Books

Reaching for the Araldite

Ferdinand Mount

The Politics of Consent Francis Pym (Hamish Hamilton £8.95) T ooking natural is not what politicians rare best at. For the first of two instalments from this book, the Sunday Times photographed Mr Pym in some gothic arch or vault, looking pale and otherworldly, as our Editor noted, like a gargoyle or one of the Undead. Last week, they had him uneasily posed with a watering-can (wet - nurturing the soil roots in same), watering what appeared to be a patch of foxgloves under a tree, on which hung a nesting-box, presumably sheltering some tit or nuthatch which had taken refuge chez Pym from the harshness of the world, one of those small, bright- eyed birds that dart here and there and draw their little round heads back into their hunched bodies, only now and then to let fly some surprisingly loud and intricate song, making those noises - tsk, tsk, chirruck, chirruck, that sort of thing which are so hard to identify from the approximations in the bird book.

Francis Pym is a bird more often to be seen flitting through the bush than pecking on the bird table: elusive, devious in flight but charming when on song. And this book is equally hard to pin down, although its purpose is plain enough: to demonstrate the wrongness of Mrs Thatcher and the rightness of F. Pym and others on the things that really matter. It is adorned with chapter headings from Aristotle, Aeschy- lus, Nietzsche, Dr Johnson, T. S. Eliot and so on - none of them exactly fellow wets, one would have thought, although Nietz- sche and Dr Johnson shared the melancho- ly which occasionally peeps through in Mr Pym's thoughts about the modern world: 'People talk to each other less than they did', 'The cult of material values . . . the rise in human greed'. Indeed, although Mr Pym deplores calls for a return to 'Victo- rian values' (ie Mrs T), it is precisely the passing of those values which he most mourns; his tone of voice echoes quite exactly the sad late-Victorian tone of Arnold and Tennyson, watching the tide of faith ebbing and blank day breaking on the bald street.

The sensitive reader is subjected to a minimum of politician's ego talk. True, we are told of a meeting of the European Foreign Ministers Council at the Golf Club in Luxembourg: 'I made the arguments in my own way - quietly but firmly - and left them with a sense of my determination, but not of utter inflexibility'. But on the whole, Mr Pym leaves us with a sense of his own modesty, seriousness and affability.

What, then, is he on about? He is for balance and against extremes. He is also against 'dogma, ideology, imbalance, (ex- cessive) individualism and insensitivity'. People, he says, will wonder 'to what extent such comments are intended as direct criticisms of the Government in general and of the Prime Minister in particular'. Mmm, so they might. Well, here is the answer: 'I do not believe the Government or the Prime Minister to be extreme, and to say they were would be to fall victim myself to extremism.'

Oh, that's all right, then. But no, wait: 'However, I do think that these attributes exist as tendencies within the Government' - and since one of the things that Mr Pym is most worried about is 'an unhealthy degree of centralisation', surely they must be attributes of you-know-who? A great deal of the book is like this.

Mr Pym says that he admires many things about Mrs Thatcher: decisive lead- ership, consummate political skill, defeat of inflation, improvement of Britain's standing in the world, privatisation, sale of council houses and so on. 'Any Govern- ment would be proud to nail a comparable list of achievements to its mast and few have been able to do so in recent times.' A little fulsome, you might say, fellow must be angling for a job.

What doesn't he like about her then? Narrow-mindedness, intolerance, dogmat- ism, centralisation etc (see above). But are not these the defects of the very same virtues which he acknowledges? Yes, yes, he acknowledges that too. 'I believe that every positive characteristic has an oppo- site dimension and that the two are intrinsi- cally related. If everything that I most dislike about the Government's approach was to be eradicated, much of what I most admire might well be eradicated also. The same is true of everyone and everything' (my italics). But in that case, a different approach to the areas where he thinks the government has gone wrong might well also produce new defects. For example, to take two of his principal nostrums, more generous rates of benefit to the unem- ployed might well produce an increase in the number registering as unemployed; and a shorter working week, if enforced by government, would be very likely to in- crease industry's costs and so put more, not fewer, people out of work. Mr Pym ack-. nowledges these risks too. He'll acknow- ledge anything.

