Political Commentary
Another Paul's conversion
John Grigg
Last week Paul Johnson announced his defection from the Labour Party, to whose interests he had not been conspicuously devoted for some time past. His conversion was, therefore, less sudden than that of his illustrious namesake nearly two thousand years ago, and it was also different in another way. Whereas Paul of Tarsus was converted to an obscure creed, the preaching of which exposed him to danger and death, Paul of Iver has merely joined the great majority of his fellow-countrymen in disliking socialism, while the particular form of anti-socialism that he has embraced is as fashionable as it is distorted.
In his long 'Farewell to the Labour Party' (published in last week's New Statesman, and then substantially reprinted in the Sunday Telegraph) there is no hint of apology for, or even acknowledgement of, his own past errors. The suggestion throughout is that, while the party has changed and degenerated, he has remained constant — constant in his belief in creative diversity, constant in his hostility to trade union power. As an historian he may be reliable about Queen Elizabeth I or Christianity or ancient Egypt; but he is manifestly unreliable about himself.
He tells us that things began to go badly wrong with Labour in the spring of 1969, when Harold Wilson's attempt to reform the trade unions was 'destroyed by a conspiracy of cynics, defeatists and trade union authoritarians'. It was then that Mr Johnson 'caught the first whiff of disaster.' But what did he do about it? Did he warn the people? Did he commend to them a party which — unlike the Labour Party in 1966 — was expressly pledged to reform industrial relations, and to bring the trade unions more effectively within the law? Did he even preserve an anguished silence during the 1970 election, as the only means of betraying neither his party nor his convictions?
Not a bit of it. He committed himself wholeheartedly and without qualification to Labour. In a signed article entitled 'The 'Moral Issue is There' (which appeared in the New Statesman on 19 June 1970) he wrote: 'The truth is that there is no greater guarantee of this country's internal sta bility and security than a solid Labour majority in the House of Commons. It is not a formula for instant socialism. . . But it is an absolute and cast-iron defence against adventurism% That last jargon word is surely worthy of any commissar, and shows that if the Labour Party was already, as he would say, on the first stretch of the 'fearful road' to Gulag, he was himself among those who were marching cheerfully along it.
And what of his attitude at the end of 1973, when the miners were using industrial action for the unconcealed purpose of smashing the Heath government? I remember talking to him at the time — since he clearly has no objection to quoting private conversations he will not mind my referring to the fact — and being startled by the intensity of his malevolence towards Edward Heath. It seemed that no one in the country could be !mare delighted at what the miners were doing, or less troubled by the implications for British parliamentary democracy. Now he tries to fudge the issue with these words: 'The events of winter 1973-4, when the triumphant miners trampled over the prostrate body of Ted Heath, are open to a variety of legitimate interpretations.' Convenient and consciencesalving, maybe; but hardly legitimate.
The result of Mr Heath's defeat was, of course, a second Wilson capitulation to the trade unions, and more especially the closed shop legislation which Mr Johnson describes as marking, for Labour, 'a historic shift in its doctrinal loyalties, from the beleaguered individual to the grinning triumph of the field-grey regiment'. Such language seems to me grotesquely exaggerated, but in any case why was he grinning himself only a few months earlier, when the field-grey regiment was trampling over the prostrate body of an elected Prime Minister?
I have not yet mentioned his attitude during the Paris evenements of May 1968, which on reflection seems to me to have a particularly important bearing upon the step that he has now taken, and to be, if anything, even more consistent with his new ideology than with the old. On the face of it, nothing could have been more militantly, more exultantly, left-wing than his praise of the students who nearly brought down the Fifth Republic. But in reality his motive was the same as that which has now driven him towards the radical right. He saw in Danny le Rouge the champion of individualism against corporate establishments that he now thinks he sees in Maggie la Bleue.
There is no need to quote at length from what he wrote at that time. One or two passages will give the flavour. On 24 May 1968, urging anyone interested in politics to go to Paris, he said that one could watch there 'the birth-pangs (perhaps, soon, the murder or even suicide) of a new approach to the organisation of human societies.' Once again he added, 'the French have given birth to a new revolutionary spirit, which will ultimately enrich the lives of all of us. I would like to think, without much hope, that Britain has a contribution to make.' Soon afterwards he was appealing to New Statesman readers to subscribe to the Support Fund for French Students and Workers, and noting with satisfaction that his line on the Paris revolt was being denounced both by 'Stalinists in the Morning Star' and by 'high Tories in the Telegraph and Spectator' (N.S. 'London Diary', 14 June 1968). It was, surely, the anarchist in him that responded with such enthusiasm to the Paris students. He did not bother to ask if the order that they were seeking to destroy, and that they came so near to destroying, was itself indispensable to liberty. He made no distinction between the corporate ideals of de Gaulle, Stalinists and high Tories. To him, they were all essentially the same -enemies of promise, enemies of the free spirit of Man. In that sense the Johnson of 1968 is not at the opposite pole from, but strikingly prefigures, the Johnson of 1977. The individualism that he asserts carries the laissez-faire spirit to its ultimate limit. In only one respect has he allowed corporate loyalty to restrict his outlook, compared with nine years ago. He then wrote with approval of the Paris students that they repudiated nationalism, but he has since become the offshore islander, the fanatical English super-patriot. His cult of the individual and hatred of corporate bodies is now uneasily combined with a narrow nationalism. This would have shocked the nineteenth-century Liberals to whose ideology his own is in other ways close. It is anything but close to the theory and practice of traditional Toryism, and Tories should be cautious in their welcome to him as an ally. There should be no killing of the fatted calf, no rejoicing over his apparent home-coming — because the Tory Party, even if he were to join it, is not his true home. Neither his form of individualism nor his form of anti-corporatism is in harmonY with the Tory view of history, or of the world.
He is still declaring, as in 1970, that 'the issue is not primarily political but moll,' and his historical studies have convince° him that 'the emergence of the individual t5 the first, decisive step in any civilisation But is that a correct judgment? My 01 study of history, for what it is worth, me to believe that he is putting the car,' before the horse — that the first step in civir isation is the creation of communities, and a sense of community; that without collective restraints the individual would never have, had any chance to emerge as a civiliseni being. Is that not implied in the very wore 'civilisation', which suggests a trans1ti011 from the jungle world of every man for biro.: self to the ordered, collective world of vil° !ages, towns and cities? ' Yes, and trade unions. Mr Johnson indiscriminate union-bashing is only one aspect of his general repugnance to codri: porate loyalty and discipline. His i.11 vidualism is that of the artist, entireYc appropriate within the strictly artistir sphere, but fatal when applied to polities any other form of human endeavour requu ing cooperation.
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