BOOKS

1688 And All That

BY BERNARD LEVIN ONCE upon a time, as I sat with sharpened pencil and opened notebook in a lecture= room at the London School of Economics, the door opened and in came Mr. William Pickles with a copy of that morning's Times under his arm. Mounting the rostrum, he flung the paper down on the lectern with disgust, saying as he did so, 'I've written better French Constitutions than that myself.'

The trouble was, the Fourth Republic had not accepted his draft (prepared, if I remember correctly, at the request of the French Socialist Party); and with the results (give or take a pinch of post hoc propter hoc) that we have all seen. Now Sir Ivor Jennings has been more fortunate. As the greatest of modern constitutional lawyers, his hand has been evident (even if he would scarcely recognise, let alone own it) in many a source-document of many an emergent society. It is not surprising. With his two mighty pre- war works, Cabinet Government and Parlia- ment, he took a long lawyer's look at democracy in Britain which laid the foundations for a couple of generations' study of what makes our political system work. The method, as befitted a lawyer, was descriptive and analytical, not interpretative; yet it was Jennings's ideas of democracy that I went into Mr. Pickles's lecture with.

And on the whole he served us well. True, there was the notorious-section in his little, less- remembered book The British Constitution, in which he convincingly demonstrated the exis- tence of a political pendulum by the use of a diagram which changed its scale on the way down and probably helped to instil fallacy into more political students than any other teacher before or since; Socrates was hemlocked for less. (It is noteworthy that whenever the swing of the pendulum turns up in Sir Ivor's pages now it is decently clad in inverted commas.) But the blemishes were few, the achievement great; he described, for all time, the British Consti- tution.

But time hath, my lord, a wallet on his back. Even the British Constitution changes over the years, and ways of looking at it change still more. There needs no psephologist come from Nuffield College to tell us that; though there was Bagehot once, there was still need of Jennings later. Now there is David Butler and Robert Mackenzie. Meanwhile, there is still Jennings, and I fear that he brings with him, for the keenest noses at any rate, a faint, far-off whiff of mothballs.

For Sir Ivor has finished the job he began a quarter of a century ago. After the Cabinet and Parliament, he always intended, very naturally, that the study of party should follow. What with one thing and another, 1942 has now become 1962, and a lot of water, some of it deeply stained with ink, has flowed under the bridges in the meantime. Yet here is Sir Ivor with the final work* in his great series, and presumably his last major word on the subject. Here is one passage from the first volume:

* PARTY POLITICS. By Sir Ivor Jennings. Vol. 1 : Appeal to the People. Vol. 2: The Growth of Parties. Vol. 3: The Stuff of Politics. (C.U.P., 45s. each.) . . . few electors go to election meetings now and it is very difficult to arouse enthusiasm over the sins of one's opponents when the wireless or television has to compete with little Johnny, who wants a glass of water, teen- age Margaret, who wants to switch to Luxem- burg and have a dance, and grown-up Herbert who dislikes being told to do washing-up and is therefore doing it noisily. Father, expectorat- ing into the fire, is apt to say 'them poli- ticians; and when Father swears we all swear.

And here is another :

Television is not normally sampled in small lots; it is expected to provide an evening's enter- tainment—perhaps a day's entertainment—seven days a week. The effect of such an intake must be to improve standards rather than cause them to deteriorate.

And here is another:

There is a firm belief among professional politicians that 'organisation' pays dividends, but it may be exaggerated.

Now all three of those passages (and they are far from being entirely untypical of the author's approach) are clearly a waste of paper. As far as the first is concerned, we do not want academics of Sir Ivor's standing to write Daily Sketch leaders, wild social inaccuracies and all; what we want from such people is hard work with insight applied to it. As far as the second is concerned, we are entitled to expect that before coming to so stupendously inaccurate a con- clusion the Master of Trinity Hall might at any rate have switched a television set on and looked at it. And as far as the third is concerned, we are surely not demanding too much if we ask why Sir Ivor doesn't read the Wilson Report, even if he disagrees with its findings; after all, nobody has ever had any difficulty in getting hold of a copy.

