Dr Grimond's Casebook
Alastair Forbes
Memoirs Jo Grimond (Heinemann £7.95) Some Spectator readers must have been surprised, in the week of this book's recent first appearance, to see a picture across two columns of its handsome author's left profile looking right. It appeared in an advertisement offering the book, postage paid, sale or return, for less than a quid as an inducement to join Blackwell's 'Mainstream Book Club' which they claim — with doubtless every justification — to be a lot better than the cultural television programme of the same name. They are, as it were, running the Liberal Party's Lost Leader as a Loss Leader for a Christmas hamper of such other right-thinking goodies as Paul Johnson, Bernard Levin. Hugh Thomas and Lord Blake.
What Jo Grimond has himself disarmingly called his 'scrappy . . disjointed . . . sententious' memoirs (his Asquith motherin-law, who always pronounced hOtel, garage and even Odeon in the French fashion, might have deprecatingly dubbed them decousus) are already good value at the publishers' net price of £7.95 but they are a real snip at 95p. Unlike the jatest blasts and toots on their own tin political trumpets by Kissinger and Wilson, they also deserve good sales and profits, if only, as yet further evidence to disprove Goethe's view that 'distractions and party politics make Britons essentially incapable of reflection and unable to complete the quiet processes of culture'. Not that the author stands in particular need of the sort of Golden Delicious windfalls that come Kissinger 's or Wilson's way, for he was born the sole heir to a solid bourgeois fortune derived from the giant Dundee jute mill founded by his great-grandfather. Over its gates was placed a life-size statue of a camel couchant attended by a rather Monty-PYt hon-Bibhcal looking Bedouin in a knees-up Isadora Duncan short tunic, perhaps as a needling reminder of the difficulty to be expected by a rich man, however enlightened an employer he might be, in gaining entry to the Kingdom of Heaven. Reading his delightful account of a cosy, cocooned provincial childhood in the large comfortable house in St Andrews. rented by his 'unselfconsciously Scotch' parents for 11/0 a year, it is easy to see why he thinks the BBC (of which his brother-aw Mark 13onham-Carter, who has inherited his late M. other's possessive interest in the Corporation, is an active Deputy Chairman) has rather lost its creative touch since Dr Finlay's Casebook folded. Indeed much of his memoirs could easily pass for a first treatment for a filmscript to replace that series, with plenty of the pawky Grimond prose suitable for a voice-over. Little Jo thought the family servants 'eternally cheerful', living as he himself has contrived to do since, 'in that attractive world where work and play are mixed up'. Unlike most children, who believe that death is for others but not for them, the otherwise contented and conventional Jo was on the contrary convinced that he alone in the world was destined for the dark. Proustianly present in his memory still are the smells of the two St Andrews golf links and 'the gurgle of a sunk putt'. 'Golf, he writes, 'has to be played reasonably well and seriously', much the same attitude as that which his fellow-Etonian friends, the DouglasHomes, bring to shooting and fishing, though a dillettante approach to politics can always pass. His own departure down south for a traditional Sassenach boarding-school education was a first departure from all previous Grimond practice, and for want of other offered explanation may have been motivated by some possibly sub-conscious salmon-like upward social thrust by his 'unintellectual' parents, 'ignorant about the iniquities of their children's world'. He prefers to 'draw a veil' over the nameless indignities he suffered at his English prepschool which 'surpassed Evelyn Waugh's wildest imaginations'. So Eton came as a great relief. Besides, he 'liked being in a town and being able to walk about and eat huge teas,' though he adds that during his stay there, which came to include a spell as a swell in 'Pop', 'at no time should I not have leaped at the chance of going home'. He also maintains that 'one of the minor advantages of an Eton education is that it teaches you to cheat acceptably', a remark that some may see as his single sideswiping reference to the Mr Hyde side of Etonian Jeremy Thorpe's personality, of which all
the other mentions are confined to undiluted praise of the good-humoured, thoughtful and eloquent Dr Jekyll bit.
Another early lesson of Eton's idiosyncratic 'Comprehensive' system was that 'being yoked with the clever will not of itself cure the idle of their idleness nor the stupid of their stupidity'. Amongst the latter Jo could never be numbered. Though he found much of the. teaching 'abominably wasteful of time' and felt that he had become at about 15 'almost unteachable', he won a scholarship to Balliol and then, having discovered he 'could write essays whether I
knew anything about the subject or not', came away from there with a First. At Balliol he found constant pleasure in the society and friendship of the half-Russian, half-Northumbrian Jasper Ridley whose special quality has perhaps been more convincingly conjured up in Philip Toynbee's 'Friends Apart: A Memoir of the Thirties where he is described as half-loving
and half despising the class he came from. The then Communist Philip at 17 had suffered quite long-lasting love pangs for the 15-year-old Laura Bonham-Carter whom Jo was to marry after she had 'come out', Jasper having previously married her elder sister Cressida, a union touchingly described in the Toynbee book and tragi cally ended by Ridley's literally absurd wartime death as an escaping PoW. Grimond had proposed to Asquith's grand-daughter while they were the pre-war houseguests of the then Leader of the Liberal Party, Archie Sinclair, from whose Caithness fief he had. across the Pentland Firth, caught his first sight of Orkney, after the war to become his constituency and home and almost certain to remain his home even after it has ceased to be his constituency. He had already at Oxford, 'when Liberalism was patently on the wane' quixotically decided he would be a Liberal politician and 'the Law seemed a suitable career for an aspiring politician'. Another Oxford friend had been the courageous young German Adam von Trott, later to be executed for his leading part in the failed July Plot against Hitler. Grimond quotes a pre-war letter in which
von Trott laments that 'we seem to turn mad
or mediocre in Europe nowadays . . we nice post-war people were brought up to believe that the right things always win and that therefore it was only a matter of discovering and stating the right things'. The little British Liberal rump shared this sense of confusion and as a result was like the Labour Party often irresponsible and inconsequent in its actions. Archie Sinclair himself deplored his friend Churchill's warnings which were also rather wetly responded to by the author who 'still hoped for peaceful disarmament', though 'it rather looked as if some arms were necessary' [sic I 'Pre-war politics', as Grimond rightly recalls, 'were about great and deeply-felt issues' and 'were certainly not dull', at any. rate for those who thought Hitler's war could have been headed off with a little more courage and forethought. On this
point he pertinently reflects that 'it is strange but hardly elating to compare our behaviour towards Communism with prewar attitudes to Fascism. The Russian tyranny is as evil and more prolonged than that of Hitler'.