In fact, he starts the book by imagining two stereotyped reactions to himself as well as to Mrs Thatcher. On the one hand, `Margaret Thatcher is courageous and re- solute . . . Francis Pym is ineffective and negative. He epitomises the willingness to compromise that has led Britain downhill. He has no practical alternatives to offer. All he does is whine . . On the -other hand, 'Margaret Thatcher is a dangerous, doctrinaire demagogue . . . Francis Pym had the courage to stand up to this tyranny and look where it got him. He stands for the decent, compassionate side of Conser- vatism. He is a man of principle and integrity.'

You see what an odd, interesting book this is; the ordinary politician may imagine those stereotypes, but it is not his way to write them down, because he doesn't want to be seen looking at himself. Francis Pym, by contrast, lets it all, or quite a lot of it, hang out; he deplores the stiff upper lip; `Lack of sensibility is not the problem, but fear of it'; he is scornful of the refusal to show emotion in politics; the visible de- monstration of sympathy is one of the marks of leadership. This is how the wise politician finds the right balance between individualism and interdependence; 'it is like using the two tubes of Araldite - the adhesive and the hardener; the strongest bond is obtained by using precisely the same quantities of both.'

The book follows the conventional pat- tern: foreign affairs, defence, Europe and so on. But there is a plot to it too, for with each succeeding chapter we become aware that somewhere lurking behind the plati- tudes Mr Pym has a hero: shrinking of the globe . . . need for dialogue . . import- ance of the Commonwealth . . . idealism for Europe . . . need for style and fun in politics . . . by the last quarter of the book, our hero is in full view. Mr Pym is reaching for the Haroldite. Things have never been quite ihe same for him since Supermac retired.

The message is rubbed home. Ideo- logues and dogmatists split the party and may keep it out of power for a generation: look at Chamberlain and tariff reform, Peel and the Corn Laws. The greatest of all sins in British politics is to take policy seriously.

Mr Pym has his own set of policies, naturally: more government borrowing and spending, a concerted industrial strategy, a partnership with management and unions, and the containing of inflation. 'I do not want to undermine the Govern- ment's economic achievements, but to extend them' — and square the circle too.

But what he claims to resent most of all about Mrs Thatcher is not her policies but her conception of her role. He himself envisages 'a broad and impartial role for a Prime Minister as the head of a united team', a referee not a centre forward. We are given to understand that Mrs Thatcher is exceptional in regarding herself as a playing captain of the team. This is, of course, a caricature of the past. From Gladstone and Disraeli to Macmillan and Heath, Prime Ministers have invariably

and rightly taken an active part in the overall direction and prosecution of impor- tant policies; Macmillan, it will be recalled, sacked not one but two Chancellors who refused to reflate the economy as he wished; Heath badgered the Treasury into doing the same. What Mr Pym resented as Foreign Secretary was not being left entirely in peace to pursue his own policies (who wouldn't?). In effect, he appears to deny that government should have any collective sense of purpose; at one point, he seems to come close to denying the collective re- sponsibility of the Cabinet as traditionally understood. He says he felt when in government and feels now bound to sup- port the Government's objectives and his own Department's decisions, 'but I do not feel bound, then or now, to support every other aspect of Government policy in private or even in public.' And nor indeed did he. With many a tsk and chirruck, he made his lack of support plain.

I find the book strangely appealing. There is something irresistible about a former Foreign Secretary writing 'a more apt visual image (of the Conservative Party) would be a heart in which both extreme views meet at the bottom point, moderating gradually as they travel round their respective sides and finally pouring together into one point at the centre'. My blue valentine, in fact. Somehow, after all the contradictions and the malice and the pieties, there is a niceness about the whole book. Trollope (so often travestied as a novelist whose forte was fruity characters) would have known how to convey this essentially mixed (not mixed-up), soft- brave, prickly-affable man, so quick to take offence, so anxious for serenity.