Not a Dry eye on the House
Grey Gowrie
A BALANCE OF POWER by Jim Prior
Hamish Hamilton, f12.95
Against odds, Jim Prior has written a very good book. Any feeling of surprise has nothing to do with ability (a first at Cambridge, unmentioned here), achieve- ment (sensible and probably durable in- dustrial relations legislation) or literary skill (the book is funny and has an innate sense of when to inform, when to remind, when to omit). The rare and remarkable thing is the kind of book it is and the way in which it defeats expectations of the Prior- lashes-Thatcher variety.
Pick up A Balance of Power, and a public face gazes up at you from the dust jacket. Pink, comfortable, a touch puzzled, it is an archetypical English face, flushed with common sense and decency. Its owner shares these qualities but the book gives a lot more away than the photograph, un- covering a complex, self-aware and start- lingly self-critical man. In spite of the title, this is not a polemic,although you could put it beside Ian Gilmour's or Quintin Hailsham's prescriptions for the kind of politics we need. It isn't, thank goodness, a chronological memoir CI come now to the fateful Budget of 1981') of the type that made the Eden, Macmillan or Wilson writings unreadable. It isn't a political diary in the Crossman-Castle mould, being insufficiently bitchy. It isn't an auto- biography, although childhood and school days are touched upon with deft relevance. It is really a sketch for a self-portrait, rather like Rab Butler's The Art of the Possible. Only this time the sketch is seen against treatment of two other quintessen- tially English faces: Ted Heath and Mar- garet Thatcher.
Having worked for all three of these remarkable people, although not at all closely with Ted Heath, I must declare an interest of affection and admiration. This isn't a very objective review. I'm in any case unconvinced that objectivity is possi- ble when reading or writing about contem- porary politics. Governments in this cen- tury reach into so many lives that feeling both absorbed and frustrated by politics is more common than people usually admit. Not until the limits of government are more precisely set, a cows-come-home eventuality at present, will governors and governed start to like each other more. Jim Prior's book is steeped in this kind of anguish: the public are always turning out to be more suspicious of sensible, right- thinking measures than he expects. For what my own compound of experience and prejudice is worth, I side with Prior on industrial relations, with Mrs Thatcher on economics and political attitudes generally, and with both on their brave recognition that the Irish Republic cannot be consi- dered a foreign power where Northern Ireland is concerned. Nearly a third of the book is given to Ireland. Prior was frus- trated at the failure of his attempt to give local politicians more say in their electors' affairs; he underestimated the attachment both sides feel to what Churchill called the ancient integrity of their quarrel. Never- theless, the Anglo-Irish agreement was both just and far-sighted and most of the credit must go to him.
Unlike most people who've served in cabinets, Jim Prior was never a junior minister. In 1970 he went straight from PPS to Ted Heath to Minister of Agricul- ture; he held the great office and influence of Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House when the government fell. He is by nature an insider. One of the sad things about this enjoyable and lightly written book is that he never felt himself to be on the inside track after the change of leadership. This led him to underestimate his influence on Mrs Thatcher, who re- spects him. I have often heard her say that she wishes more people who make their objections felt outside the cabinet room would pipe up inside it, like Jim. She needs a bit of wooing, as does he. I used to think that Prior, a forceful and obstinate person himself, lacked perceptiveness about char- acters of the same kind. This book shows I was quite wrong. It is a brilliant portrait of the Prime Mininster and in many ways an admiring one; it takes on additional inter- est, too, from the juxtaposition with Ted Heath.
Jim Prior identifies with the principles of the Thatcher administration more than I expected. His experience with the Heath prices-and-incomes policy turns him against detailed interference by govern- ment in pay settlements. Upset by what he takes to be the effects on jobs of the alternative counter-inflationary approach, which he calls 'monetarism' and uses as a portmanteau term of abuse, he hankers after the Neddy forum as a place where a public sector going-rate, at least, might be set. Pull the other one, Jim. This is an unbelievable piety for a man who is himself a tough and entrepreneurial manager (a family joke is that Jim is a Dry when it comes to farming) and who has suffered, as a politician, from abuse by Fleet Street managers disappointed that his legislation couldn't immediately rescue them from decades of caving in to union pressure. (As things turned out, they were wrong there too). While I don't doubt that he reads public anxiety about jobs accurately, I see no evidence that 'monetarism' or an ideological fixation with the levels of gov- ernment debt (it does cost) has much to do with the three million on the register. The Thatcher administration has a perfectly respectable record of job creation by con- temporary European standards; unfortu- nately, the number of people seeking jobs has been rising rapidly at a time of unpost- ponable structural change. Prior does not ask why West Germany, for example, more than twice as rich per head as ourselves, has an unemployment register only a few points below ours and fewer people in work overall. As for monetarism, Britain is awash with liquidity at the moment (ask the Sainsburys) and so wages rise at the expense of the unemployed. If I were Chancellor there'd be a short, sharp squeeze about now . . . but it was his tolerance in my case of this kind of (to Jim) crazed mumbo-jumbo that made him a pleasure to work for.
Man management is not one of the many strengths of this government. It is a pity that Prior did not get the DTI rather than GEC; while we're on acronyms, BL was rescued, after all. The union law reforms are jewels in Mrs Thatcher's crown. They were put there by Jim Prior. A worse pity, a real sorrow is his intention to leave the House of Commons. I see no reason why, if they go against the grain of their recent history and keep their heads, the Tories shouldn't command a majority at the next election. But as this book demonstrates, they are not so rich in warm, shrewd and far-sighted politicians to think little of their loss.
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