The fact is, the study of politics in this coun- try has gone farther and faster than Sir Ivor Jennings imagines; and even if he knows per- fectly well how far and how fast it has gone, he is plainly unable to keep up. There is more value in Mr. Mackenzie's British Political Parties, Which weighs about one-sixth of this work, than in all of Sir Ivor's three volumes. This is not because Mr. Mackenzie knows more facts than Sir Ivor; he probably knows far fewer. It is not even because Mr. Mackenzie is a cleverer man than Sir Ivor, though as a matter of fact he is. But the superiority of Mr. Mackenzie's study sprang from ten years of grindingly hard field-work. Every annual conference of both major parties in this country since the war has been attended by Mr. Mackenzie; has Sir Ivor ever been to one? The only extended reference to the subject in these three volumes is a de haut en has description of the place of conference in the constitutional theory and practice of the Labour Party which is already out of date.

To a large extent, of course, Sir Ivor is the prisoner of his own achievements. Cabinet Government and Parliament really did deserve their acclaim. They were vast, meticulous maps of the terrain, and good maps were desperately scarce at the time. This final

work is a map, too (where else, apart from the statute itself, can one read a detailed summary of what information may and may not appear on a British ballot-paper, and in what circum- stances it may be ruled invalid?), but with this map there are two faults; too many areas are left vaguely marked, 'Here be dragons,' and the science of geography has in any case been devalued.

The sociologists, the psephologists, the social historians, the market researchers, the psycholo- gists, the economists—all these have been pouring out words on British politics for years. Sir Ivor has clearly read a great deal of them (why, in- cidentally, does he give us no bibliography?), but absorbed less into his own thought. He grapples manfully with the psephologists, but the rest of the 'breed—the sociologists particularly—he appears to regard as outside his province entirely. Perhaps it was too late to teach an old dog new tricks.

Nevertheless, for all its inadequacies, this is a powerful and useful book. The second volume (`The Growth of Parties') is, as one would expect from Sir Ivor, the best. The third volume (The Stuff of Politics'), dealing as it does with the ideas in the minds of politicians and those who do (or do not) vote for them, is a trifle bloodless, but both comprehensive and sensible; the author, for instance, sees clearly enough what is happening to the Labour Party, and why; just as he sees clearly what Disraeli's effect on British political life was. Even in the much inferior first volume there is, at any rate in the historical section, the panoramic yet meticulous view with which Sir Ivor made his name. One can forgive a great deal of unproduc- tive speculation about what 'Bill Bloggs' thinks for such a couple of paragraphs as these: The Prince of Wales appeared with Fox's badge, laurel and a fox's brush, and an escort of prize-fighters. The poll was closed on the fortieth day and Fox was chaired in a huge pro- cession ending, appropriately enough, with the 'State. Carriages of their Graces, the Duchesses of Portland and Devonshire, drawn by six horses, superbly caparisoned, with six running footmen attendant on each'. This was by no means the end of the rejoicing, for the Prince of Wales gave a fete and Mrs. Crewe gave a feast, at which everybody, including the Prince, wore the party colours, buff and blue. The Prince toasted 'True Blue and Mrs Crewe',while Mrs Crewe replied with 'True Blue and all of you'.

This kind of thing converted contested elec- tions into sporting contests in which the emo- tions of the participants were strongly engaged. Georgiana Devonshire's efforts were not a mere friendly gesture to Fox; they were a constitu- tional rebellion against the King because his powers had increased, were increasing, and ought to be diminished. It was a contest between Pitt and Fox, but on public issues. Though the Duchess did not know it, she helped to found the °Liberal party. The 'friends of Mr Fox' supported the 'principles of Mr Fox'; and though Opposition languished during the French Wars, there always was an Opposition, which took office in 1830, passed the Reform Bill, and dominated politics for most of the nineteenth century.

That passage has all of Sir Ivor's virtues; it is well-read, interesting, relevant and significant, and it displays insight and understanding. He has looked long, hard and lovingly at the British Constitution, even if he has done his looking from too great a distance, and with a quizzing- glass instead of, a microscope. Let him who is without psephology among you cast the first stone.