Events, dear Boy, Events: A Political Diary of Britain from Woolf to Campbell is a very enjoyable book. Edited by Ruth Winstone who also edited Chris Mullin’s diaries it takes you back to the most amusing parts of a century of politics in the words of diarists from Beatrice Webb to Piers Morgan.
When you read it, it is almost as if you were there at some of the key moments of history, listening at doors and picking up bits of gossip.
This could be just a collection of random extracts, but Winstone brings a narrative and architecture to the venture so the whole is like a strange play or film. As the book goes on we get to know most of the characters as in a novel.
But the book also maps changes in British society and the history of the Labour party is a strong theme that runs through the book. We start with Ramsay MacDonald forming the first minority Labour government.
Webb’s rather brutish summing-up of it is recorded on 29 October 1924 ‘Here ends the episode of a Labour government but also of a minority government – an episode which Sidney thinks, on the whole, good for the education of the party – and as far as he is concerned, a good joke which like all good jokes ought not to be repeated.’
In an an entry from 13 July 1960 Hugh Dalton reminds us that Hugh Gaitskell was as keen as Tony Blair to get rid of Clause 4, ‘Today Hugh [Gaitskell] gave up the ghost on [trying to remove] Clause IV. It will remain unchanged in the party Constitution. Of course the press will naturally and logically describe this as a great defeat and rebuff for Hugh … But neither he (Hugh) nor I realized the massive boneheadedness in all sections of the Party … it has been a staggering and almost unbelievable experience’
In 1967 Richard Crossman is fretting about the effect on the results of the Leicester South-west by-election (which Labour went on to lose) of the introduction of ‘Barbara’s breathalyzer’ ‘It is,’ he writes, ‘regarded as an extremely unpleasant attack on working class drinkers.’ And yet Barbara Castle was right. And measures to ban smoking in public places by her female successors Patricia Hewitt and Tessa Jowell were equally lambasted but also right.
What is also striking is how much of a role Tony Benn plays in commentating on events from 1943 to the present day. His first inclusion is a letter to his brother from Oxford where the college is pretending to light incendiary bombs in a Dad’s Armyish sort of way. His last in 2008 when he is self-consciously the grand old man of politics criticising proposals for the bank bailout in the US.
I had forgotten that for a time Benn was called Wedgie. This is Wedgie at his height in diary entries from the week in 1976 when Harold Wilson announced he was standing down, and the party had to elect a new leader very quickly. After describing the occasion, Benn says: ‘Jim Callaghan who found it hard to conceal his excitement said, “Harold we shall never be able to thank you for your services to the Movement”.’ The same day Castle is canvassed by Michael Foot and assures him that she will vote for him AND tell Wedgie that he shouldn’t stand. But the most important thing, as Castle says was to stop Callaghan. ‘‘Don’t worry said Joe [Ashton] grimly. ‘The “stop Jim” movement is already under way: from the Right as well as the Left.’
Benn who then did stand in the election but was beaten can’t help being pleased that Denis Healey does so badly. ‘I must say the fact that Denis got only one more vote in the second ballot than I got in the first gave me great pleasure: he was utterly rejected really.’ Callaghan, of course, goes on to win.
By 2006 and the end of the book politics is more public and more brutal. Piers Morgan here describes with joyful relish inciting a TV audience against Jack Straw on the inflammatory subject of the Iraq war ‘…it rapidly descended into a gladiatorial bearpit, with Straw as the helpless young slave being torn pieces in front of the baying crowd. He began to physically shrink back into his seat, panic in his eyes … he was getting well and truly buried.’
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Sally Gimson is a Labour councillor in Camden and tweets @SallyGimson. Sally Gimson
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Events, dear Boy, Events: A Political Diary of Britain from Woolf to Campbell
Ruth Winstone (ed)
Profile Books | 640pp | £25