The cadavers of the great and good during the last decade have been shuffling off the obituary pages of the broadsheets to be assembled into book form. The Daily Telegraph is the most notable exponent of anthologies of obituaries with titles such as the Daily Telegraph Book of Airmens’ Obituaries. Politico’s own effort is entitled the Politico’s Book of the Dead – a selection of dearly departed politicians from the last hundred years or so.
According to the introduction, by editor Ian Dale, the majority of the obituaries appeared in newspapers shortly after their subject’s death, but ‘a number have been specially commissioned by us for this book’. It would be useful to know which are which, as the tone and content of an obituary written in say, 1964, will inevitably be different to one written in 2004 – recent obituaries being a little more ‘sexed up’, you might say, and certainly with far fewer ‘confirmed bachelors’, who ‘preferred the company of men’. A note on contributors would also have been helpful. Everyone, after all, has his or her angle, and nowhere more than in politics.
This collection is intended to demonstrate that most politicians aren’t such bad sorts and that they generally go into politics with good intentions. It is useful to be reminded of this truth, at a time when the received wisdom is that politicians are either corrupt or useless or both, but the careers on display in the Book of the Dead don’t always fill one with civic pride in our past legislators. The Conservatives, in particular, in this volume seem to have more than their share of bores, bounders or B’Stards. The obituary of the patron saint of Tory rogues, Alan Clark, is, however, a very fair consideration of his life and times. This even-handedness, together with a clean, clipped style, and the odd waspish aside, is common to the vast majority, if not all of the contributions.
Perhaps the Book of the Dead is most useful as a miscellaneous history of post-war British politics. The obituaries of the two Harolds, Macmillan and Wilson, by Geoffrey Goodman and Vernon Bognador respectively, are excellent evaluations of their premierships. Dean Acheson, then US Secretary of State remarked in 1962 that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role, and the obituaries for Macmillan and Wilson analyse their attempts to find one.
It is a shame then, that there is seemingly no coherent policy for actually being in this in this volume, apart from being a deceased politician. There is Macmillan, but no Churchill; Wilson but no Attlee. No mention is made in the introduction of the criteria for inclusion. While it is undoubtedly interesting to include a cross-section of backbenchers, it is unfortunate that it is at the cost of such heavyweights as Ernest Bevin, member of the War Cabinet and Foreign Secretary in the 1945-51 Labour government. This is especially galling, because three of the obituaries featured here are fictional – Harry Perkins from A Very British Coup and Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby from Yes Minister. Perhaps they are of interest to political anoraks, but these imaginary politicians are never as remarkable as the blood and guts stories on display in the rest of this book.
And here is where the heart of the Book of the Dead lays – in the delicious anecdotes and digressions. A few pages in, we are introduced to Horatio Bottomley, an Edwardian Liberal MP who held the self proclaimed ‘unique distinction of having gone through every court in the country – except the divorce court.’ His career, perhaps inevitably, ended in jail, as the author of his obituary relates, ‘where a prison visitor found him one day sewing mail bags. “Ah, Bottomley”, inquired the visitor, “sewing?” “No”, came the response, “reaping”.’ Politico’s Book of the Dead has an abundance of such stories, politicians’ lives, to appropriate Oscar Wilde, rarely being pure and never simple.