ANOTHER VOICE

Why Jo Grimond was too good to be Prime Minister

CHARLES MOORE

In the month when hundreds of thou- sands of people are buying a certain vol- ume of memoirs, let me quote from anoth- er:

Given the political climate. . . could we have advanced more? The answer is probably 'yes'. Perhaps I did not grasp the opportunity firm- ly enough. Perhaps I did not realise it could be there ... Looking back I fear I was not sufficiently on the offensive.

That is Jo Grimond, who died this week, on being leader of the Liberal Party.

The index to the Memoirs also indicates a less than obsessive pursuit of power . . . buys pictures, 141; first elected, 146; as Party whip, 147-8, 169, 186, 214; family life, 164-6, 280, 286-8; and universities, 179-83; and art, 183-4; as Party leader, 188, 228, 249; deafness, 249, 283 . . . "I wince,' he writes, 'whenever I hear the periodic cries that we need leadership.'

Jo Grimond loathed pomp and bureau- cratic hierarchy:

Whenever I hear the words 'status' or 'pres- tige' I reach for my gun. I once attended a banquet at which Mr Attlee, after he had ceased to be Prime Minister, was present in full fig. During dinner, having dropped some- thing, he slid dextrously off his chair under the table. The search proved troublesome so one of the flunkeys came to his aid. Their rumps could be seen bobbing about above the table like the sterns of two terriers down a rabbit hole. In due course Mr Attlee sur- faced breathless but triumphant. About half past ten he left to catch the Green Line bus to Cherry Cottage. Seldom can a man have been less concerned about 'face'. I awarded him a round of heartfelt, if silent, applause.

His is a very attractive story, of a hand- some, independent-minded and intelligent man, who married into a dynasty of the Liberal Party (his widow is Asquith's grand- daughter), became its leader, helped to revive its fortunes and eventually retired without rancour to write well — including, often, for this paper — on politics, art, Scotland, the countryside and so on. He wrote in the Country Diary in the Field that 'the abandonment of aspirations to a fine lawn -is the beginning of wisdom'. Most politicians say that sort of thing; I think he meant it. As one surveys the ranks of deter- mined dullards striving to become real or shadow Parliamentary Under-secretary for Administrative Affairs, how one misses someone like Jo Grimond. He was the sort of man with whom one would never have a really profitless conversation because he always said what he thought, and what he thought was interesting. This applied to any subject, great or small. He almost con- vinced me, for example, that the fun of liv- ing in Orkney was not the great length of its summer days but the extreme shortness of its winter ones.

One is tempted to think that the fault of modern politics is that there are no Gri- monds in it. The party system, the over- professionalisation of politics and the bureaucratic blight of which he eloquently complained forbid it. In the 1959 General Election Grimond put forward a policy about something or other on television. 'That's not what your manifesto says,' *the interviewer pointed out, holding up a copy. 'Oh, really?' said Grimond, unembarrassed. 'Can I see what it does say?' Today, it would literally be more than John Major's job is worth to be so cavalier. Grimonds can see what is ridiculous, and modern politicians never cannot.

But I do not think one should succumb completely to the charm. After all, Jo Gri- mond, among many others, is to blame for something important in 20th-century British politics — the failure of liberalism and Liberalism. If he and his party had more to offer than their opponents, why did comparatively few vote for them?

A Liberal's answer, I suppose, would be that people are too easily distracted from important principle by short-term electoral bribes and appeals to vested interest. It is a dangerous answer because it implies that a political party can be superior to the voters. Is that really possible, and, even if it is pos- sible, is it a good thing to be? Since the purpose of a party is to mobilise opinion in order to win, what is the point of a party which thinks its failure to win is evidence of its high morality?

Political parties ought to be appeals to particular interests. It is their moral duty: how else are interests to be advanced, rep- resented and reconciled? If parties do not transmit the signals made by particular interests it is as disastrous for democracy as it is for prosperity when interference with the economy distorts the signals made by free markets. The Liberal Party represent- ed the interests of free trade — corn mer- chants, Nonconformist self-helpers, gro-

cers, artisans. It failed to adapt its repre- sentation to the political rise of the working class and at the same time handed its defence of free trade over to the Tories. The measure of its failure is that Alderman Roberts's daughter made her career as a Conservative. Thirty years earlier, she could barely have avoided being a Liberal.

One of the consequences of this failure was that no political party, at the crucial moment, really identified the danger to British society which was posed by statism. Labour was in favour of it, and the Tories, though against it, were mostly paralysed by social guilt and the fear of being against the tide. Jo Grimond, in fact, was almost the only prominent post-war Liberal to take the problem seriously, but, as he himself admits, he only did so after he left the lead- ership. He did not quarrel with Butskellism at the time. Indeed, he adorned it. The Lib- erals' separation from interest meant that they did not see what was actually happen- ing. They had some good thoughts, but unrigorous because untested. Grimond says as much: As for Scottish Home Rule, I never guessed that it would take the form of an additional tier loaded onto a country already bent dou- ble under too much government. I always assumed that it would go hand in hand with a reform at Westminster and a smaller British Parliament and Civil Service. Nor in the Fifties and Sixties had we tasted the burgeon- ing of local government, the multiplication of officials or the additional regulations pouring out of Brussels.

What the Liberals said was somehow unserious, although many of those who said it were exceedingly solemn. This is a fea- ture of the annual Liberal Assembly to this day — a passionate excitement about the efficacy of a particular policy accompanied by a vague, unspoken and pleasurable awareness that it will never quite happen.

Jo Grimond was a brilliant, witty, upper- class version of all of that. He liked to start hares without bothering to catch them. At one point in his memoirs he tries to set out his political creed, but within a few sen- tences he is off on a tangent: seemed to me that a French-Canadian Governor might well be better able to cope with Malta than a British Governor.' Jo Grimond was a marvellous man and (I think that is the more appropriate conjunc- tion than 'but') I am glad he never became Prime Minister.