Churchill and the Appeasers, Johnson and the Remainers

Would a Prime Minister Johnson "forgive and understand" their wrong-headedness?

Back in February, I remarked in a post here that:

There is even one school of thought that whether the result [of the Brexit referendum] is leave or remain, Boris Johnson will become the next leader of the Conservative party and therefore Prime Minister

and, if anything, this outcome seems more likely, not less. In fact, if being taken seriously is a measure, recent excoriating attacks on Johnson by, for instance, Matthew Parris on 26 March in The Times (Tories have got to end their affair with Boris, Charm can make us forget the dishonesty and recklessness that would be ruthlessly exposed if he became leader) and Nick Cohen in the Guardian a few days later (Boris Johnson. Liar, conman – and prime minister? The mayor of London has been treated with woozy indulgence by the media. But Britain may pay the price), suggest much more likely. Reacting to Parris, John Rentoul in the Independent was calm, It's time to get used to the idea of living under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, or perhaps just resigned.

Not long before, I had come across the biography which Johnson had written in 2014, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. Reviewers tended to regard it as very readable in the style of Johnson’s Daily Telegraph opinion pieces which appear most Mondays (at £5000 a time they say), as not adding much to the huge amount of literature on his subject already available and as being as much about Johnson as Churchill.

It occurred to me that if Johnson were to become PM after a Brexit vote, he would be leading a Cabinet many of whom had been "remainers". How would he deal with them? Would his portrayal of Churchill who, after only three weeks as PM and in a much greater crisis in 1940, had to work with senior members of a Cabinet who had been advocates of appeasing Hitler, offer any insights?

Rather to my surprise, Chapter 1 plunges straight in at this point in Churchill’s life with The Offer from Hitler, made via Italy to negotiate an end to hostilities. This was put to the Cabinet in May 1940 by Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary and long-term appeaser of Hitler:

[Halifax] was tall, very tall; at 6 foot 5 he loomed about ten inches above Churchill – though I suppose advantage matters less around a table. (page 11)

Johnson is no more than 5 foot 10 by the way. Later after describing the Cabinet’s deliberations, Johnson comments:

It makes one cringe, now, to read poor Halifax’s defeatism; and we need to forgive and understand his wrong-headedness. (page 16)

and later:

All we are saying – in mitigation of Halifax – is that in seeking peace, he had the support of many British people, at all levels of society. (page 17)

Over 200 pages later (Johnson’s book is thematic in structure, not chronological) Halifax re-appears in 1941, prior to Pearl Harbor and the USA’s entry to WW2, as

… the British ambassador in Washington. This was none other than our old friend the Earl of Halifax: the beanpole-shaped appeaser - he who used to go hunting with Goering. Halifax was the British envoy charged with appealing to the finer feelings of the United States and he was having a terrible time. Shortly after arriving he is said to have sat down and wept - in despair at the culture clash. He couldn't understand the American informality, or their habit of talking on the telephone or popping round for unexpected meetings. In May 1941 the aristocratic old Etonian endured fresh torment when he was taken to a Chicago White Sox baseball game and invited to eat a hotdog. He refused. Then he was pelted with eggs and tomatoes by a group called the Mothers of America. Even for an appeaser, it seems a hell of a punishment. (page 247)

Johnson, if not inclined to vindictiveness, at least seems to have a taste for schadenfreude. He fingers a few other appeasers, for example:

Rab Butler, then a junior Foreign Office minister, was caught telling a Swedish diplomat that he thought Britain should do a deal – if Hitler offered the right terms (page 230)

returns to Johnson’s sights

… Tory drips such as Butler (the old appeaser) … (page 288)

So perhaps Tory remainers shouldn’t hold out too much hope of forgiveness and understanding from a Prime Minister Johnson.

There are some good things in The Churchill Factor. Johnson gives a whole chapter, An Icy Ruthlessness, to the decision to destroy the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, a tragedy which the British tend to overlook when revisiting the events of 1940. And another, The Ships that Walked, to Churchill’s sponsorship, when at the Admiralty during WW1, of the initial development of the tank by the Directorate of Naval Construction.

Unlike some celebrity writers, Johnson is happy to give credit to various helpers in the Acknowledgements, in particular Dr Warren Dockter, but my favourite is the one to a fellow Old Etonian:

David Cameron did some invaluable devilling into the exact locations of the pivotal meetings in May 1940 – not at all clear in Lukacs, for instance. (page 361/2)

UPDATE 24 APRIL 2016

Remarks by Johnson about President Obama at the time of the visit to London have led to Borises being sold heavily in the reputations market in the last few days – perhaps never to recover, although there are still 60 days to go before the Referendum.

