The dotty earl wins through

Bevis Hillier

LORD LONGFORD: A LIFE by Peter Stanford Heinemann, £20, pp. 502 Peter Stanford can be forgiven for not having read what Michael McNay wrote about Lord Longford in the Guardian on 21 June 1975. McNay has never been what you'd call compulsive reading. McNay wrote that Longford, Mary Whitehouse, Punch, Enoch Powell, Robin Day, Malcolm Muggeridge, Michael Parkinson, Question Time in the House of Commons and, as it happened, your reviewer, were in them- selves perfectly absurd and thus sublimely beyond satire'.

The opinion enshrines two popular beliefs about Lord Longford: that he is ridiculous and that he is always to be men- tioned in the same breath as Mrs White- house. The other name associated with his is that of Myra Hindley, the Moors mur- deress, for whose release from prison he has campaigned. Here we encounter one of the apparent paradoxes of Frank Longford. On the one hand he is seen as an ally of the censorious and intolerant Whitehouse. On the other his campaign on Hindley's behalf seems to demand a superhuman tolerance. The paradox was never better pointed up than in a `Jak' cartoon which showed Long- ford addressing his anti-pornography com- mittee: 'Then as soon as we've got all the pornographers in prison, I'll start a campaign to get them out.'

On the absurdity count, Longford is him- self as responsible as anybody for circulat- ing the stories that guy him as a dotty peer. The British have connived at that image: the tabloids, to discredit his views, the rest of us because we like our lords to be a touch Wodehousian, rather as Americans expect British men in general to say 'old boy' after every sentence. The funny Long- ford stories in this book (some familiar, some not) are pretty funny. When the Hon Frank Pakenham, as he then was, joined the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry as a private in 1939, the Oxford Mail ran a big picture of 'Private Pack' offering one of the lads a cigarette; the caption was, 'Have a fag, mate.' As Minister of Civil Aviation in Attlee's government, he went on an official flight: He spied a man sitting alone, away from the main party, seemingly lost in thought. Long- ford made a special effort by going over to talk to him and offering him a drink. Only later did he learn that the man was one of the senior engineers who was trying to listen to the aircraft engine as part of a safety report.

When Longford's book Humility was pub- lished (uniform with this edition, Medea on Good Parenting) he was said to have walked into bookshops and demanded to know why it was not on display in the window. That one's apocryphal, Stanford concedes.

Is a new biography of Longford needed? Before he was 50 he had already, as Stan- ford genially puts its, 'flooded the market' with two autobiographies; a third followed. I recall the spoof utterance of Rousseau which won a literary competition for inventing farnow, last words: 'Send away `Lord Longford's on a new kick': Frank Longford pictured in the Daily Mail, 15 November 1971 that confessor: I have nothing left to confess.' In addition, Mary Craig's percep- tive Longford.. A Biographical Portrait was published in 1978. Longford's wife Elizabeth, his sisters Lady Mary Clive and Lady Violet Powell and his brother-in-law Anthony Powell have all written autobiographies that deserve to be raided for any anthology of verbal self-portraits. And innumerable articles have been written about Longford. They range from the hostile (a strayed and silly old goat' Jean Rook; 'giving do-gooding a bad name' — Police Review, 1985) to the ambiguous (He has the gift of clowns; he can make all worldliness seem farce' — Malcolm Muggeridge) and the indulgent (Every- body asks the wrong question about Lord Longford, viz., is he barmy? The question is not worth asking: of course he is barmy. What we should be discussing in something quite different: is he right?' -- Bernard Levin). But, yes, this new life of Longford is worth having. It could have been slightly better researched and slightly better writ- ten, but it is admirably balanced.

It is so well balanced that it may be little to Longford's taste. We are told it was written with his full co-operation, but at times Stanford is so unpunchpullingly candid — Shamelessly Frank might have been an alternative title — that you begin to feel, with authorised biographers like this, who needs an unauthorised one? 'The impression of failure . . . is hard to dispel,' Stanford writes. Longford has never made it into the top rank of politicians. This was partly because when young he accepted a peerage from Attlee (he inherited the earl- dom later), partly because his friend Hugh Gaitskell, who might have promoted him, died prematurely, and partly because Stanford's sources suggest — Longford did not apply himself to his briefs and got the reputation of being a 'flibbertigibbet'. The job he would have loved was the Home Office, where he could have pushed for penal reform. Our prisons remain deplorable. Pornography still flourishes. Myra Hindley has not been released, neither is she likely to be as long as ambitious men are Home Secretaries. Against these failures must be set a grow- ing, belated recognition, with the alleged link between the James Bulger killing and video nasties and other as yet inconclusive evidence, that Longford's campaign against violence on television may have been justi- fied. He might echo what Winston Churchill wrote when Nazi aggression proved accurate all his anti-Hitler speeches of the wilderness years: My warnings .. . had been so numerous, so detailed, and were now so terribly vindicated, that no one could gainsay me. (The Gathering Storm).

Stanford rightly gives full credit to Long- ford for having tried to put his Christianity into practice. Longford really has emphasised, in a way so Christian as to be wildly impolitic, the 'forgiveness' part of Christ's message. He tells Stanford: When Jesus said, 'You were in prison and I came to you', He didn't say, 'You were in prison and I came to you because you were falsely accused.'

