Notebook
When I read Dick Crossman's revelations of life in Downing Street under the premiership of Harold Wilson, I recall an unhappy summer I spent in a house next to an ill-conducted and unsuccessful kennels kept by three women, none of whom were ever on good terms with both the other two at one time. Their premises emitted just the same yapping and scuffing and low-grade Complaints about Valerie's inconsiderateness and speculations as to what that oaf of a young vet had done to Mrs MacKenzie's Pooh-Bah. Downing Street had apparently no advantage except that the Ministers did not have litters, at least on the premises. But as I accept this picture and make that conclusion I am vexed by certain doubts.
Dick Crossman was at Oxford with my husband and he was for some time our neighbour in the Chilterns. We both found him a charming companion and virtuoso conversationalist and not a selfish one. He was a wonderful hand at conducting a general conversation as if it were chamber Music, and he could bring out the best in the shy and the alien. But he had his handicaps. The chief of these was his failure to tell the truth, which, I would like to say, I do not think should be success in telling lies. It was an idiosyncrasy which raised the problem: by What mechanism do we distinguish between our memories and our fantasies? How do we know, when there crosses our mind a road running between mile after mile of sunset-coloured verges whether we are remembering something we once saw in the State of Georgia in day-lily time or something we dreamed? I do not know what Mechanism helps us there, and no physiologist or psychologist I have ever asked has ever given me an explanation, but I do know that Dick Crossman had not got it. .r his seems to me a poor qualification for a diarist.
hut that was not the only point which seems to indicate him as a non-starter in the Pepys stakes. He had also no sense of humour. He could make good enough small jokes, just UP to Oxbridge size, but with not much to Spare. But he could rarely see other peoples jokes. It often seemed that he had gone into public life so that his deficiencies Should a always have a red carpet to walk °n, and in the Diaries he gives this particular deficiency the VIP treatment by failing to see a joke made by the Queen, not a very good one, but seaworthy. When he told her he had to spend the afternoon at the Elephant and Castle she said, `Oh, what a with-it address.' This Dick Crossman, entirely missing the irony, describes as a funny remark, 'showing how completely out of touch she is', because 'of all the places in that dreary part of London' and so on.This is really a double boner, for he should have known that the Crown owns some interesting property near the Elephant and Castle, and in her administrative capacity must have had to consider its character. But if one is to be a diarist one must understand other people's jokes and load one's mind with the sort of apparently useless information that always comes in handy.
It is really most unlikely that we should get the truth about Downing Street in these volumes. I cannot believe that Sir Harold was in such a perpetual state of deliquescence as is there suggested, for the years have passed and he is still alive. If • what Dick Crossman said was true, then Harold Wilson may not be the greatest peacetime Prime Minister we have ever had, but he must possess one of the most magnificent livers of all time, worthy to be honoured beside Churchill's. But if my curiosity is moved by such an allegation, I do not really believe I should be amused. This is a pernicious book because it is full of denigrating material which could destroy the described person's standing and authority, but which could not be challenged in the law courts under the laws relating to libel and slander, since they are belittling but not defamatory.
Anyway, I would not myself look here for the genuine crusading candour. The section of the group which is most lovingly described is morally, intellectually and emotionally so inadequate, so petty, so poujadist. Dick Crossman gives an account of a conversation in which he and some crones, republicans like himself, considered the possibilities of making the royal family subject to the same taxes as the rest of the population, so much did they dislike the fact that the Queen is `by far the richest person in the country' and the family 'inordinately wealthy'. That Crossman should have chronicled such inane deliberations shows how far he had declined from his first promise. Obviously no stem of government is sacred since it is man-made, and obviously at any given moment, a monarch may be the right head of state for one country and a president right for another, and their situations may be reversed by the course of history. But only an idiot could wish to abandon the monarchy because the monarch had become 'the richest person in the country'. As the monarch represents the power of the nation, the sum of the population's energy, he or she should be the richest person in the country, or look like it. Nobody should be in a position to trump his or her ace.
It is indeed relevant to inquire whether the royal family is 'inordinately wealthy' by which is meant, I suppose, so wealthy that other people go short. But it appears from the context that none of the participants in this conversation were any better informed than we are on this point, and they have less than the usual capacity for forming a rough estimate, since Dick Crossman is guilty of including 'pictures' among the items of the 'inordinate wealth'. Let us pause and reflect over this. The dynasties chosen by the superdynastic will of Englishmen have bought works of art through the centuries, not because they had taste some had and some had not but because they were very rich people and rich people have throughout the ages bought pictures. Our monarchs bunged their purchases into their palaces and left them there, and there they stayed, when the art critics ran hither and thither outside, often howling like dogs. So where was Stubbs when the light went out? Why, biding his time in Windsor Castle. The phrase 'pictures and riches' is damning. It does not show that Dick Crossman was moved by mean envy of those that have more than he did, or that he did not respect the art of the world, and the random system by which art is created and preserved. It does mean that he had lost his ear for true talk, that he had learned to tolerate jargon and even to echo it.
There is an element of modern life which makes it possible that there were plenty of people sitting about in Number Ten like the figures in the background of Hogarth prints. Now that the population is gathered together in large towns and centreless overgrown suburbs and villages, young people leaving school do not find a social circle of adult friends waiting to receive their juniors, and they miss the companionship they had at school, and do not get it at their work, nor in the crowded University or Polytechnics unless they find a focal point. For this reason many of them join political societies, whether or not they have a gift for politics, which is surely hardly more common than a gift for languages. But some of them who are most deficient in this respect rise in the ranks of whatever party they join because of their personal dynamism.
Many of these cases never develop any real intelligence regarding the problems of government; but they can become indispensable. They can occupy themselves cheerfully with the meaner problems of party organisation, it is their hold on life, and they can talk of them without cease, joining up Westminster twaddle with constituency twaddle, and it affects their superiors, since all slave-drivers end by being part-owned by their slaves. One of the main defects of the diaries is that they might lead the reader to suppose that these conditions were peculiar to the Labour Movement, whereas they can arise in any party. It would also be a pity if the reader concluded that no person concerned with the Government ever said anything that was kind, imaginative, penetrating or scrupulous, and that nobility never dared to raise its head. This is part of the autobiography of a peculiar case and has no general application.
Rebecca West
Previous page
