Jo's influential children
Alan Watkins
JO GRIMOND: TOWARDS THE SOUND OF GUNFIRE by Michael McManus Birlinn, 120, pp. 469, ISBN 843410060 Shortly after the war Milton Shulman, then a rising journalist on Lord Beaverbrook's papers, was taken out to lunch by a publisher who had a proposal to put to him. The idea, he said, would make their fortunes. The young Mr Shulman asked what it was. 'The Life of Clement Davies,' the publisher replied. Mr Shulman was disappointed. He declined the offer. The Life of Clement Davies, as far as I know, remains unwritten to this day, though the former Liberal MP, Lord Hooson. his successor in Montgomeryshire, has delivered a lecture on him. He was a most distinguished but rather dull Welsh barrister. He nevertheless deserves commemoration of some kind. It was he who, in 1940, persuaded Herbert Morrison to base the attack on Neville Chamberlain on a motion for the adjournment rather than of censure, which would have tended to unite the Conservatives behind their leader. As it was, the vote was won but the abstentions were many. A few days later Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. Just over 10 years after that Churchill offered him the Ministry of Education in his post-war administration, but Davies declined, so ensuring the continuance of the Liberals as an independent party until they merged with the Social Democrats in 1988.
Jo Grimond succeeded Davies in 1956. The lo. was a tribute to modern communications, for previously the papers had called him `Joseph'. Mr McManus has done for him what Mr Shulman, no doubt wisely in terms of effort and reward, had declined to do for his predecessor. It is probably an advantage that the author is a Conservative, the candidate for Watford at the last election and a former assistant to Sir Edward Heath. He is not of any Liberal faction but is sympathetic to his subject. He has clearly worked hard.
Whether Grimond was really worth all that effort is more questionable. He had ceased being leader by the time he was 54, though he had a brief interregnum in the embarrassing change from Jeremy Thorpe to David Steel. His chief advantage — his
principal characteristic — was his charm, to which most people were susceptible, as is his biographer. He did not believe that politics were the whole of life. There were times when he gave the impression that he did not greatly care whether he was leader of the Liberal party or not. Nor was this impression misleading. There were, indeed, occasions when he lost all patience with the Liberals. and no wonder.
This charm, however, had its obverse side. He was impatient. He could be tetchy with party functionaries of one sort or another. Though he was commendably modest about his Balliol First (in PPE), he left no doubt with most people that he considered himself their intellectual superior, which was not always self-evident. He was, as he remains, best known for wanting a 'realignment of the Left'. The phrase was that of his friend and brother-in-law Mark Bonham Carter. But Grimond was never wholly clear about what it meant. Were the Liberals to replace Labour as the principal opposition party to the Conservatives? Or was there to be a new party composed of most of the Liberals and 'sensible' Labour people, leaving a small, unelectable Socialist party which believed in nationalisation and nuclear disarmament?
Grimond's answer varied as the mood took him. What was apparent was that he did not have the faintest idea of how to arrive at the destination, however it might be defined. Part of the trouble was that he did not understand the Labour party, and had no particular wish to do so. As Mr McManus remarks in one of his best lines, he thought its members were all like Roy Jenkins. The trouble also was that he had formulated his ideas in the early 1960s, when it looked as if Macmillan's England would last forever. Harold Wilson ruined things by winning the 1964 election. Even though he had a majority of only four, he paid the Liberals not the slightest atten
tion. But Grimond told the 1965 assembly that 'our teeth are in the real meat' (often incorrectly rendered, though not by Mr McManus, as 'the red meat').
This was a plain untruth. Wilson carried on more or less as if the Liberals did not exist. It is certainly arguable that the SDP, the Alliance, the Liberal Democrats, even Tony Blair's New Labour were all Grimond's children, Mr Blair being posthumous. But the odd thing is that he did not seem specially attached to the others who had arrived during his lifetime. He was positively opposed to the Lib-Lab pact. What had happened was that, in the late 1970s, he changed his views. He saw some merits in Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph. In an earlier phase, similarly, he could never see that the anarcho-syndicalism with which he had always possessed some sympathy placed him nearer to the Trotskyists than to Lord Jenkins. This does not mean that Grimond was muddled, even if he was disinclined to hard political effort. He was his own, usually rather irritating man. Mr McManus has made a valuable addition to the remarkably small literature of the post-1945 Liberal party. One of these books raised
a fundamental doubt as to Mr Grimond's decision on the position the Liberals should occupy in the political spectrum. For suppose Mr Grimond's decision had been different. Suppose he had made the Liberals a genuinely middle-of-the-road party, appealing to the prejudices and interests of the middle classes. Suppose Mr Grimond — without embracing the attitudes of M. Poujade, or even of Mr Martell — had laid down that the object of the Liberals was to replace, not the Labour Party, but the Conservatives. What would have happened then? Would we have witnessed a more impressive Liberal revival?
This was what I wrote in a slim volume, now rare and scarce, published in 1966. It is perhaps more pertinent now than it was then.
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