When the war came, Grimond found that it 'did not seem to be very well conducted.'
It was in the Army that he 'first noticed the absorption of public officials with their allowances, perks and badges of office. . On reaching Parliament in 1950, after a near-miss in 1945, he found that it provided 'many of the minor comforts of a club . . . making and seeing friends is a constant bonus from membership of the House of Commons', very different from what one might call the Groucho Marx view of the matter shared by many other people. 'What job,' he further asks, 'above all, would provide free travel between Orkney and Shetland to London?', cannily adding: 'I count myself lucky to have been round the world at the public expense.' What he did miss in London were the great private houses he had known before the war, though he seems to have been left out of both the Cunard and Colefax salons. 'With the decline in personal entertaining due to its expense, people get isolated from those who may have no axe to grind and can speak freely to them. Mr Asquith, I expect, ran across many more people who talked freely to him than do Prime Ministers today. It can have done him no harm either to watch the fare ticking up on the taxi in the days before government cars'. However. as I can myself recall with pleasure, there was a period in the Fifties and Sixties when thethen Editor— Proprietor of the Spectator kept a very hospitable house on the Thames at Syon where Grimond was a frequent guest along with Gaitskell, Jenkins and many other social democrats and radical non-Socialists as well as enlightened Tories. Here the topics of the day were most convivially discussed until far into the night. Lady Caroline Gilmour fortunately exercising no ban on Claret such as that lately enforced on his guests by the petulant whim of her usually more sensible brother, the otherwise admirable Duke of Buccleuch.
Grimond finds it evidently difficult to decide under which Harold, Macmillan or Wilson, Britain ran fastest 'down the grooves of decline' or saw more opportunities lost of stopping the rot. Having himself been wobbly on Suez, he is lenient to Eden for no better apparent reason than that his wife Clarissa was one of the 'Liberal Girls' of his youth and a hospitable week-end hostess of his late middle-age. As to his own leadership, he admits in retrospect that he might have achieved more had he but had 'more confidence in his and the Party's destiny'. Now that the Tories on several issues are coming nearer to his way of thinking and vice-versa, one falls to wondering how he might have fared had he. like Jasper Ridley's son Adam, joined them. One of his anecdotes concerns a Liberal Shetlander shrinking at the last minute from voting Tory on catching Gladstone's eye staring reproachfully from his portrait on a porcelain plate. The formidable Lady Violet's living or dead eye could doubtless similarly gorgonise, though I notice her son-in-law makes no mention of Mark BonhamCarter's onetime all but consummated apostasy from Asquithian ancestorworship.
The truth emerges that Jo is as much sui generis as the constituency to which the good fortune and patronage that have all along coddled his career brought him more than three decades ago, a constituency to which so many of his pages, and of these often the best, are devoted. Et in Orcadia ego myself, having first seen the Old Man of Hoy loom alarmingly out of a 1940 mist on the starboard wingtip of Archie Sinclair's RAF De Havilland Dragon, and having subsequently crossed the Firth in a Force 9 gale aboard a Naval drifter on my way to board a cruiser at Scapa at least a quarter of a century before being greeted on the Stromness quay by the Right Honourable Member and his Orkney-raised and Orcadianly-named youngest son Magnus. So deep in Orkney soil are the Grimond roots after 30 years a-growing that he has by now come to find jarring the 'coarse volubility' of 'the assertive and quarrelsome Scots race' and has acquired the tolerance and lack of abrasiveness of Orkneymen who have an agreeable easygoingness to match their soft singsong Scandinavian dialect. His book is therefore unabrasively long on bouquets and correspondingly short on brickbats.
Though he has more than once flirted with the idea of a come-back to the top (a sort of contagious non-specific infection contracted by most ageing ex-party chiefs since Gladstone and by no means confined to Liberals), once in 1969 being strongly tempted to head a semi-Separatist Rising north of the Border based on the Highlands and Islands, and again in 1976 when Thorpe resigned, Jo Grimond, now growing as deaf as the Standing Stones of Stenness, has reconciled himself at last to the life of an enlightened, individualist backbencher with a busy life outside the House in many fields beyond broadcasting and journalism. If his first venture into autobiography is in many places perhaps a trifle complacent and bland (a word which, by the way, in Orkney and Shetland means buttermilk and water), one hopes that in the years to come he will use his talented and sometimes even poetic /pen to prise open a few more cupboards of memory (not all of which need to be found to contain skeletons) and to clarify matters he has at present left as grey and grainily indecypherable as most of the three dozen photographs he has chosen to adorn his text. A decade ago that once indefatigable Fleet Street megalomaniac Cecil King noted in his diary; `So Grimond yesterday was friendly as ever, charming as ever, as realistic in his thinking as ever, but had no solution to offer or action to suggest.' He may have had a point there.
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