Uncontrite owl
Ferdinand Mount
Memoirs Reginald Maudling (Sidgwick & Jackson £7.95)
On 12 November 1943, the Spectator published an article by Reginald Maudling, then aged twenty-six and a flight-lieutenant working in the Air Ministry (poor eyesight had kept him out of the air). The article, entitled 'Conservatives and Control', discusses the alternatives to socialism after the war. A return to laissez-faire, though attractive to an independent people chafing under the restrictions of five years of war, is to be rejected. 'Can anyone of intellectual integrity maintain that it represents a serious contribution to political thought?' The alternative recognises state control as a means of guaranteeing freedom.
What is freedom? 'Freedom for civilized man is not a mere negative, not just freedom from; it is freedom to live as a member of an organized society, freedom to think, speak, work and worship and to develop his individual personality in conditions that befit the dignity and greatness of the human race . . . Control is part of the machinery of freedom and in the freedom of civilized man control is absorbed and transcended.'
Mr Maudling truly claims that what he wrote then has remained his consistent belief ever since. His ideas about the Welfare State and incomes policy derive naturally from the view that 'control is part of the machinery of freedom.' And his Memoirs show quite clearly how that view came to be formed. It will have been noticed that whenever Reggie wishes to beef up an argument he is inclined to bung in a spot of Hegel. His amiable demeanour being more akin to the Owl of the Remove than to the Owl of Minerva, it has been generally assumed that the purpose of this is to remind the reader that he got a first in Greats. But in fact, buried under the easygoing charm, there does seem to lurk a somewhat Hegelian mode of thought. Control = Freedom. Opposites are absorbed and transcended. History is an Organic Process with its own laws of development. And its most vital organ is the State,
Mr Maudling is a government man. His entire working life has been spent close to the centre of power. His first sustained experience of work was in the private office of the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair. There, 'I first inyselt began to appreciate some of the great virtues of the British Civil Service, and how these could be developed after the war in a combined effort to increase Britain's prosperity . . . The interface between Government and industry was going to present fascinating problems and exciting opportunities.' After the war, he joined the Conservative Research Department and wrote speeches for Churchill. The old man did not care for some of the sentiments he was expected to mouth, in particular the more interventionist aspects of Rab Butler's Industrial Charter. Winston's attitude to economic problems, we are told, was a fairly cavalier one. 'These things, he felt, should take care of themselves, and who is to say, in the light of experience, that he was wrong?' Well, Reggie, for one.
Over the years, Mr Maudling's faith in the ability of the senior civil service and his ministerial colleagues to move mountains has remained undimmed. He has a kind word for all of them — except perhaps for Mrs Thatcher who finally removed him from this agreeable company. This passionate belief in the ability of government rationally to organise economic growth is probably based on the somewhat cock-eyed view of the 1930s which prevailed during and after the war. The myth was that dogmatic adherence to laissez-faire had prevented the Old Gang from doing anything about the Slump. The truth was that throughout the 1930s politicians of all parties were competing as to who could most radically 'reorganise', 'co-ordinate' or 'rationalise' industry. Harold Macmillan's The Middle Way, far from representing a reaction against the exhausted volcanoes of his front bench, was in reality a more extreme version of the conventional wisdom to which they subscribed. Nevertheless, this is the myth that Mr Maudling . inherited and to which he has loyally clung, unmoved by the success of his old friend Ludwig Erhard in following quite different policies or by the fact that the most successful British Chancellorship since the war, Lord Butler's, was a period of liberalisation and reduction of State control. Mr Maudling's inflexibility is more puzzling still because he was Economic Secretary to the Treasury under Butler and regards it as the most exciting and most satisfying time of his career.
He makes the interesting point that Mr Heath was not nearly as inflexible as commonly supposed and adduces as evidence that it was he himself whose arguments changed Heath's mind on both incomes policy and Northern Ireland. If so, Mr Maudling bears a heavy responsibility for two of the most costly decisions of post-war years.
The paradox implicit in his own account is that he himself, cheerful, easy-going old Reggie, is the inflexible one. He is much concerned to rebut the legend that he is a lazy man. And in the sense in which the
legend is promoted, his complaint is just. He bustles, he travels, he takes on jobs, he writes long letters to The Times and articles for the Sunday Express; he is full of advice and his advice is frequently taken. And those who thought, he would have made a better Prime Minister than the last two or three still have a decent case.
For there is about him a wonderful absence of petulance or rancour or petty vanity; he has the inner self-confidence of a man who has always lived in a happy family. He is grown up in a way that successful politicians rarely are. If he had been Prime Minister, no doubt the government would have followed most of the policies that have landed us where we are. After all, they were his policies. But they would have been pursued with a certain serenity and tact; Maudling wouldn't, I think, have pressed things too far. His talent is really for managing men, not for sustained thought. If he is lazy, it is an intellectual laziness, a reluctance to confront the stubborn basics of a problem; for example, in Northern Ireland, the Border.
There is a certain casualness too in the way he deals with the scandals which dogged his business ventures. His account of his involvement with Mr Jerome Hoffman and the Real Estate Fund of America is perfunctory in a manner which would be fetching if it did not reflect such a careless attitude towards his choice of associates. 'Disquieting news about Mr Hoffman', foresooth. The guy was a known conman, later to be jailed for fraud. Why not say so? Mr Maudling's defence of his conduct in the
Poulson affair won't do either. He blathers on about Mr Poulson's contributions to the prosperity of Britain, apparently oblivious of the fact that Poulson corrupted local government on a scale unparalleled in English history. To take one simple point, how can Mr Maudling possibly have regarded his connection with Poulson's Gozo hospital project as not constituting an interest which ought to have been declared to the House of Commons when speaking in a debate on Malta? It would have been a great pity it these lapses had driven such an endearing and affable man out of public life, but a touch of contrition would be graceful.
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