegis of the Conservative Political Centre. The purpose of he lecture is to enable the speaker to philosophise about conservatism in the grand manner; and the standard of address is usually high. This year the occasion will be a sadly piquant one; for, in the season of the publication of the final volume of the Macmillan memoirs, that describing the succession crisis of 1963, was coming to the CPC platform in Blackpool Quintin McGarel Hogg, Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone, Lord Chancellor of England. Exactly ten years ago in a spasm of emotional commitment, and to thunderous applause from his audience, he used the CPC meeting at the Pavilion cinema in the Winter Gardens to announce his resolution to resign his herediatry peerage and contest the leadership of his party.
Quintin Hogg can be pompous, but only when he is bored. He once presided over an hour and a half long meeting of Tory backbenchers: it was his job to listen to questions, make answers and generally contribute, as Shadow Home Secretary, to the discussion. After fifteen minutes of unexciting questions he began a spontaneous and off the cuff address on the work and responsibilities of the Home Office which went on until the meeting broke up, and stunned members left the room. He had been bored, and his solution to boredom is to speak himself, at any length required, until the occasion comes to an end. Such speeches are never his best, and can become unduly irritating, as it becomes apparent that he is merely entertaining himself, and not concerned in the least about his hearers.
But the stately manner, and the occasional pomposity, should not oe allowed to conceal his essentially humorous, unpompous, and self-mocking characteristics. The various sides of his character were well illustrated on the occasion of the Old Bailey bombing. Hogg heard the explosion when ensconsed with his dresser, preparing to take the Woolsack at the House of Lords. He decided that it was the duty of the Lord Chancellor, as head of the English judiciary, to proceed to the scene. But, being a thoughtful man whenever he remembers to be, he realised that his official car would cause further difficulties for police already very likely to be over-burdened by traffic jams. So he fetched out his little collapsible bicycle and pedalled off to the scene of the explosion. We heard the story over lunch, and asked him if he did not feel that the sight of him perched atop the tiny machine detracted from the dignity of his office. "Not at all," he replied, with his wheezy, asthmatic laugh, "it does no harm at all for the Lord Chancellor to appear a little ridiculous from time to time." We then asked him if the bicycle was still a regular means of travel for him in London (he used it regularly in opposition) and he replied, the laugh deeper and more prolonged this time, "Oh, no. You see, the Lord Chancellor cannot be ridiculous all the time."
The little anecdote testifies to a nature at once balanced and divided. Hogg's extraordinarily high sense of duty and style is balanced by his puckiShness and even schoolboyishness; but the breadth of his interests and the variability of his temperament create strains and tensions in his personality. Thus, when Edward Heath made him Lord Chancellor he had to accept that his honourable ambition to lead his party was dead for ever; but at the same time he was about to hold the office that had once been held by his father, and that succession touched his sense of the family and of tradition. "I trust," he said, "that I will be able to add my own few bricks to the structure of English law, but I can hardly hope to do as much as my father."
That lack of expectation for himself is partly due to the reverence he has for his father's memory, partly due, we believe to a feeling ingrained by 1970, that he had never, despite his seemingly endless talent, achieved to the full what it sometimes seemed he might achieve. Harold Macmillan had described Hogg and lain Macleod as the only two members of his last cabinet who seemed to him to have something of genius about them; and, from the moment he entered politics — as the appeasement candidate in the 1938 Oxford by-election, where he was opposed by A. D. Lindsay, who was supported, in turn, by a vigorous and courageous young man from Balliol, one Edward Heath — Hogg behaved as though that was true. In 1963 he even, when his temperament and occasional apparent instability were mentioned to him as disqualifications for the succession to Macmillan, invoked a comparison between himself and Churchill. But as a minister he rarely seemed to find either the opportunity to attempt the heights or the occasion to scale them. As First Lord of the Admiralty he devoted himself to defending the Suez operation; as Minister of Education in a relatively mild period, he had little to do save make himself agreeable to the teaching profession; as holder of a rambling commission under Macmillan as Lord Privy Seal he busied himself with sporting matters, with unemployment in the North, with signing the test ban treaty in Moscow, with the oddments of scientific research. By 1963 he seemed a small change man, and that, combined with the vagaries of an open and gusty nature, was enough to disqualify him from contention for the succession: if the new Leader had to be a peer, since that could happen only if the Commons candidates were compelled to deadlock each other, it would be Alec Home, the healer, rather than Quintin, Hailsham, the controversialist.
