Profile: John Peyton

A man and his role

John Peyton is probably the likeliest British politician to quote, without affection, and with point, W. B. Yeats, Winston Churchill and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in the same speech, and with effective reference to the state of his country. "We have found it surprisingly easy," says this man,

to overlook the loss of power, which brings with it certain inconveniences; its possession imposes duties, its retention demands effort. Wealth after all is relative and the possession of military' strength makes little impact upon the daily lives of ordinary men and women. It has been less easy to lay aside the trappings, the privileges of power and wealth; to remember for instance that there are better ways of influencing other countries than by sermonising in weekend speeches which make little impact even upon the newspapers at which they are aimed, none at all upon the ostensible recipients. It is often convenient to forget that conceit when unaccompanied by achievement is not. only intolerable; it is ridiculous.

That is • a complex, knotty, disagreeably challenging, sombre statement, not at all the sort of stuff one uses to rally the troops. But it is honest, and it is analytical.

The Yeats quotation which supports the argument is familiar:

The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity

The Churchill less so:

I have watched this famous island descending incontinently and fecklessly a stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the., beginning; then after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet."

The Solzhenitsyn scarcely at all, and least of all to his Rotary Club audience: it comes from a letter Of protest to the Patriarch of all the Russians and calls attention to a state of affairs

where we have to hand over our defenceless children not into neutral hands but into the domain of atheist propaganda of the most primitive and dishonest kind. . . Our young people who have been snatched away from the Christian faith lest they should be infected by it, are left for their moral upbringing only the abyss between the propagandist's notebook and the criminal code.

"Would we be justified," the speaker concluded, "I wonder, in turning aside and concluding that such a message addressed after all to the head of a foreign church has nothing in it for us?"

John Peyton, the Minister for Transport, is one of the rarely noticed ministers of this Government, not merely because his job, though important, seems dull to the rest of us, but because he is slight of frame, and light of voice: a politician needs to force himself on us before we attend to him. When he appears in the forefront of events it is when we have a crisis about roads, or about heavy lorries; and when the press dwell upon him it is to suggest that he is one of the more satanic figures of the Tory right, a member of the Monday Club, a harsh, hard man who has said, " Those who decry success fail to recognise that the only alternative to it is failure." There is — it is obvious to anybody who has met him — an underlying hardness in the man; but it is allied to a complexity, almost a diffidence, of character.

The paradox is explained by another — Peyton has a great capacity for gloom; and a politician's ability to be optimistic. Everything he says suggests that the country is on its last legs; everything he does — even in the apparently dull Ministry of Transport — that survival, and even success, can yet be achieved by an exercise of will.

At least in opposition a duality of achievement matched Peyton's dual personality. He had been a junior minister, but lost his place on the Tory front bench in one of Edward Heath's reshuffles because, it was said, he did not work hard enough. He responded by turning himself into a pitiless backbench goad, both of his own leaders and of the Wilson government. When he nagged Heath, or Whitelaw or Maudling, he did so from the assured position of the only Tory backbencher who could consistently and without fail get under Harold Wilson's skin at question time. He was a master of the technique of opposition — and, indeed, of conduct — within the chamber of the House of Commons, and some of his maxims are worth quotation. A front bencher on either side of the House has special privileges, in that the Speaker will almost always call him to speak, supposing he indicates a wish to do so.

That privilege, Peyton argued, imposes duties. A front bencher must always defend his own backbenchers: when a humble Tory, or an inarticulate Socialist, is sharply put down by a minister, one of his own leaders must rise and defend him, if only with some such formula as, "My Honourable Friend has devoted a lifetime's study to these matters. The minister is therefore obliged to take his argument seriously. He has not done so. Can he explain to the House why not?" "Always turn your head," was another piece of Peyton advice to frontbenchers: it was an elementary part of parliamentary courtesy, he believed, to turn around and indicate that you recognise the backbencher on your own side whose arguments you were supporting or following through. Harold Wilson, Peyton believed, was the great master of all these minutiae, and the opposition guerrilla viewed the then Prime Minister with the respect one expert accords to another.

