Sir Walter Mitty
Christopher Booker
After ploughing through Andy Roth's somewhat laborious demi-biography*, I fear we all have to face up to the undeniable tact that Harold Wilson, Knight of the Garter, Conqueror of Anguilla and chief architect of that second Battle of the Atlantic, the sinking of the Torrey Canyon, has simply become a crashing bore. The real reason for this is plain. It is no accident that not even the industrious Roth himself has had the energy to carry the Wilson story beyond 1964 (with the exception of a preliminary chapter or two on the seedy revelations of the past year and the Honours List). Because after 1964 there really is no story. The fact is that, in terms of any real or lasting significance, Wilson's eight years in office were almost totally nugatory, Apart from certain Home Office legislation (e.g. the 1967 Criminal Justice Act) can anyone name a single positive achievement of those years? Just as it is appropriate that the sole legacy of the great Liberal Revival was David Steel's Abortion Act, so it is appropriate that the chief legacies of the Wilson years were the 70 m.p.h. speed limit, probably more often broken than any Act on the statute book, and Wilson's pet project of 1963-4, the University of the Air'. For three terms Wilson presided over a 'Government of the Air', and now that the 'baseless fabric' and insubstantial pageant' have faded, they have left 'not a rack behind'.
Nothing, that is, except for what might be called the 'situation comedy' aspects of Wilson's time in office, which continue through the Crossman Diaries et al. to Provide the nation with a fast-dwindling supply of gaiety (they were always more funnily and accurately scripted at the time by Mrs Wilson's Diary). Certainly the Wilson era comes to look more and more like a transfer of I Love Lucy to Number Ten, starring Walter Mitty and Marcia Falkender— although the age-old plot of the weak, henpecked husband led astray by a raging virago was the other day inspiring Richard Ingrams, who had just seen Macbeth, to draw a rather darker dramatic Parallel (it is tempting to speculate on the identity of the other characters: Duncan, the amiable old Scots 'king who must die' was obviously Macmillan; Bankwoy was certainly bundled off-stage after accepting one dinner invitation too many; or was the spectre at the feast poor George Brown?) ,In the end, in fact, the Wilson story was too lacking in substance to provide either real comedy or real tragedy. The only questions which remain, I suppose, are how did this absurd Dickension caricature (a cross between Gradgrind and Micawber) come to be in Number Ten in the first place; and how far, now that his reputation is crumbling, will it finally collapse (i.e. will further revelations actually lead to disgrace, or will he be just quietly forgotten as a rather embarrassing hiatus?) As Andy Roth assiduously shows, Wilson always was a pretty grey and inhuman figure: the Oxford swot; the eager beaver statistician at the Ministry of Mines during the war; sucking up to Attlee; boasting about his gritty negotiations over the price of animal feed with Mikoyan: the untrustworthy Bevanite rebel of the early 'fifties. But this is all familiar stuff. There is no real theme or new insight to the book (no real attempt, for instance, to expjain how Wilson. came to enjoy his great hour of glory in 1963-4 as the self-appointed 'dynamic' champion of the 'New Britain). And the only trace of humanity in the story is the forlorn figure of Mary, with her dreams of Rupert of the Rhine, Charles H and Byron, landed by a chance meeting at a tennis club with this strange, little womble (who combined all the vanity of her heroes with none of their glamour) and having to stick it out for forty years.
There was a time when Commentators were expected to ask and answer three questions about a book — what is this book trying to say, is it worth saying, and how well *Sir Harold Wilson: Yorkshire Walter Mitty Andrew Roth (Macdonald and Jane's £7.95) * *A Prime Minister on Prime Ministers Harold Wilson (Weidenfeld/Michael Joseph £7.50) does it say it? Nowadays, when the sole purpose of many books is simply to cash in on something else, such as a TV series, or the fact that its author was once prime minister, such questions become increasingly meaningless.
What for instance, can one possibly say about Harold Wilson's own selection* * of 'essays' on some of his predecessors at Number Ten, which is a book only in the sense that it consists of three hundred-odd pieces of paper stuck together between cloth covers, and covered with words? One cannot help wondering what was the precise process whereby all these words were gathered up. The copyright of the book rests in something called Paradine Histories Ltd, which presumably means that the book is not unconnected with an almost entirely unwatched TV series going out at the moment involving David Frost. One suspects that a certain amount of the groundwork (such as the fact that Winston Churchill put a tax on cigarette lighters in 1928) was provided in return for a handsome fee from Paradine Histories Ltd by the distinguished historian Lord Blake.
But there are plenty of signs that Sir Harold has himself left his mark on the text somewhere along the way, as in the reference to Churchill facing Ernest Bevin 'eyeball to eyeball' during the General Strike (p.258) and again to 'the Soviets and the Americans' being 'eyeball to eyeball' over Cuba (p.318). Sir Harold may not have quite the elegant command of the English language shown by some of his predecessors (Churchill, Rosebery, Balfour, Gladstone, Disraeli to name but five), but at least his style is unmistakable, and stands comparison with that of, say, Sir Alec Douglas-Home or Edward Heath. Also it would be unfair to blame Lord Blake for the errors of fact. A.J.P. Taylor's notice of the book in the Observer consisted almost entirely of a long list of historical inaccuracies, ending with the words non sans, 1 would merely add, from more recent events, that the meeting between Macmillan and Kennedy to discuss Skybolt was in December 1962, not January 1963, that Macmillan and de Gaulle, talked at Ram bouillet, not at the Elys6e, and that please, please can people stop accusing Mr Macmillan of boasting to the British people 'you've never had it so good'. Sir Harold may have made endless mileage out of twisting Macmillan's words when they were 'sparring partners', but in fact Mr Macmillan used the phrase (borrowed from a Democrat election slogan of 1952) in a speech at Bedford in July 1957 when, far from boasting, he was issuing a warning against the dangers of inflation: 'Indeed, let's be frank about it; some of our people have never had it so good. What is beginning to worry some of us is "Is it too good to be true?", or perhaps I should say "Is it too good to last?" I fear that in his latest day-dream role as 'famous historian', Sir Walter Mitty carries no more authority than in any of the others.
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