Earlier in the month Johnson had published his tax return:

 - his earnings from the Daily Telegraph seem to match their reputation. In The Churchill Factor (pages 72 and 73), Johnson dismisses Evelyn Waugh’s criticisms of Churchill’s literary style:

Is it that Waugh was a teensy bit jealous? I think so; and the reason was not just that Churchill had become so much more famous than Waugh had been, by the time he was twenty-five, but that he had made such stupendous sums from writing. And that, for most journalists, alas, is the truly sensitive point of comparison. (page 73)

On Running Amok

Currently it seems that the remains of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, flight MH 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March, are in the southern Indian Ocean. Matthew Parris in an article, The flight swallowed up by a beautiful hell, in The Times (£) on 29 March described from personal experience the extreme nature of the areas which have been searched.  Annexed below are the expert opinions of Dr Philippe Blondel of the Department of Physics, University of Bath, on the difficulties of looking for lost aircraft using side scan sonar.

The first flight I ever made was from Penang to Singapore on a Douglas DC-3 belonging to Malayan Airways, Malaysia Airlines’ predecessor but several. The formal British colonial involvement, direct and indirect, with Malaya lasted from 1824 to 1963, although it now seems far less well-remembered than the experience of India. Wikipedia has a list of about 60 English words of Malay origin, “Loan words from Malay in English”, although some of these loans seem to be more taken for granted than others, for example: compound (enclosed group of buildings), gingham, gong, ketchup, launch (boat), sago, sarong. Amok, usually preceded by run or running, is a common useage, as is its Norse companion, berserk. It also appears as amuck and amock, all three words according to the Oxford English Dictionary have been used as a noun or an adverb, stemming from the Malay amuq, since the late 18th century.

Someone has provided Wikipedia with a detailed account of amok, which is, according to the article, a recognised psychiatric condition.



ANNEX by Dr Philippe Blondel of the Department of Physics, University of Bath for the BRLSI 

The news are still coming in from the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, and two weeks after the catastrophe, there is still no trace of the plane or its passengers and crew. Debris were sighted by satellites in the Southern Indian Ocean, several thousands of kilometres south of Australia and far from the intended route, but there has been no other indication since. How else can modern instruments help the search? Debris at the sea surface will be hard to find by the search parties, combing several hundred thousand square kilometres of some of the most challenging places in the ocean. Speaking from experience, I know how hard it can be to see objects in waves several metres high, from the bridge of a ship subject to the weather typical of the “Roaring Forties”. But even if tell-tale signs are still visible at the surface, two weeks after the catastrophe, most would have sunk several kilometres down to the seabed.

The best search tools are sonars, using focused beams of ultrasounds to probe all the way to the seabed. The first priority remains to identify with certainty the site on the seabed. Traces at the surface, from debris to oil patches, would drift with the currents and the prevailing wind patterns, and they need to be traced back to a potential source. Anything sinking from this source would then be affected by underwater currents, possible implosions at different depths, scattering over a large debris area and being affected in different ways by bottom currents. This part of the search is likely to take several weeks. Mapping the site itself can take several weeks or even months, imaging the seabed in overlapping swathes, in the difficult, autumnal conditions of this region.

A typical search, like the ones I have been involved in, would typically start with a low-frequency system (eg 30 kHz), to map large swathes (kilometres wide) with a lower resolution (close to 10 m). Any unusual return would be noted down and further investigated, using higher-frequency systems covering smaller ranges (hundreds of metres or less) but with higher accuracies, metric or submetric. The metallic or composite hull of an airliner would show strong acoustic returns, even in rough terrains, and assuming it has not exploded or sunk into gullies, it would be detectable with sonar. The sad truth is that the plane is most likely to have exploded at impact, or imploded as it sank several kilometres. Debris would therefore be scattered over a wide field, depending on the different currents on the way down and on the sizes of the debris. The debris field, especially with its larger or more reflective components, would still be identifiable. Human remains, even after a few weeks in water, should still be identifiable with very high-frequency sonars. All evidence is usually complemented with video and photographic imagery, taken with autonomous or remotely-guided underwater vehicles, covering every possible inch of ground, feeding into possible loss scenarios, and helping any recovery deemed necessary (in the case of the Air France 447 flight several years ago, this included bodies, critical pieces of equipment and the black box recorder, two years later).

