Being willing to take punishment almost without limit (although certainly not without pain), Selwyn, ‘the great survivor’, overcame all this and had three and a half years as Macmillan’s Foreign Secretary before being transferred from the one top departmental job to the other. Mr Thorpe conveys the impression that he was happier when he became Chancellor, preferring the ‘candle-ends’ of the Treasury to foreigners. It must be said, however, that, while he was an insensitive Chancellor, he was also an effectively innovative one. It is a general paradox of the Chancellor’s position that his ex-officio dominance in the government is balanced by the fact that most of his work is building sandcastles that are predictably washed away by the high tide of his successor. Lloyd was unusual in leaving the semipermanent landmarks of the National Economic Development Office and Council (which survived until the magisterial Chancellorship of Mr Lamont made such cross-industry advice unnecessary) and the Regulator (by which indirect taxation could be easily varied between Budgets).
Then he was the leading and most shattered victim of Macmillan’s ‘day of the long knives’. Loss of office destroyed his life. He had nowhere to live and little to do. He was also very bitter about the injustice. But he kept his mouth shut, buckled down, became more relaxed and bonhomous, forged a lucky alliance with Alec Douglas Home, and was back in office as Leader of the House of Commons within fifteen months. It was a quick tit-for-tat with Harold Macmillan. In this post, which seemed to require most of the qualities he did not possess - delicacy of touch, wit, and detachment - he was a considerable success. It lasted only a year until the general election of 1964, but was the indispensable foundation of his 1970s Indian summer of five years as Speaker.
The last time I saw Lloyd, in July 1977 when I had recently become President of the European Commission, he told me that he was writing about Suez and I told him that my Secretary-General, who had been Guy Mollet’s directeur de cabinet at the time, probably knew more about it than most people. He said, ‘Then he may well know certain things which I do not, and which were kept secret, even from me, by Eden and Mollet.’
The Longfords
This essay is based on Observer reviews of Elizabeth Longford’s memoirs, The Pebbled Shore (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), and of Frank Longford’s History of the House of Lords (Collins, 1988).
The Pakenham/Longford clan constitute without question one of the most remarkable and prolific literary families in Britain. Apart from the parents, Frank and Elizabeth Longford, Thomas Pakenham has recently and deservedly won the W. H. Smith prize, Lady Antonia Fraser (Pinter) is English chairman of PEN as well as an author whose publications are always an event, and Lady Rachel Billington is a novelist of subtlety and perception.
This essay, however, is concerned only with the parents. Elizabeth Longford, to whom I would give the first place in the whole family, has had a literary career of unusual shape. Although she had done many other things, such as inspiring Maurice Bowra to a proposal of marriage, awakening her future husband like George IV arousing the spirit of Brighton in Rex Whistler’s allegorical painting, having eight children, moving calmly from Unitarianism to disbelief to High Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, three times becoming a Labour candidate and twice fighting an election, she had never written a book until she was fifty-three. And even then her first, Jameson’s Raid, was not one of her best.
She has since become a most accomplished biographer, partly because she learnt one lesson from the only partial success of Jameson’s Raid, which is that, as Mrs Beeton might say, in order to prepare a fine dish you must first catch a succulent bird. Her subsequent choice of subjects, sometimes strengthened by a delicate special connection, has been brilliant. Victoria R.L, her first great success, was the first life of the matriarch of Europe’s royal houses to be written by a wife and mother. Gynaecologically it comfortably outclassed Lytton Strachey.
Her next subject was the Duke of Wellington, whose wife was a Pakenham forebear. This she did in two volumes, the first mainly military, the second mainly political, and both handled with a rare blend of meticulousness and verve. She is not a stylist of note; she could not be parodied. But she has a strong narrative gift and an unusual capacity to combine respect for historical fact with what is almost a gossip columnist’s instinct for what will interest her readers.
After Wellington, she turned to Byron and then to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt as well as to two or three further royal studies which were perhaps more commercial and less historical than Victoria R.I. These, however, do not come within the scope of the 1986 volume of her autobiography, which stops, quite sensibly (better perspective, hope of another instalment) but without much explanation over twenty-five years ago, when Lady Longford was sixty. These first six decades of her life contain quite enough action, variety, and above all names, to keep us going comfortably over 330 pages. She retains all her narrative sense, there is hardly a dull page, and the photographs, always extremely important in a volume of memoirs, are great fun.