For all that, and for all that this description may smack a little too much of the Strauss minuet side of parliamentary procedure, Peyton has the instinct for the jugular. It was he who first saw the potential of Wilson's devaluation phrase about "the pound in your pocket." And, when more senior Tories were driven to distracted boredom by advice to repeat and repeat it, he would get up in the House Tuesday after Tuesday and Thursday after Thursday, whenever he was called, and dangle in front of the Prime Minister a gibe fashioned out of the use of that unfortunate formulation.

Peyton believed passionately that the Wilson government could be brought down through the humiliation of its ministers in the chamber:every small defeat there, he thought, in a repetition of one of the oldest British political adages, would seep out, as blood under a curtain, to the country at, large. There can now be very little doubt that there was a great deal of truth in his belief. It is also

clear that his preaching and practice demonstrated a singularly cruel and destructive political imagination: he can wound a political opponent; and far from being afraid to strike, relishes the act.

Nor did he spare his colleagues. He came back from his constituency one week and observed to a much more placid and more senior colleague, "They think we're bloody wet down there." The colleague replied, "Well, John, if they t'h'ink you're wet the rest of us don't have much of a chance." Peyton looked at him, and said slowly and deliberately, " Don't mistake ' we.' When I said they think we're wet, I meant they think you're wet. They certainly don't think I'm wet."

It is instructive to note, incidentally, that the combination of large, if pessimistic, imagination with the utmost savagery in political exchange, is part of the classical equipment of the British political hero. Nice men neither win elections nor save countries. The Churchillwho could effectively announce magnanimity as the' first principle of politics could also strike viciously at his rivals, and say of Attlee that he was "a sheep in sheep's clothing," and that, "a taxi-cab containing Mr Attlee drew up at the House of Commons and nobody got out." Macmillan could say of an affecting account of Harold Wilson's early poverty, " If he went to school in his bare feet it was because his boots were too big for him." Wilson himself could say of a meeting between Butler and Macmillan, "The Prime Minister went to the airport and grasped his Right Honourable Friend warmly by the throat." And lain Macleod was past master of the art of combining the most majestic statement of political aspirations with the most ruthless carving up of an opponent. If, however, one is to speak of Peyton in the same breath as such gladiators, one must explain why he is not far more prominent than he is. A simple answer would mention again the lightness of his voice: the stento• rian range is beyond him. A more compleX one would advert to something almost aca. demic in his approach to politics and political propaganda: he understands the business s° well, and can dissect its processes so minutely, that he finds it difficult to use them unself: consciously. He works too carefully over hls excellent speeches, until they become addresses rather than rousing rhetoric. It is possible, too, that Peyton's present, ministry caters to his less creative side, an° doubtless Peyton realises this. It is also pus; sible that he realises that no economic 0' technological ministry could fully test or se' tisfy him in the area of the general ideas pe would like to bring to bear on political activ.", ity. Asked once what job he would choose!' allowed to take his pick among cabinet oftr ces he replied, without hesitation, "T)'1 Home Office." Because, he added, "there could say something about what was happen: ing to my country, and my saying could u` effective." It is striking that a man who mad,e part of his reputation with his toughly f17,, market ideas on economic policies shout', when he had thought about it, decide that th' soul of politics is to be found elsewhere. Peyton is a rather Cromwelhan figurf; ruthless in actions, generalising in ideas. probably the most dominating, if underlyn, supposition of modern British politics — tradicted only by Mr Heath's entry into Eti; ope, and Mr Powell's career — that gene, ideas cannot be translated into political seCI tion, or political programmes. Yet, everyb0,A — or almost everybody — would wish W'r the translation could take place, as it did clu ,e ing the last war. It is potentially inspiring We an able middle rank politician, who is neither the leader of his party nor its senior may e ick, who has yet to be given a serious chan., to try his wings, who is personally and tellectually immovable by any temptation: fudge what he stands for, should still belle that the translation can be made.