Falkirk – an unlikely Falklands

It is part of modern British political mythology than Mrs Thatcher only won the 1983 election because of the resurgence in her popularity which followed the favourable outcome of the Falklands campaign in 1982. For David Cameron to be confident of securing a Conservative government after the 2015 election, he needs something similar (to see the size of his problem put Con 40% Lab 35% and LD 13% into Electoral Calculus). For the moment Cameron is having a good try at hanging the trade unions around Miliband’s neck, particularly after the shenanigans concerning Labour’s candidate for the forthcoming Falkirk [by-election] reselection.

Will it do the trick? At PMQs on 3 July Cameron mentioned the Unite union 8 times and Unite’s General Secretary, Len McCluskey, 6 times. On 10 July it was 8 and 2 times respectively, but by then Miliband had taken appropriate action both tactically with regard to Falkirk and more widely in floating the idea of a new relationship between Labour and the unions.  Miliband also moved onto the offensive at PMQs, asking some pointed questions about Tory funding. Unlike the Falklands, union funding and Falkirk do not seem the sort of issues which move substantial numbers of voters’ minds and, moreover, there is a slight risk that Miliband may come out of it well as a strong reformer and avoid being labelled a weak placeman of the unions.

Anyway the whole thing seems just a bit stagey. Of the four volumes of Alastair Campbell’s Diaries, the first, Prelude to Power 1994-1997, concentrates on the task faced by the Leader of the Opposition as an election approaches. It’s also the one which covers the time before Campbell became a civil servant (of sorts) so presumably its content was determined entirely by his judgement rather than being subject to the official protocol which would have applied to the later three. Pugnacious by nature, Campbell had no hesitation in recording the combative relationship which prevailed most of the time between Blair, Labour’s last permanent Leader of the Opposition, and the PM of the day, John Major. But he also mentions the mysterious occasions when Blair disappeared for discussions with the PM. Either Campbell wasn’t told what these were about, or he didn’t choose to write about them. He reports that on one occasion Major threatened to publish private correspondence between himself and Blair – again we are not told what about (page 380).

Almost certainly that’s the way things have always been done and there are good reasons for such arrangements continuing. For example, recently it was reported that Miliband had attended the National Security Committee (not for the first time) in late June for a discussion on Syria and why not? However, perhaps the lesson to be drawn is that governments and oppositions from time to time make common cause without necessarily telling the public or the media all about it. I can’t help wondering whether in this case the cause might turn out to be that of funding political parties out of taxation – the main ones of course.

McCluskey is an interesting man who seems to like SW France. Described by Rachel Sylvester in The Times (£) on 10 July:

Mr McCluskey — an opera buff, who loves attending Glyndebourne and visiting French vineyards (“St Emilion is my favourite wine and such a beautiful village”, he told me when I interviewed him a couple of years ago),

he is a left-winger but with right bank tastes, and tastes which extend beyond red wine according to the Spectator’s Steerpike on 13 July:

The wine waiters at Claridges are taking a keen interest in the investigation into malpractice in Falkirk. And they’re hoping that Unite will be fully exonerated. Len McCluskey likes to celebrate political victories at the hotel bar with a glass of pink champagne. His most recent visit was in July 2011 after Rupert Murdoch’s ‘humblest day of my life’ admission before a Commons select committee. McCluskey toasted the press mogul’s self-lacerating words by downing a bottle of pink fizz with his old mucker Tom Watson. As they say, nothing’s too good for the workers to subsidise.

(Actually it was “most humble day of my life”.)


UPDATE 13 JULY

A few hours after this was originally posted, a typically elegant article by Matthew Parris for today’s The Times appeared on their website, Guess who’s going to pay for politics? You!  He expands on the theme that “The political parties will ask the taxpayer to pay their bills once unions and tycoons have walked away” and that:

The very notion will be massively unpopular. There will have to be a tacit deal between party leaderships not to break ranks and exploit public indignation.

My notion was that the “tacit deal” is rather nearer than he seems to think. Parris is, of course, much better–informed than I am, just as he is a much better writer.


UPDATE 11 SEPTEMBER

Matthew Taylor was Tony Blair’s Chief Adviser on Political Strategy when he was Prime Minister and then became Chief Executive of the RSA in November 2006. On 9 September he posted on his blog Party funding – the future is out there (no thanks to me). This extract describes a past attempt at a “tacit deal”:

Back in 2006, working for Tony Blair and having previously written a think tank pamphlet on party funding, I was asked to explore a new funding settlement. The precipitating factor was the cash of honours allegations which led to several Labour advisors being arrested and placed on police bail.  

