Up and down the greasy pole

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

REGGIE: THE LIFE OF REGINALD MAUDLING by Lewis Baston Sutton, £25, pp. 320, ISBN 0750929243 ✆ £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 In November 1943, The Spectator published an article with the unpromising title ‘Conservatives and Control’ by an unknown young man called Reginald Maudling. It covered familiar enough territory intelligently enough. In the last century, the Left had fought for individual liberty against the forces of privilege; now it was the party of the Right ‘that is fighting the cause of individual liberty against the threatening collectivism of the Left’. We had discovered that both political and economic liberty were important, but socialism merely chose equality over freedom, sacrificing political liberty in the process.

The Conservatives could combat this, but they had to choose how to do so. They could accept the regulations and controls imposed in wartime, or they could make a frankly demagogic appeal against state bumbledom ordering us from cradle to grave, but that was something no one of intellectual integrity could treat as ‘a serious contribution to political thought’. Or then again, the Tories could find — yes — a Third Way and recognise that ‘the purpose of State control and the guiding principle of its application is the achievement of true freedom’.

As Lewis Baston says in his penetrating and informative biography, on the basis of this piece Maudling might have been one of the ‘socialists of all parties’ to whom F. A. von Hayek ironically dedicated his freemarket polemic The Road to Serfdom the following year. Apart from reservations about direct control of industry, there was little to distinguish Maudling from contemporary Labour social democrats, and he was plainly to the left of New Labour. It was a position from which he never really deviated in the course of a political career which promised much but which ended in ignominy.

At the time he wrote his essay, Maudling was 26 and working as a temporary wartime civil servant. He came from a modest middle-class family, the son of an actuary who had, fascinatingly enough, at one time sailed close to the legal wind promoting an insurance company which went bust. Reggie went to school at Merchant Taylors’ and then to Merton as a Postmaster or scholar. He spent a certain amount of time at Oxford drinking and playing golf, but still managed a First in Greats, displaying as an undergraduate the mixture of affability, cleverness and indolence which were his hallmarks ever after. He read for the Bar and married young, a dancer and actress called Beryl Laverick who was to be part of his sad story.

As with the rest of his generation, his career was thrown off course in 1939. Tory politicians later tended to be marked by how far they had had the proverbial good war, and Maudling just about passed, commissioned in the RAF but precluded by his eyesight from flying duties and seconded to the Ministry of Supply. When the spirit of politics moved him, he might have chosen any of the three parties but plumped for the Tories, stood without success in the Labour landslide of 1945, and then joined the Conservative Parliamentary Secretariat, which became the Research Department and a famous nursery of talent. Maudling’s colleagues there included Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell, and their task was to adapt the Tory party for the postwar age.

All of them accepted the spirit of the Industrial Charter inspired by R. A. Butler, their mentor, with its commitment to full employment and conciliation, all three were elected in the famous Tory 1950 vintage, and all were members of the One Nation group (which was not, as is sometimes supposed, merely paternalist or proto-Wet in tendency). Maudling was soon rapidly ascending the ministerial ladder. Churchill’s peacetime premiership could be something of an organisational shambles, and when Maudling was made Parliamentary Secretary at Transport and Civil Aviation (not ‘Civil Administration’, as one of the odder of the comparatively few slips in the book has it) he turned up to announce himself to his minister Jack Maclay, who had not been told of the appointment. Maudling was much happier when he became Economic Secretary to the Treasury under his old master Rab Butler, indeed he would later say it had been the most fruitful period of his ministerial life.

He entered the Cabinet in 1957 to take charge of negotiations between a potential European free trade area and the new sixmember Common Market. In the event, the European Free Trade Area was created, but it did not establish an agreement with the Six, thanks largely to the first display of de Gaulle’s anglophobic hostility. Maudling himself was clear-sighted in recognising that ‘the whole idea of the Six’ was ‘a movement towards political integration’. It was fine for the participants, he said in 1959, but for Great Britain to sign the Treaty of Rome ‘would be to accept as the ultimate goal political federation in Europe, including ourselves’, which did not seem to him a proposition which, ‘at the moment, commands majority support in this country’, eerie words to read 45 years on.

Having survived a spell in the very hot seat at the Colonial Office, Maudling ended his ministerial career with two of what are sonorously known as the great offices of state, but both rather briefly and controversially. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer for two and a quarter years at the end of the long Tory government, appointed by Macmillan when Selwyn Lloyd was despatched in the July 1962 Night of the Long Knives, and remaining in office after Alec Douglas-Home succeeded. Characteristically, Maudling had at first caballed with his old comrades-in-arms Iain and Enoch to stop Home, but then, unlike them, agreed to serve under him. After the Wilson government and the Tories’ surprising victory in 1970 he served as Home Secretary for just over two years, before his reckless financial indiscretion caught up with him and forced his resignation. He worked his way back to the shadow cabinet but was abruptly — and to his rage — sacked by Margaret Thatcher. He died at only 62 of cirrhosis of the liver.

