The wobbly Anglo-French tandem

Frank Johnson

THE ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE ALLY by Peter Mangold I. B. Tauris, £18.99, pp. 275, ISBN 1850438005 ✆ £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 ‘Oscillations between ideological absurdity and mediated superficiality sketch out a wasteland of seemingly empty but wildly proliferating signs.’ Periodically, but not much more enchantingly, the style gives way to an awful talking-down, and the reader finds that he has paid good money to be told that A Room with a View ‘offers a brilliant satire of early 20th-century middle England ... a simply delightful read.’ The editing is hopeless. American spellings come and go. Some idiot misguidedly read the whole of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum without apparently noticing how its hero’s name, Casaubon, was spelt, or indeed the same name in Middlemarch. There are mistakes in the titles of novels by Douglas Adams and V. S. Naipaul. Really, nothing at all in this appalling production can be recommended, and you wonder how on earth it was produced, and who on earth it was produced by.

The second question can be answered with a brief look at the contributors’ biographies. Though the contributors are described by their editor as ‘a cross-section of the international reading community, including critics, academics, novelists, poets, literary journalists’, there is not one creative writer of any reputation involved, nor any literary journalist I’ve ever heard of. Mr Peter Boxall, the editor, works at the University of Sussex. So, in fact, do 35 other contributors out of about 100. No doubt the University of Sussex is an excellent institution, but I can’t help feeling that its Senior Common Room is hardly an exciting cross-section of anything at all, and it is hard to think of academics in Brighton as thrilling arbiters of literary taste, or sufficiently diversified by the addition of lots of other contributors also almost entirely from provincial universities.

At least those own up to their provenance. The ones I feel sorry for are the 19 who can find absolutely nothing to say in their biographies to recommend themselves, and we have no idea whatsoever why a Lizzie Enfield, a Lisa Fishman, or a Seb Franklin were invited to contribute to this festival of idiocy. One of these effectively anonymous contributors writes possibly the stupidest 200 words I have ever read on the subject of P. G. Wodehouse’s Thank You, Jeeves. It deserves to be quoted:

People seem not to know how to read Wodehouse. Readers tend to see him as a comic writer and expect jokes — but there are none, just as there is little as regards an engaging plot or interesting characterisation. P. G. Wodehouse is now somewhat unfashionable ... the reactionary politics of his novels have not stood the test of time.

Anyone who thinks that there are no jokes, characterisation or effective plotting in Wodehouse has clearly no business asking for our attention on any subject. Dr Vybarr Cregan-Reid will not, as Pope said of Johnson, soon be dgterrg. This whole misguided volume may now be allowed to sink back into the darkness of Sussex whence it rose. In the spring of 1916, the young French officer Charles de Gaulle was captured at Verdun. The French demanded from the British a diversionary offensive to prevent the entire French army from collapsing. Most British troops were not yet trained for such an effort. Nonetheless, they opened an offensive on the Somme. There, the young British officer, Harold Macmillan, was almost fatally wounded.

Twenty-seven years later, the AngloAmericans intrigued against that same de Gaulle in North Africa, and he intrigued back against the same. Churchill sent that same Macmillan from London to help resolve the dispute. De Gaulle survived as Free French leader, partly as a result of Macmillan’s diplomatic skills.

Twenty years after that, the two men were heads of their countries’ governments. Macmillan applied for membership of an international union which the other dominated. Membership was refused.

Beginning as unknown participants in great events, steadily moving over many years to the centre of them, the lives of these two intertwined for half a century. Peter Mangold is the first to have had the idea of tracing this joint journey. It is a story concerned with those two subjects which Mr Benn and the more pious always tell us should have nothing to do with one another, but which all history tells us are inseparable: politics and personalities. Mangold has done the subject justice.

It will be found that Macmillan and de Gaulle were very different from one another, but, perhaps to some readers’ surprise, also had much in common. But first we must admit the differences.

Macmillan was a professional politician. He was good at his profession. He would have risen to the top, or near it, at any time in British parliamentary history. After ‘a good war’ and work in the family firm, he got into parliament early, as professional politicians do. But many who rise in all kinds of profession take a risk at one time or another, preferably early on. Macmillan did so in the form of becoming a backbench rebel against Chamberlain’s appeasement of Germany.

The risk was that appeasement might succeed. In that case, Macmillan’s rise would have been slowed, perhaps stopped. But there was a good chance that appeasement would fail. In that case, Macmillan would receive a new prime minister’s patronage. That is what came to pass. A wartime ministerial career, prominence in opposition after 1945, a peacetime ministerial career, the premiership — all followed.

De Gaulle was not a professional politician. He was a master of politics, but that is not the same thing. He could not have risen as a professional politician in the Third Republic. He disapproved of political parties. He scorned the string-pulling needed to rise in a party, and disapproved of the system.

Only an upheaval, with the destruction of the republic, could lead to his assuming supreme power. This happened to him twice. First in 1940, when France fell, de Gaulle proclaimed himself on no authority but his own leader of Free France. By 1942, Roosevelt found him too independent, and eventually sought to replace him with General Giraud. Using his political skill, and with Macmillan’s aforementioned help, de Gaulle saw off Giraud by turning almost the whole Resistance against him, frustrating the wishes of the West’s most powerful politician, though in the end Roosevelt realised that Giraud was a political duffer. De Gaulle became head of the liberation government in Paris, but soon resigned because the new constitution gave parties too much power.

Ultimately, however, the two are more alike than unalike. Both reached the ultimate heights by manipulating a foreign crisis. In 1956, Macmillan, as chancellor, urged his prime minister, Eden, into Suez. Then, by playing up the threat to sterling, he helped force Eden to abandon the venture. Two years later came the second upheaval bringing de Gaulle to power. From exile in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, he did nothing to disabuse rebellious generals and FrenchAlgerian settlers from believing that he would keep Algeria French. The postwar fourth republic, conceding that it could not defeat the rebellion, ceded all powers to him. He then betrayed the rebels by ending French rule in Algeria. And his new constitution curbed the parties.

Both careers had the same theme. Each sought to maintain their countries as great powers. Both believed that the Suez and Algerian withdrawals were bowings to the inevitable, and that greatness could be maintained in other ways.

This explains the policy of both even when they were on opposite sides in their final crisis: Macmillan’s application to join the Common Market and de Gaulle’s refusal of it in 1963. The two men’s policies were the same, but their countries were different. Macmillan thought that Britain could remain great, or at least influential, by being part of the new Europe. De Gaulle believed that France could remain great, or at least influential, by keeping out America’s Trojan Horse, Britain. That final crisis thus embodied the meaning of both lives.