Although the negotiations were behind the scenes, agreeing a basic package with the Conservatives (newly led by David Cameron who was keen to show his statesman-like credentials) proved relatively straightforward. Although historically the Tories have relied much more than Labour on high value donations, Cameron knew how toxic this issue had been for his own Party and how dangerous it could one day become again.  

… The deal we had careful put together was sabotaged by anti-Blair elements in Labour’s ranks. There is little doubt that they did so on the instruction of those around Gordon Brown – who was at the time keen to grasp any stick with which to beat the Prime Minister.

Phyllida Lloyd’s 'The Iron Lady'

Much has been said and written about this film since the start of the publicity onslaught in the UK in mid-November. In support there seem to have been numerous private screenings for the movers and shakers before general release to the rest of us on 6 January. Months ago there had been a private MORI screening in Guildford (where Thatcher’s England endures presumably, though “Susan” from Farnham wasn’t struck). Unsurprisingly then, even before seeing The Iron Lady, I wondered what I could possibly add in this post, but here goes.

Firstly, there are three Margaret Thatchers in this film, summarised in the table below. 

The film is structured so that Roberts and Maggie are accessed through flashbacks triggered by Lady T’s finally disposing of Dennis’s (her late husband) clothes. There are too many flashbacks and there’s too much of Jim Broadbent’s jokey reincarnation of Dennis. My guess is that the Margaret Thatchers we see on the screen are divided about 45% Lady T, 35% Maggie and 20% Roberts.

The young Margaret is played competently by Alexandra Roach, but the Roberts period was dramatized well-enough quite recently in Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley, with Andrea Riseborough in the lead role. (Riseborough is shortly to appear as Wallis Simpson in W.E.). The Roberts’ grocery in the film appears to have been the only one where ration coupons were not required during the war.

Streep’s performance has been praised mightily and certainly her Maggie and Lady T were a tour de force of both acting and of makeup, costume and prosthetics. Oddly enough I found Lady T more convincing. Perhaps this is because only a few hundred people at most know Margaret Thatcher at 85 at first hand. Streep’s acting, particularly the voice and posture, seems highly credible to the rest of us, but we lack any benchmark. This puts her Lady T in the same category for most people as her turn as Julia Child in Julie and Julia. However, Maggie appeared regularly on television for over 11 years, and colour broadcasting had begun in the UK at the time she first entered the Cabinet. Those of us above a certain age watched her often in the years up to 1990. Also, during the Maggie period, she must have met thousands of people, including me. I thought, admittedly unlike some who worked closely with Thatcher, that Streep’s Maggie was very good but at times not quite on the button. However, I doubt if anyone else will ever do better than Streep.

The Maggie episodes include contemporary news footage leading, for example, to the sudden appearance on screen of a larger than life (and almost school boyish) Peter Allen. Despite this nod to realism, the Maggie parts of the story are also the most operatic and demand the greatest extension of artistic licence. For example, Prime Ministers do not march around Parliament with the rest of the Cabinet in their wake, like mediaeval courtiers trailing behind their Prince. But I have had a problem with differentiating dramatization and documentary when it concerns recent events. So I couldn’t help but be amused when Jonathan Powell, reviewing the papers on BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show on 4 December, told us:

… my brother worked for Mrs Thatcher for eight years and she would cook him breakfast most mornings in the flat in Number 10 and he certainly would vouch that she would never have revealed herself in her decolletage to another man, absolutely not …

For nerds like me, the BBC is sitting on a pile of documentaries about the Maggie years made by Michael Cockerell and others and, according to the FT (£), their archive is being digitised for us to watch on a micropayment basis. So I shouldn’t complain about a film drama departing from the strictly factual. However, I found things became irritatingly detached from reality in the House of Commons scenes in The Iron Lady. While these provided ample employment opportunities for male members of Equity over 50, the Commons during the Maggie period was not exclusively for men with one exception. The chart below shows that Thatcher was not alone in Parliament in her time (1 of 25 women when she arrived, 60 when she left), that things improved under New Labour, and how much further there still is to go, as there are only 144 at present (including 82 Labour and 49 Conservative).
 

