Party Sheepdog
Chief Whip. By Viscount Chilston. (Routledge, • •Kegan Paul, 45s.).
POLITICAL biography is a demanding art whose chief difficulty lies in striking a balance between the personal and the general. Viscount Chilston has chosen to play down • the personal. There is in this biography little continuous account of his grandfather's career; indeed, at times one might equally be reading a biography of Lord Randolph Churchill, of Chamberlain or of Balfour. Instead he has used the first Viscount Chilston's correspondence to illuminate general parliamentary and party history, and this is probably the most valuable thing he could have done.
Aretas Akers-Douglas's public career stretched from 1880 to the Great War, but the most im- portant part, as his biographer rightly stresses, was his time as Chief Whip to the Conservative Party, from 1886 to 1892. For he brought to this office a combination of qualities and talents peculiarly desirable and necessary for managing the party under Cecilian leadership and for main- taining the Unionist alliance. He was in the first place a leading landowner in Kent, . a country gentleman respected by old-fashioned Tories while at the 'same time sympathetic to the progressive elements in the party and a friend of Lord Randolph. He was independent, but a devoted party man, little interested in ideas, but with a flair for managing men, capable of both charm and ruthlessness, and because both loyal and forthright a perfect conductor of party opinion to Salisbury and Balfour. He must be accounted one of the chief reasons why that pair of remote dons was so far from ineffectual.
His correspondence throws light on a number of interesting passages in party history: on the lack of support for Churchill after his resigna- tion in 1886; on the difficulty of maintaining the Unionist alliance, particularly the strain put upon it by the bad relations between Chamber- lain and the Midland Tories; on W. H. Smith as leader of the Commons and Bailout's slit:- cession; on Chamberlain's gradual rapproche- ment with the party; on Salisbury's retirement from the Foreign Office; on Balfour's relations with the party over Tariff Reform. The author. who has delved also in the papers of Salisbury
and W. H. Smith, has a nice sense of the im- portance of personalities and makes good use of the new evidence.
He is less successful with the narrative which connects these nuggets. It is too episodic to pre- sent a clear picture to the uninitiated, too familiar to the expert. Much of it is based on the standard biographies, very dubimis sources. They are, with a few shining exceptions, not only partisan but often dishonest in their use of evi- dence. But these are not faults of Viscount Chilston. He sometimes expresses opinions one might have accepted more easily from his grandfather and occasionally lets his prejudices run away with him, as when he writes of Glad- stone's 'spurious retirement' in the 1870s or of the 'orgies of Socialist legislation' indulged in by the Liberals after 1906. But, within the limits he has set himself, he is careful and at times acute.
The limits are, however, pretty stringent. His- tory through the eyes of a Chief Whip is a strange, remote affair, and it is scarcely sur- prising that we get little help towards a general interpretation of the period. The author leans on the familiar Imperialist explanation of Con- servative electoral successes, though he does prop it up with his evidence of good organisation (and incidentally claims that Conservative social legislation was not entirely prompted by Cham- berlain). The explanation, though familiar, is not much good, and arises largely from concentrating on Westminster rather than studying the constitu- encies, thus cutting off politics from its social roots. In this respect the book suffers from the shortcomings of its genre; it is House of Com- mons history, but as such it does give a vivid sense of the myopic world of party management.
JAMES CORNFORD
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