A heart of gold
Robert Blake
Memoirs of a City Radical Nicholas Davenport (Weidenfeld and Nico1son £3.o0).
Mr Nicholas Davenport needs no introduction to readers of the Spectator, for whom he has written a shrewd and percipient column on economics, finance and the City for over twenty years. His book, The Split Society (1964), was one of the most interesting diagnoses of the ills which have afflicted us during the last half century. Sir Roy Harrod commenting at the time said: "I think you are the sole living writer I know who has consistently written 'regardless of fashion, party or prevailing ideology." This is true, and the description of him by an anonymous reviewer in the Economist as "the most articulate of that rare and curious breed, the City radical" is also true. He has to a remarkable degree combined expertise in the world of investment and finance with a deep understanding of the attitude of the trade unions and the working class. His memoirs are most entertaining, highly perceptive and admirably written.
Moreover much of his book is highly topical. Mr Davenport personally knows — and has long known — most of the high-ups in the Labour Party and has generously entertained them at his beautiful house, Hinton Manor, near Oxford, appropriately the home of Henry Marten, the adviser of the Levellers. His remarks about those now in the key positions are not always flattering. His hero was Hugh Gaitskell, and as he sadly observes -Gaitskellism was never, alas, tried." The more one sees the present Labour party in action the more one regrets the premature death of a statesman who might have healed — it is impossible to be certain — the divisions which arerapidly making British society the most neurotic in the world. Harold Wilson possesses many assets, but he has been hitherto, and probably always will be, an essentially divisive figure nationally, however skilful he is at keeping his party united. But perhaps this is the basic problem. Could Hugh Gaitskell have kept his party together? Can anyone unite both the nation and the Labour Party? Mr Davenport did not hit it off with either Mr Callaghan or Mr Wilson.
I always felt when talking with Jim Callaghan that it was like playing with a big Alsatian dog. All would be well and then suddenly you would get a nasty bite. With Wilson it was like being friendly with a cat. It would purr along and take delight in being stroked but suddenly it would arch its back and walk off in another direction.
Mr Davenport, having damaged his heart through too much athletics at Oxford, went into the War Office as a civil servant in 1914 and after the war into the City, beginning as an expert on the economics of oil and writing briefs for a firm of stockbrokers. He soon became involved with Keynes and the rebels against the City Establishment, and they worked in close co-operation for many years, Mr Davenport being financial correspondent of the Nation, later the New Statesman. From that position he was able to observe the tortured posturings of its editor, Kingsley Martin, whose muddled mixture of Marxism, millenarianism and mugmumpery must have been distressing to someone of Mr Davenport's clear mind, though he liked him as a weekend guest. Mr Davenport became a director of the National Mutual Life Assurance Society, invited by the General Manager because they wanted someone who could answer back Keynes, who was Chairman. "That was impossible," Mr Davenport says, but he appreciated a directorship which in those days went almost always to products of Eton and the appropriate Etonian Oxbridge college, not to those of Cheltenham and Queen's.
In 1933 he bought Hinton Manor, It has been his home ever since. He compares himself with its former owner. The republican and regicide, Henry Marten, was the counsellor of one of the extreme puritan sects thrown up by the Civil War — the Levellers, though never a member. Mr Davenport sees them as analogous to the puritan left intellectuals of his own time, the new Levellers Of the 'thirties whose moment of triumph was the election of 1945 and the formation of Attlee's government — such figures as Douglas Jay, Herbert Morrison, Stafford Cripps and Hugh Dalton (his affection for Dalton does not stop him being extremely funny about Dalton's foibles). And in the 'thirties Mr Davenport was a prominent member of a secret dining society known as the XYZ club, whose purpose was to try to bring a modicum of knowledge about practical public finance to the attention of these somewhat doctrinaire politicians, just as Henry Marten tried to inject some common sense into the Levellers.
Mr Davenport's parallel with Marten and the Levellers may not strike all historians as valid, but is is quite clear that on the main issue dividing Labour Mr Davenport was right and the new Levellers were wrong. Unfortunately their successors, now in office, are even more wrong. The profit motive is more suspect than ever, and the ghosts of bigotry and prejudice, far from being exorcised, haunt the Party still.
Mr Davenport has all his life preached the need for a sensible Labour government to modify, control and harness capitalism, not to kill it as the Healeys, Foots and Benns seem determined to do. No wonder he prefers the attitude of his friend, Mr Harold Lever, who is not-only sound on fiscal policy but also very far from being a leveller. Rich himself, he married a wife from the wealthy Iraqi banking family of Bashi who decorated their flat in Eaton Square with genuine panelling and furniture of the Louis Quinze period, and many other objets d'art.
What will the comrades say? I asked Harold, as I watched a French artist painting the bathroom in trompe l'oeil style:I don't care,' he replied putting on a strong Manchester accent. 'My wife has been used to luxury all her life and 1 don't see why she should be deprived of it because she marries a poor Labour
member from Manchester,' .
Mr Davenport's enjoyable book is not all malicious, but neither is it mealy-mouthed. What autobiography worth reading is? His principal bites noires are the old City establishment, the Tory deflationists, the Treasury Knights and the Marxist left whose influence in the Labour party is much stronger than most of us realise. These are well worth fighting. Long may Mr Davenport continue to do so.
Robert Blake is the Provost of Queen's College, Oxford.
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