Women MPs as percentage of total, 1918-2010

Among the column inches which this film has generated, I thought Boris Johnson’s views were interesting “… [the] writer and director (neither of whom, I guess, would call themselves ardent Thatcherites) …” until he turned his piece into an excuse for City axe-grinding; Matthew Parris in The Times (£) is worth a read, despite his irritating self-references to “Mrs Thatcher’s clerk”; Tom Harris, after he saw the film tweeted “dearie me”, but then blogged his fuller opinion; Tim Robey in the Telegraph explained that someone seems to have had an expensive change of heart about the music - fallout from the MORI session perhaps? Charles Moore, being Thatcher’s official biographer, has to be read, and he made the point as others have done that

:… there can be no doubt that it is calculatedly unkind to take a real, living person and portray that person as demented, which this film does. Either such a portrayal is false and therefore indefensible, or it is true, in which case the poor victim cannot answer back. The making of the film is therefore exploitative, and it is bound to hurt anyone close to her, above all, her family. In this straightforward, moral sense, the film should not have been made in Lady Thatcher’s lifetime.

The right to privacy of a public figure once retired into private life, whatever their mental health, doesn’t seem to be up for discussion, however. Surely there is a debate to be had about the border between legitimate ‘public interest’ and ‘what the public might find interesting’ and might pay to see as a film? It is perhaps worth noting that Carol Thatcher, who has written articles about Lady Thatcher, appears in the film, but her twin, Mark, who as far as I know has never spoken or written about his mother, does not.

David Owen (a former neurologist) observed in the Independent that:

While neither factually nor medically correct in every detail, this film could achieve something important and enduring: acceptance that dementia, however it presents itself, is rarely an indication of a poorly functioning brain in earlier life.

and argued that ‘Hubris Syndrome’ is the psychological frailty which undermines leaders. My pet theory is that Prime Ministers, because of the stresses of the job (eg PMQs, the oversized and hyperventilating UK media, sub-standard personal accommodation in Downing Street, too much travel induced by the UK’s view of its world role) age in office at about 18 months a calendar year, making Thatcher about 92, not 86 (see Table below).

*6 months added for every year as Prime Minister

Professor Steven Fielding blogged some astute comments, in particular in noting the similarity of the plot to that of the late Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly Deeply:

In that 1990 British-made movie Juliet Stephenson plays Nina, a widow who refuses to come to terms with her loss. As a result her dead husband, played by Alan Rickman, keeps appearing until she realises that she has to move on and starts a relationship with another man. That Michael Maloney plays Stevenson's new love interest and is also Thatcher's doctor in The Iron Lady might have helped jog my memory.

David Cameron, (perhaps with an eye to the female C1/C2 over-30 demographic taken with Streep’s performance in Mamma Mia - just kidding), told the BBC:

It's a fantastic piece of acting by Meryl Streep, but you can't help wondering, why do we have to have this film right now. It is a film much more about ageing and elements of dementia rather than about an amazing prime minister. My sense was a great piece of acting, a staggering piece of acting, but a film I wish they could have made another day.

According to The People on 15 January Lady Thatcher watched a DVD of the film “with close friend Lord Bell at her home in Dulwich, south London.” They quoted a source as saying:

By all ­accounts she was left quite emotional as she watched her life story. She actually spoke of being ‘pleasantly surprised’ by what she had seen ­although emotions do ­appear to have got the better of her as she recalled her real-life response to events shown in the film.

However, on 21 January the FT (£) reported Lord Bell as saying that he:

has no plans to see [The Iron Lady] as it will not “make any difference to her legacy”.

And finally two things not, as far as I know, reported in the UK press. Firstly, The Iron Lady had its world premiere in Beijing on 19 November at the first U.S.-China Forum on The Arts and Culture. Maggie as a medium for the exercise of US soft power – perhaps they should have called it The Ironic Lady.  Secondly, the aria, sung by Callas, background music in the film as Maggie finally leaves Downing Street, is Casta Diva from Bellini's Norma and, of course, it was John and Norma Major who were about to move in.

Streep-Maggie, Lady Thatcher, Meryl Streep

Note: Data from Women in Parliament and Government, Feargal McGuinness, House of Commons Library Standard Note SN/SG/1250, 5 January 2012.

ADDENDUM 16 JANUARY

I'm giving this film an Anticipointment Index of 4 (out of 5 at worst). This reflects that it had a very high level of hype but was redeemed for its failings by Streep's performance.

ADDENDUM 23 JANUARY

Benedict Brogan (of the Daily Telegraph) in his daily email this morning reported

Conor Burns, Conservative MP for Bournemouth West, and Lady Thatcher’s chief representative in Parliament, tweets an update on her progress: “Lovely visit with Lady T this evening. Good chat about defence, Falklands and Welfare Bill. In great spirit”. Good to hear.