Rushing to judgment
Maurice Cowling
GUILTY MEN by Hywel Williams Aurum Press, £19.95, pp. 280 In a foolish article published a couple of months after the general election of 1997, Mr Hywel Williams declared that the Con- servative party was dead. His reason for thinking this was the disillusioning experi- ence he thought he had had of the party's higher reaches in the last three years of the Major government.
In private, Mr Williams is sly and satiri- cal, is excellent company and, as a cynically instinctive reactionary, is a member of the Roy Jenkins Appreciation Society, the tone of which is anything but appreciative. If he is still a Conservative, however, he is a rather unusual one.
Mr Williams's father is a widely respect- ed minister of the Congregationalist Church in Wales and has a high reputation as both pastor and preacher. Mr Williams himself was brought up to be bilingual, was at school at Llandeilo and Swansea Grammar Schools and then went to St John's College, Cambridge, where he became in effect an Anglican, took Firsts in the History and English Triposes and wrote most of a PhD on late-Victorian Anglican theology. After rejecting the chance to test his vocation as a clergyman (at Ridley Theological College), he learnt from a decade or so as a master at Rugby that he had a vocation not to become Mr Chips. In his thirties he joined the Conservative Research Department as a way into politics or journalism, became Mr Redwood's spe- cial adviser on Mr Redwood's appointment to the Welsh Office in 1993, and stayed with him as chief of staff on Mr Redwood's resignation from the Major government in 1995. Guilty Men describes what Mr Williams saw, or believed he saw, in those years.
No man is a hero to his special adviser, and Mr Redwood is no exception. Mr Williams describes him as being larouche' and 'fastidious', as having 'few friends' and as showing 'only limited curiosity' about the minds of others. There is a 'touchingly uncertain quality' to his 'angularity'; he dis- plays a 'resentful fastidiousness' about his lower-middle-class origins; and he suffers a disabling tendency to become 'an island of policy-prescriptions' where Mr Portillo one of the villains of the book, with his `cruelly fastidious lips' and 'GCSE version of Enoch Powell' — blamed everything that went wrong (disreputably, as Mr Williams believes, and unsuccessfully) on `metropolitan liberal sneering'.
Throughout these negative judgments, one recalls the verdict of Mr Roger Kim- ball, the distinguished American critic, who, after an evening spent with the two of them, declared that it was Mr Williams who looked and sounded like the politician and Mr Redwood who looked and sounded like the bag-carrier.
Mr Redwood emerges, nevertheless, as the least guilty of all Conservatives. He is `audacious', is 'impatient with hierarchy' and feels the deepest suspicion of 'the self- interested ambitions of civil servants'. He has an instinctive understanding of the Conservative party, expresses 'simple views' in a 'subtle and original manner', and employed his time at the Welsh Office replacing the 'one-nation Conservatism' which had made Wales into a Keynesian principality with the 'subtlety and complex- ity' of a reconstructed Conservatism designed for use in the whole of the United Kingdom. Not only was he a 'romantic' about England and the English, he also brought so 'transforming an élan' to the Conservative party that his decision to challenge Mr Major in 1995 deserved to succeed. And, the story concludes, he was defeated only by the indecisiveness of Mr Lilley, the selfishness of Mr Portillo and the machinations of the Major machine, just as his defeat in 1997 by the 'witless blankness' of Mr Hague was a victory for `Tory Philistia' and the 'château-bottled shits' who had kept Mr Major in office for so long.
Guilty Men includes sometimes flattering sketches of Conservative journalists, intel- lectuals and special advisers, blistering and often brilliant accounts, of ministerial enmities and inadequacies, and a touching analysis of the 'baffled virtue' which allowed Mr Redwood to accept Mr Clarke's offer of the shadow chancellorship after his defeat on the second ballot in 1997. But the main theme, apart from Mr Redwood, is the vanity, paranoia and manipulative machiavellianism of Mr Major who combined 'irresolution' with `stubbornness', had 'a syntax and circumlo- cutions' which were as ridiculous 'in private as in public' and whose method of govern- ing, far from being the balancing act he claimed it was, was actively to foment dis- agreement in the Conservative party in order to be able to divide and rule it.
One argument in Guilty Men is that Mr Major ought to have been removed in 1995 because his personality and method of gov- erning were making a Conservative recov- ery impossible. Another contradictory and somewhat conventional argument, which might have come straight out of the Guardian or Channel Four News, is that the Conservative party had become so inward- looking, arrogant and intellectually corrupt that no leader could have restored it.
Guilty Men is a fascinating and repulsive book which, though monochrome and nasty about most of the politicians involved, should be read by anyone who wishes to understand contemporary poli- tics. It is as though Mr Alan Watkins had been chief of staff to Mr Foot during the 1983 general election campaign, had decid- ed to rush to judgment, and had dipped his pen in vinegar in the course of doing so.
In pillorying almost everyone Mr Williams is achieving a footnote in history, and justifying his own, and to some degree, Mr Redwood's judgments. At the same time, he does not establish that the politi- cians he attacks were being intellectually corrupt or displaying ambition, rancour, caution, duplicity and policy in a more than conventional amalgam; and he entirely ignores the fact that, unlike its 'ethical' rivals, the Conservative party does not (in its right mind) pretend to be holier than they are but tends by and large to a decent scepticism, which the public may yet come to admire, about the more obvious forms of political humbug.
Finally, there is the question-mark Mr Williams puts against Mr Hague, on which the appropriate comment was made many years ago by Mr Richard Crossman when he claimed that, for every MP who actually became leader of a party, many more had capacities which their failure to become leader deprived them of the opportunity of displaying. This is what makes Mr Williams' attack on Mr Hague irrelevant since Conservative leaders, with a few notable exceptions, after beginning from as low a point as Mr Hague have grown into the job and conducted it as well as the con- dition of the party has permitted. Whether Mr Hague will grow into the job remains to be seen. For the moment, if he reads Guilty Men, he may console him- self with three reflections — that, though the public shares its view of politicians, his- torians appreciate the loneliness and impenetrability of the party leader; that (quite unwittingly) it raises a central ques- tion about loneliness and impenetrability m Mr Major; and that, in an ideal world, where mercy would be tinged with malice, Mr Williams would be given the Siberian task of restoring the Conservative party in Wales.
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