THE WAPPING PROF
Outsiders: a profile of
John Vincent, the historian the Bristol
Left want to silence
TO THOSE who have not really thought about him, John Vincent appears to be a bundle of contradictions — a black Mur- doch reactionary who yet has every sort of liberal credential — a Stockport/ Manchester upbringing with shades of T. H. Huxley in the background, a liberal education at Bedales and an almost equally liberal education from Sir John Plumb while an undergraduate historian at Christ's College, Cambridge.
Liberal virtue was dented a bit by H. J. Hanham, the 19th-century historian (now vice-chancellor of Lancaster University) whom Vincent knew at Stockport, by a reading of Butterfield's The Whig Inter- pretation of History, which had a great effect when picked up on a bookstall at the age of 15, and by a Tractarian schoolmas- ter whom Vincent encountered, improb- ably, at Bedales. But Vincent's first intro- duction to cynicism came from the glimp- ses into power politics he was given by R. E. Robinson, the historian of imperial- ism, from whom he learnt much in his third year at Cambridge before Robinson be- came a professor at Oxford.
Vincent was a quiet, studious under- graduate who needed wickedness as an experience and got it as a young fellow of Peterhouse in the late 1960s. His departure from Peterhouse to the chair of modern history at Bristol in 1971 involved a memorable and appalling quarrel with the then Master of Peterhouse, his eight years as a fellow having been marked by inter- mittent explosions of an intense, unreason- ing, libertarian socialism. During the Gar- den House riot of 1970, when the heavies of the Cambridge Left broke up a dinner at the Garden House Hotel in honour of the Greek colonels, Vincent, in those far-off days when this sort of thing could happen to a fellow of Peterhouse, was given a rebuke by innuendo from an Appeal Court judge who was confirming prison sentences which had been imposed on some of the undergraduates involved.
At Bristol, Vincent's early years were not without difficulty, but once married to an intelligent and understanding wife, who is his best critic, he began to frequent Anglican churches and to be seen at Dr Casey's and Dr Scruton's Conservative Philosophy Group. Book reviewing in the Sunday Times brought him to the notice of Mr Rupert Murdoch and he became first a regular political columnist in the Times and then a regular political columnist in the Sun, which writes of him affectionately in these days of difficulty as its `Prof .
Vincent's contributions to the Sun are headed by a photograph of the eager, apparently Brylcreemed columnist and are written in what is supposed to be the language of democratic politics. The con- tent is Thatcherite and adapts both to the matiness of the Sun and to the changed conditions of the 1980s — some of the opinions and part of the tone which Mr Powell had adopted 15 years earlier. This caused great offence to the Guardian, which gave its readers a licence to dislike the column soon after it began to appear. The Guardian has said nothing against the heavies of the Bristol Left disrupting Vin- cent's lectures since they began to do so three weeks ago.
Vincent is a kind man, dedicated to the interests of his pupils, and, now, a devoted family man. Should one see the Murdoch phase, therefore, as simply a young radical of the late 1960s turning himself into a domesticated middle-aged conservative of the 1980s? No, say those who know Vin- cent best, one should not; it's easy to reconcile his contradictions once you understand that he is not to be typecast politically and responds now to the same stimuli that he responded to 20 years ago — a taste for paradox, a lusting after irony and the desire to form his mind by acquir- ing experiences of worlds other than the world of academe.
Vincent's mind is remarkable. Give him a conventional truth, say his friends, and he will respond with a counter-truth, Of manifest implausibility. Brood on his counter-truth, chew over it, and you'll find that light floods in and you have a new truth which enlivens and transforms the boring old truth that you began with. Imagine this process going on incessantly for 20 years in conversation, in tutorials, 10 lectures, in book reviews and in cryptic correspondence, and you have that capa- city to transform the understanding of the politics of industrial society that was shown at its best in The Formation of the Liberal Party — the first and most brilliant of Vincent's books, which used paradoxes as signposts and pointed in ten different directions at once.
Since The Formation of the Liberal Parry Vincent's output has been constant but the achievement irregular. The Governing Pas: sion had splendid passages but was also 10 monochrome, while the word 'diaries' (he, has edited four modern English political diaries), if not graven on his, as it is on another eminent heart, may still hay.e prevented him doing work for which he Is suited uniquely. 'He reminds me in s°, many ways of Lord Dacre,' says his old friend Maurice Cowling, who knows them both. 'He is certainly the cleverest histo- rian writing about modern English politics and all his friends wish that, in addition to all these exciting things at Wapping, he, would get on with finishing The Politics 0.1 Industrial Society.' Vincent's search for paradox arises from a deep dislike of entrenched opinions, belief that entrenchments encourage the dull, the stuffy and the conventional. 111.1s, also is the origin of his irony — the bell' that nothing is what it seems, that any _ attempt to pretend that it is deserves to be contested, and that the only sensible thing. to do to this sort of pretence is to confront it With its polar opposite. This is Vincent version of the Butterfieldian or Dacreian irreverence which believes that established opinions and institutions need constantly to be tested for pomposity, and Vincent not only tests the Labour Party, the trade unions, the Guardian and Lord Dacre as zealously as Butterfield tested Whigs and Namierites and Lord Dacre tests the monks and priests of historic Christianity, he also applies the test to himself. No one who knows him doubts that his Murdoch persona is an ironical commentary on his academic persona — an attempt to wrench the quiet studious undergraduate that he really is out of his professorial cocoon into the real world of mercenary journalism.
The Bristol heavies are said to include a number of ex-public school boys with the usual paraphernalia of the undergraduate Left and well-heeled parents in Hampstead and Highgate. What should they think about Professor Vincent? They should think about him very warily. If he is a figure of the Right, he is a gadfly, not a stereotype. He is on the Left as well as on the Right, is a civil liberties libertarian as well as a Thatcherite and not only bats all around the wicket but also shifts his wicket as he goes along. In his case absolutely nothing is what it seems and what a heavy should ask himself before his protests become ritual is whether it is more ridicu- lous to tangle with an ironist or to demon- strate against a paradox.
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