arhament

A view from the bridge (2)

Wilfrid Sendall

t.'„Lue 1945 Parliament you could generally t`" a Labour MP from a Tory at a glance. Not today. I have never heard Mr Ted Short as Herbert Morrison did, that he got his '''uc.rls from the Co-op. If he does, the standards °ISO-Op tailoring have risen remarkably. out it is not just the clothes. The men in'de them have assimilated too. They don't Jus_t look alike. They are alike.

N

c o doubt there is some deep social signifit"oe in this. Indeed, if one of my pet con,entions about the House of Commons — that 'tt is a good random sample of the nation — is rue, it must mean that we have made some Progress towards the classless society. Frankly, I deplore it. It has eliminated the elernent of contrast and colour which made Politics exciting. I must add, though, that this .'ssirrillation does not apply to political views. n this respect the two sides of the House are Probably further apart nowadays. There was 110 great difference in political philosophy be!rween the rich, urbane aristocrat, Oliver LYttelton, and the more modestly rich, con7c1ous1y rough Stanley Evans, except that t.Yttelton was probably a trifle further to the left.

Both were princely raconteurs. Oliver's ace_ount of the first meeting between Winston 'ipurchill and Harry Hopkins on January

' 1941, should alone make his memoirs th°rapulsory reading for every journalist. In hge same vein was his tale of how Churchill's r,°rse, Colonist II, came to lose the Ascot

old Cup,

, Sir Winston, said Lyttelton, decided to go u,c'wn to the paddock " to address to the horse few words of preliminary exhortation. He 141ssured the horse that, if he did well this day,

e would spend the rest of his life in agree

le, female company. Overcome by the great thn.aa's eloquence, the horse ran rather below

Is best form."

Stanley Evans's command of rich, ripe plagery was one of the joys of Westminster. I f:,c,all an occasion when some project of his flat in the House for lack of support. In ss"e Lobby, I commiserated. "Wilfred." he " the trouble is this. In this place, courge is as rare as rocking-horse shit."

The culture of Rab Butler and Harold Macmillan was balanced on the Labour side by the truly remarkable, self-taught erudition of a generation of Labour men who started life on the factory floor or near it. Where are they now? Since the death of Tom Price of Westhaughton, Frank Tomney, the old glassblower, of North Hammersmith is one of the few survivors.

Is it just the sentimentality of memory which makes me believe that parliamentary debate has dropped a whole octave in twentyfive years? A Labour front bench which deployed Morrison, Stafford Cripps, Nye Bevan and the majestic Ernest Bevin, faced a Tory Opposition including the witty Oliver Stanley, that great phrase-maker, Brendan Bracken, and Anthony Eden (no wit but a fluent, lucid expositor of an argument none the less), to say nothing of the mighty Churchill, whose command of the House seemed greater then than later when he again became Prime Minister.

Attlee once snapped across the floor to Winston: "The right hon. gentleman really must face the fact that he is no longer Prime Minister."

Churchill, swivelling his paunch round like the broadside of the battleship, retorted: " I am facing that fact — such as it is."

Never was Churchill's authority more manifest than on the occasion when he first deployed, to an almost totally hostile House, the case for German re-armament. With little rhetoric but closely-knit argument, he held the chamber in a silence in which the flick of the pages of the reporters' notebooks in the press gallery was clearly audible. Suddenly this atmosphere was broken by the late appearance of Bevin on the Government front bench, a pale shadow of his portly self after an operation. The Labour benches started to cheer, but, with a grand gesture and the words "I see the Foreign Secretary is taking his place, no man deserves better of his country," the Master drew the attention back to himself.

Winston was not truly an orator, rather a superb reader of oratorical prose. It did not pour out of him in a natural torrent as out of Lloyd George or Aneurin Bevan.

With the two Welshmen, it was not so much the words but the manner and the timing which cast the spell. I think the best speech I ever heard Nye Bevan make was on the occasion that Macmillan made Quintin Hogg Minister of Science. Nye said it reminded him of when Mr Baldwin appointed Lord Eustace Percy to a similar job. "When Mr Baldwin was asked to describe his function, he said that he was Minister for Thought. His special job was to produce new ideas. He had no Department, for of course he did not want to have a Department for Thinking. I believe that a cartoonist caricatured him in the role of Rodin's 'The Thinker' — and he went on thinking for about six months. Then,! believe, he resigned ..."

Alas, the written word does not reproduce the exquisite falling cadence of that last phrase; "Then, I believe, he resigned." The trick was in the pitch of the voice and the timing.

Macmillan himself nearly rolled off the front bench in laughter.

Having taken the trouble to look it up, I cannot resist quoting more of this piece of vintage Bevan.

"1 warn Lord Hailsham that that is the fate reserved for him, because he is a man without function, a man without a department, a man without precise responsibilities, who will be flickering from department to department interfering with everybody, making an enemy of every Minister in every department in turn and, when he has covered himself with sifficient unpopularity, will either resign, or the Prime Minister will remove him as a piece of useless Ministerial rubbish — such is the malignity of Prime Ministers."

I recommend this, not just for the fun of it, but because there is sound advice there to aspiring politicians.

Harold Macmillan, by study and rehearsal, was able to reproduce eventually what Nye did by instinct. It became apparent when, as Prime Minister, he was answering an involved question which ran something like this. " Is the r.h.g. aware that the Prime Minister of Thailand belongs to a society for Greater Thailand, the objects of which involve annexation of part of Laos?

'And is he also aware that the Commander of the Royal Laotian Army is his nephew?"

Slowly Macmillan rose, looked round the House, and in a tone of astonished innocence asked: " Whose nephew?"

Stafford Cripps, I suppose, was the most compelling debater of the 1945 Parliament, The inexorable onward march of his logic, the certainty with which conclusion emerged from premise, and the sense of coldly passionate righteousness he exuded, would have eclipsed Enoch Powell at his best. (The parallel between these two, incidentally, would be worth more extended examination.) No wonder Winston once remarked, as the figure of Cripps departed down a corridor: "There, but for the grace of God, goes God," I suppose I was more naive then than now, but I would wonder how anyone could possibly answer Cripps. That was until Oliver Stanley languidly uncoiled himself from the bench opposite and retorted with cool, incisive mockery.

The battle was hard in those days, often bitter, but it seems that there was always an element of respect between the sides, perhaps the result of long co-operation during the war, Churchill could call to Bevan, when in the midst of a well-argued speech on defence he began to resort to polemic, " Don't spoil a good speech now." And, amazingly, Bevan responded to the warning and reined in his racing tongue.

Is it this sense of mutual respect among the combatants that one most misses today?

This is the second of three articles by Wilfrid Sendai', former Lobby correspondent of the Daily Express.