Centrepiece
Protected by memory
Colin Welch
The New Statesman recently published a piece celebrating Denis Healey's new lease of life. We were told how this gifted man had recaptured a lost élan, the real socialism of his youth. We are again confronted, it seems, by the young Healey of 1945. This date must be for many, perhaps for the writer himself, devoid of precise meaning. But not for those of us who remember what the Healey of 1945 was about.
Old age, to de Gaulle a long shipwreck, is niggardly, takes more than it gives. Among its rare and precious gifts are long memories, which can throw unexpected light on current people and events and protect against current errors.
At the spring 1945 Labour Conference, the young Healey, in uniform, straight from Trieste, gave a speech which apparently made an indelible impression on those who heard it. Newspaper cuttings of the episode are not helpful. Indeed, certain cuttings in the Daily Telegraph library are missing. Those which survive report that Major Healey viewed the upper classes of Europe as `selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent'. They were re- lying, he hoped without justification, on the British army to save them `from the just wrath of the people who'd been fighting underground'. So far, so good: a point of view, if rather sweeping. Stauffen- berg, after all, was upper class. Yet let memory recall for you the tragic reality here coarsely characterised, and picture for yourself the pitiable `former persons' who, after years of horror, now shivered in their shoes as they waited, often in vain, for the British army to protect them from the `just wrath' of communists, then triumphant in Eastern Europe and menacing the West!
Memory supplies further details. Major Healey also in effect celebrated the social revolution (i.e. Russian occupation) which had taken place in Eastern Europe, regret- ted that no such revolution had yet trans- formed the West, and hoped that this omission would soon be rectified. Such sentiments do not chime well with the normal picture of Mr Healey as a young man who joined the Communist Party only for a short time, in a sort of honourable despair because no one else seemed ready to fight the fascists. How ready the com- munists were is demonstrated by the Hitler-Stalin pact, which caused such anguish and mental somersaults among Western communists, perhaps in the young 'Healey himself. According to Susan Cros- land's life of Tony, Healey remained a communist through the phoney war.
Mr Healey very soon abandoned his 1945 views. By November 1945 Tony Crosland found he had 'swung away from the CP' into incoherence. He then became for a long time one of Labour's most outspoken anti-communists. Yet memories of that strange speech have continued slightly to cloud my appreciation of his brilliant career in defence, at the Treasury and now in foreign affairs. Why should I allow them to do so, when they have often been contradicted by current reality (if not by Mr Healey's passionate advocacy of the Rapacki plan, described by shrewd judges as of advantage only to Russia)? Why? Well, because we all are in part what we once were; and because what is suppressed in youth may return, perhaps, as Jung said, with knife in hand, demanding the sacrifice of what it was sacrificed for.
Mr Healey is ready now for `an almighty row with the United States' about the so-called `Star Wars' project: we should not support America even in research. Such a row is all too likely, as a recent Times leader 'hysterically' pointed out. Likely as the row may be, who but a rabid anti-American would welcome it?
Mr Perle, the intelligent and reasonable advocate of `Star Wars', is characterised by Mr Healey (among others) as `the prince of darkness'. For Mr Gorbachev, by contrast, he has words which suggest the romantic ardour of young love: 'Emotions flicker over a face of unusual sensitivity, like summer breezes on a pond'. It is grimly amusing to wonder what emotions flicker over Mr Gorbachev's face as he harshly demands the expulsion from Party and society of 'alien elements', `moral degener- ates' and those who have become `antago- nistic to socialism' (i.e. to him), launches a new jihad against laziness, indiscipline and corruption, and brutally affirms that dissi- dents are rightly kept in prisons, camps, exile or `psychiatric clinics'. What can such sensitive words signal but more horrible purges, in which the corrupt and incompe- tent are swept away and replaced by others as corrupt and incompetent as they, but more indebted and subservient to Mr Gorbachev? Such possibilities were hidden from the Healey of 1945, are hidden perhaps from the unilateralist Healey of 1985; Healeys in between were more percipient.
Memory was also astonished to find in no obituary I read of Sir Michael Redgrave any reference to his extraordin- ary political and defeatist antics during the second world war, which caused him to be banned from the BBC and may have brought him near to arrest. According to
the Times, the war `enabled him to seize the moment and speak for the national conscience' as the lighthouse-keeper in Thunder Rock in 1940. In early 1941 this spokesman signed the anti-war manifesto of the People's Convention, `a good social- ist document' produced by revolutionary defeatists and fellow-travellers of the Com- munist Party, still pro-Hitler till Russia was invaded. Sir Michael's account of the episode in his autobiography is somewhat evasive, suggesting that he hardly knew what he was doing but became increasingly aware of being 'used'. `At the collection I foolishly gave a cheque for 15 guineas, I cannot now think why.' His reading at the time, Lenin's Socialism and War, suggests a more conscious decision.
Why drag all this up? Why 'drag up' anything at all? Why write obits which omit important aspects of a man who was not only a great actor? He considered himself always a socialist. His children's politics he did not understand, `but I like the revolu- tionary flavour'. Interesting links between the generations, ignored in the obits, are here revealed. The extremism of Vanessa and Corin is sometimes explained as a revolt against parents' conventional, re- spectable and titled. In fact they are presumably carrying torches handed on to them. As the older Verkhovensky begat the younger, so did Sir Michael engender his own `possessed'.
Not long ago a young man called Michael Steyn interviewed Lady Mos- ley for the Times. I suppose him young because he lacks memory. He is astonished by opinions expressed by Lady Mosley which would surprise no one with any memory of her and Sir Oswald in their prime. To anyone expecting a right-wing monster 'she is something of a disappoint- ment'. She urges — surprise! surprise! higher spending on housing and the infra- structure, 'has a Heathite/SDP-ish obses- sion with a United Europe'. She views British premiers since Churchill as 'a pro- cession of lightweights' — yes, including Mrs Thatcher. Is Lady Mosley a Wet? 'I wouldn't call myself right-wing,' she mused; 'my husband always considered himself a politician of the centre, and so do I.' Here at last is an oddity. It is certainly an eccentrically defined centre which in- cludes Sir Oswald — though Mr Heath, who also presumably considers himself a politician of the centre, does sometimes give a perplexing impression of being a mild and ineffective sort of fascist, without the necessary Gestapo.
Thoughtful members of my generation tend to view Sir Oswald, fascism and Nazism as phenomena, doubtless perverse and aberrant, of the Left. Sir Oswald after all was a Labour MP. He left Labour not so much because he had changed his views, already impatient, illiberal, 'progressive' and dirigiste, as because he despaired of Labour ever having the guts to put them into effect.
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