The 'romantic' Conservative Hugh Fraser APproach March Julian Amery (Hutchinson

0.00) A_P.,,a-t from the Napoleonic Wmoire de St. 114-ene, the most interesting autobiographic statements by politicians or their ghosts are Of them when young. Sir Winston's My Early Life, Gladstone's dispatches from Corfu, Lord Curzon's journeys as a young man through Asia, Fitzroy Maclean's Eastern Approaches, even parts of Caesar's De Bello Galileo — the Cheekiest in many ways of them all — have the pristine racy charm not of history but of Men in the making. The tale is not of the kennel but of the dog. The history of the kennels and corridors of Power comes later hedged round with inhibitions, secrets, comparisons and compromises, Worldly considerations. The wind has grown l°ng, the stature shrunken, and except as neglected quarries and hidden rubble for historians their value is often in inverse ratio to the writer's power or achievement. Far then from being assailed for turning autooiographer, Mr Amery is to be saluted. Of course there are obvious criticisms. Mr Amery is primarily a politician and a very active one. The text could have done with some More pruning ancl, the omission of such documents as his election address to the people Of Preston. Some Balkan imbroglios could have been simplified. Some self-justifications and testimonials omitted — there is no need for them. But these are minor criticisms. This autobiography is packed with incidents as good as :Stalky and Co. or Sir Winston's strange novel Savrola, or Stendhal's Le: Rouge et le Noir. Indeed at moments and certainly in the eyes of his military and diplomatic superiors, Amery and Sorel seemed to have much in common.

Compared to his silver-Spooned pre-war Etonian contemporaries, Julian AmerN,, was born with a hand grenade in his mouth. With

in months of his birth, his godfather, the CIGS, Sir Henry Wilson, had been assassinated, his uncle had unleashed the Black and Tans, by the age of nineteen he had taken Part in a civil war, and as this book ends he is about to set out on his vain quest to save his OW n brother from execution.

The central character of this book has no need to search for a hero. Fortunately unlike sci many heroes none is less glassy eyed or More observant than Mr Amery. The England that made him was the England of the Impe rial Right epitomised by Sir Winston but even

More perhaps by his own more farseeing and intellectual father, Leo. It was nota world to

be despised, and here it is minutely noted. Its ,Mainstay in Europe was the French Alliance, its dream the full development of the ComMonwealth and Empire. Far from being a world of jingoes, it was intensely academic, international, and totally

unracialist. Elitist it was, but its centre was more All Souls than the City of London, or even the House of Commons. Bruning, Smuts, H. A. L. Fisher, Kudenove-Kalurgi, a whole range of French politicians, Indian and Middle Eastern Princes were old Amery's guests at Eaton Square. In home politics the group — in so far as it had economic views — believed in economic planning and despised the narrowness of the Chamberlain government.

Julian thus arrived at Oxford in the late 1930s a francophile imperialist, and in home affairs a Conservative radical. Harold Macmillan was the darling of .us Balliol Conservatives. The Middle Way was our bible, But we were even more radical; in the summer of 1939 Amery, Patrick O'Donovan and I issued a 'Statement of the Principles of a New Conservatism.' It was nationalist and imperialist, it was left wing reaffirming the mediaeval distinction between the use and ownership of capital, it was neutral on nationalisation, and exigent on the need for a national economic

Plan. It was rather a success and Lord Beaverbrook thought it dangerously leftist. In home politics Amery has never ceased to be radical. He fought the by-election which returned him to Parliament in 1970 on a platform of national Participation.'

The war cut short his chances of either getting a first or being President of the Union, but he went down from the university infinitely more mature and vastly more independent than most of his contemporaries. 'Except for a few months as an RAF sergeant mysteriously drafted on to PT instruction, who already had a pilot's licence, he avoided like Prince Andrei in War and Peace actually ever being under anyone's precise command, and yet saw more of war in the Balkans, Middle and Far East than most. His diplomatic and military ranks abounded, his prowess in helping to torpedo enemy tankers, parachuting, leading guerrilla bands into action, ambushing, and sabotaging in the Balkans made him an irregular soldier of note. But the real interest of these wartime adventures is his assertion of his own personality against military and diplomatic machines whose purposes he believed misconceived.

Unlike most junior or even senior'officers or officials, Amery looked beyond the war to the objectives of peace. In the Balkans he saw the hope and need of building up peasant ; parties against the westward thrust of the USSR and in China he saw clearly there the swing of Roosevelt's fundamentally anti-British attitudes in the Pacific. In China he was only an observer but in the Balkans first as a temporary diplomat and then as a guerrilla ,;, leader with Albanian nationalists he made a „ contribution. In retrospect in his urging the .; overthrow of the Yugoslav Regent Prince Paul and the Bulgarian King Boris by the backing of Army/Peasant Party coups with . tacit clerical support, he was not only mill.— tarily but probably politically correct.

Whether later, still thinking along the same lines of grand strategy Amery was right in pressing for recognition of both Mihailovitch and Tito is perhaps more questionable. But right he undoubtedly was, in pressing for an honourable removal of the General before'he fell into Partisan hands and the inevitable firing squad. Indeed by 1944, Amery who four years previously had seemed to the Foreign Office the terrorist radical, had become the only Conservative counsellor in the various British military headquarters in Italy directing operations in the Balkans.

Quite intelligent officers who had never voted anything but Conservative and never could seemed to have become more partisan than Stalin, Uncle Jo, Uncle Tito, Uncle Hodja, the splendid partisans of Greece!

This was especially true of SOE: At the best of times in my opinion SOE was a bad or ganisation frequently lacking a strong or political or even honourable direction. SOE was particularly inane in the Balkans; pos tively assisting the adventurer Enver Hodja to seize impregnable Albania for communism and, had it not been for Churchill and Macmillan's personal intervention, permitting a communist takeover of Greece.

Amery of course has already dealt at greater length with his Albanian experiences in Sons of the Eagle, but the heroic figure of Abas Kupi, the splendours, comedies and servitudes of the guerrilla campaign and the ignorant perfidy of the British command in Bari until overridden by Macmillan from Caserta are worth retelling. This is not just an engaging book but in retrospect somehow a rather sad commentary on our political times. Here was a young man, more gifted than most of his political contemporaries, more intensely political than most of them, other than Ted Heath or Enoch Powell, imaginative, industrious, knowledgeable of Europe, free with many of the European languages, and yet politically I suppose it is fair to say his life has kept pace neither with his talent nor with his ambition. Like his father before him, is it because he is up against the passionate desire of the Conservative Party to make the world safe for mediocrity? Or is it because in him there is too much of the romantic, the believer in great men and in great causes, in ideas rather than the steady destructive determinism of petty events building up the downstream of British history?

But he need not despair, even if perhaps he joined the wrong political party. There are still long years ahead of him and also I trust further instalments of an interesting tale.