It could not be claimed that he was a success in those last two offices. His tenure at the Treasury was much criticised, and he was subsequently accused, not altogether fairly, of misleading Parliament and public about the economic situation. More disastrously, in 1970-72 he was the last Home Secretary to be responsible for Northern Ireland before violence spiralled out of control, Stormont was prorogued, and a Northern Ireland Secretary was appointed for the first time. Maybe no one could have prevented the horrors, but Maudling almost certainly made them worse. To his credit, Baston writes, he never denied having said, as his flight left Belfast, ‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country!’ but it did sum up the despairing helplessness with which he viewed the conflict.

Between Treasury and Home Office had come the worst moment of his political life. Even in the summer of 1963 he seemed for a moment favourite to succeed Macmillan, and then when Douglas-Home resigned in the summer of 1965 Maudling was the political pundits’ nap to win the first election the Tories ever held for their leader. But he was beaten by Edward Heath, just possibly in some measure because Tory MPs had not yet grasped how to handle such an election and wanted to say boo to the party hierarchy without actually electing Ted. As Maudling’s friend Sir Edward Boyle well remembered, he was shattered by the defeat, and it had the effect of making him even more cynical and avaricious than before.

In the other phrase of his which deserves to be recorded in political dictionaries of quotations, Maudling said that he now wanted ‘a little pot of money’ for his old age. The people to provide it were John Poulson, the crooked architect and developer, whose money Maudling took and on whose behalf he shamefully intervened in the Commons without declaring an interest; Jerome Hoffman, for whose corrupt Real Estate Fund of America Maudling worked and who was later imprisoned for fraud, like Poulson; and Sir (as he briefly was) Eric Miller, on the payroll of whose Peachey group Maudling lucratively sat, who was knighted in Wilson’s resignation ‘dishonours list’, and who shot himself in 1977 before he too had his collar felt. That catalogue defies Lady Bracknell. If two is carelessness, what does three look like?

In the truest dramatic sense, Maudling’s fall from grace was a tragedy: a gifted man undone by his own weaknesses rather than by malign fate. The fault, dear Reggie, was not in your stars but in yourself. Although clever in an exam-passing way, he always gave the impression of effortless ease, or just laziness. He was an engaging man without much depth; for all his First and his fondness for name-dropping Hegel (he explained his Middle Way or Third Way in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, which at least our present rulers have spared us), he was wholly unintellectual. He rarely read a serious book or went to a concert, preferring James Bond and jazz, two tastes he shared with his one-time Barnet constituent Kingsley Amis, along with drink, of course; as Baston drily says, the occasion when his engagement book records that the Maudlings had lunched with Mr and Mrs K. Amis and then dined with Mr and Mrs K. Amis must have been quite a day.

And Maudling was simply greedy: for food, for drink and for money. He had begun to dabble in the City before he became a minister, and grumbled that accepting office drastically reduced his income. I had not fully realised that there were clouds of suspicion forming over him well before the later outrageous scandals and indeed before he was made Chancellor. In the 1950s, he became a Lloyds Name, which he plainly could not afford to be (one might say that one of his few pieces of luck was to die before the Lloyds debacle ruined so many Names). His civil servants looked askance at this, still more so when he became President of the Board of Trade, the minister responsible for the insurance market, but Reggie could not be dissuaded from pursuing another pot of money.

This is a good book, thoroughly researched and often gripping, although occasionally displaying unmistakable signs of the academic trying too hard at fine writing. At the critical 1963 Tory conference, when Macmillan’s departure was announced and sundry hats were thrown in the ring, Maudling made a duff speech which badly damaged his chances, and he was in general an uninspiring public speaker. Or in Baston’s unhappy words, ‘It was said of Michael Heseltine that he could always find the clitoris of the Conservative conference. Reggie Maudling could barely manage to undo its bra-strap.’ As the New Yorker used to say, Block that Metaphor. It is also a long book, with dense thickets of financial detail, both public economics and Maudling’s personal schemes for enrichment. But Baston has clearly mastered these as few people did at the time: he rightly praises Private Eye, whatever its other failings, and especially the late Paul Foot, for having pursued the Poulson and Hoffman stories when the respectable press shied away.

A wonderfully vivid picture emerges of the Maudlings. Excessive marital fidelity rarely seems to be the problem for Tory politicians, but Maudling was uxorious truly to a fault. A colleague suggested perceptively that a bit on the side might have done him no harm; as it was, he was besotted with the ambitious and pushy Beryl, whose utterly improbable pet scheme for a ballet theatre on the outskirts of East Grinstead led to much of their financial woe. The book captures the flavour of the Maudlings’ domestic life, the lavish but usually filthy house in Belgravia, the gruesome dinner parties for their vulgar rich acquaintances from the demi-monde, or at least the zweite Gesellschaft, and at the end Reggie and Beryl facing disaster together in a cloud of alcohol. It’s a story for a modern Thackeray.

After Maudling died in 1979, he was survived, though not for long, by Beryl, and one of their sons also came to a sad end. Not long after Reggie died I wrote a column here vaguely spitting on his grave, or at least suggesting that there should be no mercy shown by the papers against whom he had been bringing libel actions at the time of his death, and I was rebuked for my heartlessness by his lifelong friend and supporter, the frightful John Junor. At this season of goodwill, I wish I could say I felt remorse; after reading Lewis Baston’s book, rather the opposite.