There is moral grandeur in that. Stanford goes so far as to suggest that in this respect Longford is behaving as Christ would behave if on earth today. Certainly Long- ford helps to bridge the sort of credibility chasm between preaching and practice that makes some Christians' sincerity so suspect.

Longford does have a foible; as usual, he has acknowledged it. He is what American journalists call 'ink-hungry', has a craving for publicity. While Stanford does not play down this trait, he offers an explanation for it: the cold indifference the young Frank Pakenham's mother showed him. She lavished all her adoring attention on his elder brother Edward, who became the sixth Earl of Longford when their father was killed at Gallipoli. She even had privately printed a volume of Edward's terrible schoolboy poems, one of which begins, 'Night is a sweating negro over London'. The presumption is that Long- ford has been trying ever since to win the attention he failed to get in childhood. One might carry the bar-room psychoanal- ysis further, and suggest that Longford not only clamours for attention; he remains in some degree the child clamouring for attention. One of his best friends, David Astor, the former editor of the Observer, told Stanford: 'Frank Longford is a very clever, very talented, very experienced child.' Harold Wilson was more brutal in a conversation which the newspaper magnate Cecil King recorded in his diary. Wilson told King that Longford was 'quite useless — mental age of 12'. Longford has turned this into one of his self-deprecating stories: when the comment was first relayed to him, he says, he heard the age as '112' and he was quite relieved when he realised what Wilson had actually said.

With so much on Longford already in print we are entitled to ask, what in this book is new? The answer is, fascinating interviews with his children, Rachel Billing- ton, Antonia Fraser, Judith Kazantzis and Thomas Pakenham — an acute and by no means reverential bunch, though their affection for the old man is never in doubt. Antonia Fraser provides the real scoop of the book by her childhood memory of how her mother reacted to Longford's conver- sion to Roman Catholicism — a step he took without consulting Elizabeth. We know from Lady Longford herself that, at the time, she felt 'betrayed', but that does not convey, as does Lady Antonia's cine- matic flashback, the scalding effect on the couple's relationship. Lords Jenkins and Carrington also give Stanford good value. Another catch is Longford's near contem- porary, Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, who believes that 'at heart he has always remained very conservative'. When her daughter Perdita was coming out (in the old sense) Longford, as her godfather, wrote to her saying that he hoped the young men at the coming-out dances still wore gloves.

Stanford's failure to read adequately around his subject leads to some false generalisations. For example, dealing with Longford's resignation from Wilson's government in 1968 over the deferment of raising the school-leaving age to 16, he writes: 'His political obituaries had been kind.' Not wholly. If Stanford had looked at Punch, which still had some wit and bite then before the wretched post-Coren editors took it down the drain, he would have found this epitaph:

Lord Longford steeled his mighty mind, Gritted his molars, and resigned. How sad for his heroic pose The headlines 'Only Longford Goes'.

It was once suggested to me that no one who was not a Roman Catholic should dare to attempt a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I thought that was as foolish as to maintain that one couldn't write a biogra- phy of Matthew Hopkins, the Witch-Finder General of the 17th century, unless one believed in witches. Richard Ellmann did not have to be a homosexual to write the best ever life of Oscar Wilde. Stanford is a Roman Catholic. The publishers' enjoyably maladroit press release about him says that `his previous books include Catholics and Sex (with Kate Saunders)' (bully for both of them, say I.) It adds that he 'is currently writing a book on the Devil'. Would that be the authorised biography, too? In a biogra- pher of Frank Longford, Catholicism is a mixed blessing. It helps Stanford under- stand Longford's path to Rome, but it may have stopped him from asking awkward questions, such as, was Longford's implaca- bly anti-Soviet stance in part inspired by the Catholic Church's attitude to godless communism? Robert Fisk, in his classic 1983 book In Time of War, recorded how in the war, when Ireland stayed neutral, Nazi radio propaganda played on this Catholic hostility to communism, urging the Irish to fight 'under a common banner' with the Germans against Bolshe- vism.

Stanford's prose is generally clear and unpretentious, though he is over-fond of such jargon as `shambolic' and 'semi- detached'. When I was a reporter on The Times in the 1960s, the paper's style book stated that the word 'advent' was to be used only of Jesus Christ, not of new motor-car engines. Similarly I think that `semi-detached' should be reserved for sub- urban villas and not used of politicians. It was mildly witty when applied to John Biff- en the first time; it is markedly less so when used (four times in all) by Stanford. Watch- ing Sister Wendy's Grand Tour on television last week, I was struck by the parallels between the art-loving nun and Frank Longford. Both took Firsts at Oxford; both are dedicated to their religion; both pro- nounce their 'r's' as 'v's' (like Gvaham Gveene); both have scampered about the Continent in quest of nudes; both have innocence and an innocent pleasure in the publicity that their antics attract. It is wrong to call that innocence naivety. It is a quality more powerful than shrewdness. I think of Longford's friend Malcolm Mug- geridge.

For most of his life he was the epitome of journalistic knowingness and savoir-faire; yet in the battle between Muggeridge's ide- ology and Longford's, it was the dotty earl's that won through. Muggeridge did not con- vert Longford to humanism; Longford con- verted Muggeridge to Roman Catholicism. Frank Longford has been called 'the wisest fool in Christendom' as often as modern art has been compared with the emperor's new clothes; neither tag is the less true for being hackneyed.