Perhaps Hogg's finest period in politics was between 1957 and 1959, when, as Chairman of the Party, he beat the drum of revival after the Suez debacle. At this task he was in his element: the job of instilling new life into the shattered Tory ranks appealed to his intense loyalty and love of his party and country; the fact that the task appeared well nigh irnpos
„mt. peubutor October 13, 1973 sible when he began it, stimulated his love for difficulty; and the lineaments of a difficult case appealed to his lawyer's instinct for debate. He is, and was at the Bar, a formidable and lucid advocate, not, certainly, a great lawyer or one of vast learning, but a passionate, rigorous, and cunning persuader. Particularly in legal matters, he has the knack (oddly enough, one possessed also by Enoch Powell) of taking an apparently insignificant fact and deducing from it what he believes in. He also has a rage for justice, and will give vent to it whatever the consequences. When the Labour government introduced its legislation on gambling, legislation which gave arbitrary powers to the Home Secretary, Hogg fought with verve and skill to persuade the Tories to oppose it. This was an unpopular proposal, since few politicians care to be found in the same corner as the gambling interests. "Never mind,” said Hogg, "the thing they plan to do is plainly unjust; and it is unjust whether its victims are unsavoury or no. We would not support such a law if it affected orphanages, therefore we cannot support it in this case. The justice or injustice is in the thing itself, not in the nature of those it is designed to control."
His attitude to gaming legislation provides an Important clue to the real nature of Quintin Hogg as a politician. Again when, after the dismissal of Enoch Powell from the Shadow Cabinet, immigration and race relations became a part of open political debate in Britain, Hogg was found judging the merits of the case in terms of an attitude favouring justice. In the party conference debate of 1968 he replied to Powell: he dealt scarcely at all with the facts and details of the case, choosing rather to attempt an exercise of persuasion. He spoke directly to Powell, sitting whitefaced in the audience, and pleaded with.hirn for an attitude of moderation, which was the one he found most appropriate to the case. Thus Hogg, whose early political career ,suggested that it was as a man or Ideas — his A Case for Conservatism is still a valuable text 'book — he would make his impact, and whose later career suggested that he.was a man of action, is in fact a man of attitudes. It is what he is that makes him important, rather than what he thinks or does.
At various times in his career Hogg has looked very much a man of the right — thus he supported Suez, and capital punishment -and at others a man of the Tory left — thus he made the speech of a lifetime about injustice in Ulster at the conference of 1969, and insisted on, albeit qualified, Conservative suP* port for the Labour government's race relations Acts. (On one memorable occasion, when rowdy Tory backbenchers constantly interrupted him, he turned his back on the rest of the House, faced them, and dressed them down.) But he is fundamentally a man of the broad Tory centre, humane, liberal, kindlY, but also fiery, patriotic and stern. At his verY best he could combine extremes of view in the service of the centrist ideal, and persuade to his side Tories who, for example, would never be attracted by such popular men of the middle ground as the equally intellectual, but far less passionate, Edward Boyle. For all his violence of language and expression, Hogg is essentially a healer' especially within his own party, but also „In relations with groups rarely sympathetic to It. That is why he could still play an important role in the life of the Heath Government. For the reconciling tradition of Toryism has been rather bruised since 1970, first by the Government's advocacy of abrasive policies. second by their inability to find a humane. rhetoric in which to justify those policies,thircl by their shifts and turns even in their most fundamentalist doctrines, and the lack of an equivalent rhetoric. Who but Lord Hailsham in the present Cabinet could make non: economic sense of all these conflicts an inadequacies, and launch an appeal based on the higher instincts of modern Toryism?
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