Portraits and Miniatures(112)

Giesbert is a highly successful journalist who, barely on the threshold of middle age, has established a star’s reputation, both as a political writer and as an editor. Most good journalists write books because they feel they should master a less ephemeral medium than the column or the report. But, only too often, they then proceed to nullify this purpose by choosing the most ephemeral subjects and treating them in the most ephemeral way. In Britain, Hugo Young’s One Of Us (about Margaret Thatcher) and Anthony Howard’s life of the former Conservative minister R. A. Butler are notable and rare exceptions.

Superficially Giesbert is in the mould rather than the exception. He likes writing books about events on which the dust has hardly settled: he likes reporting in direct speech conversations at which he was not present; and a certain addiction to reporters’ clichés shines through the linguistic haze. People who are displeased even if unseen are too easily described as being ‘rouge de colère’.

That almost exhausts the criticisms, for Giesbert writes with a compelling penetration. He takes one over the terrain of the Mitterrand years with the impartial but pitiless clarity of a powerful searchlight sweeping across a convoluted tract of countryside. The ‘direct speech’ technique may be presumptuous and unscholarly, but this is balanced by Giesbert’s uncanny skill in avoiding false notes. His accounts carry a great ring of conviction. It is as difficult not to believe them as it is to stop reading his high-paced narrative.

His vignettes of Mitterrand’s changing acolytes, allies and adversaries, Mauroy, Fabius, Rocard, Delors, Attali, and many others, are almost as good in a small way as the picture of the great spider at the centre of the web, silent, subtle, more predictable in method than in political position, which Giesbert cumulatively builds up. Essentially it is a portrait of ambiguity. All of his personality is founded upon it, according to Giesbert. ‘This man, in fact, is never the one that one believes he is. He is at once better and worse.’ ‘François Mitterrand is never wholly himself nor wholly someone else.’ The book’s central message is that the President always takes great care to be elusive. His actions never follow his words. He is the greatest master of secrecy and dissimulation since Talleyrand.

So, Giesbert’s compliments are distinctly barbed, even if apparently acceptable. To what extent are the barbs justified? I have never worked closely with Mitterrand. I ceased to be President of the European Community four months before he became President of the Republic. I was once summoned to have an hour’s engaging conversation with him (in Buckingham Palace of all places, when he was in London on a state visit) during which I thought he exercised great charm.

But my major encounter with him was in Brussels eight years before that. As the challenger to the French government of the time he wished to pay a day-long visit to the Commission. That was a perfectly reasonable request. Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the Opposition, paid one at about the same time. So did future Chancellor Helmut Kohl. However, the Giscard Government became very edgy about it. I cannot quite think why for I doubt if being photographed with me in the Berlaymont was going to win many votes in Château-Chinon, or anywhere else for that matter.

This did not prevent it being one of the trickiest diplomatic days I have ever spent. In order to avoid great ‘remous’ in Paris, I had to refrain from going down to meet him on the pavement or allowing him to meet an assembly of Commissioners in the Commission meeting room or proposing a formal toast at luncheon, all of which verged on being head of government treatment.

I thought Mitterrand behaved very well in the circumstances. The neurosis was on the other side. However, this book combined with that recollection makes me realize that Elysée politics, both ways round, are a fairly rough affair, perhaps a little more so than in most other democratic countries.

I also recollect that at lunch that day Mitterrand told me that he thought he would probably be too old to fight the 1981 presidential election. In 1990, with two presidential victories behind him, that may I suppose be regarded as mild supporting evidence for Giesbert’s dictum that ‘Il ne fait jamais ce qu’il dit, il ne dit jamais ce qu’il fait’.





Jawaharlal Nehru



This essay is based on a 1989 Observer review of Nehru by M.J. Akbar (Viking).





Jawaharlal Nehru, born in 1889, was Prime Minister for the first seventeen years of Indian independence. The quarter century since has produced six Prime Ministers, but three of them - Shastri, Morarji Desai and Charan Singh - were short-lived. Nehru’s daughter filled the office for sixteen of these twenty-five years and his grandson then added another four. It is a dynastic record without parallel in any democracy.