Mr Akbar therefore has a splendid subject, and publishing a quarter of a century after Nehru’s death was a good vantage-point, provided he could avoid being oppressed by the bulk of S. Gopal’s authoritative three-volume 1976 biography. Does he succeed? I cannot quite decide. He is a notable journalist, and he writes compellingly with vividness and passion. But he writes journalist’s history.
Maybe in substance he does achieve proportion and perspective: I certainly feel that I understand the balance of Nehru’s life better for having read him. But he never achieves a reflective style. He is a natural polemicist (and - an anti-partition Muslim himself - he has a polemical sub-theme, which is to put all the blame for dismemberment on Jinnah), so that even when he strives for balance his method is to refute one polemical passage with another polemical passage the other way.
His book also demonstrates the width of the gap between the Indian and the British literary traditions. There is some odd English. Governments are constantly ‘protesting’ activities of ‘the hostiles’ with weapons nefariously ‘gifted’. And in the passages dealing with anything British, the solecisms are thick upon the ground. Mountbatten is a sufficiently central character that it is a pity for Akbar to inform us that he was always known as Dicky and not ‘Dickie’, as he himself invariably wrote it. And there are many others of a similar degree of unimportance. Furthermore, I have never read a book which so cried out for pictures, and which has none. I longed, for instance, to be able to look at one of Motilal Nehru - which is a tribute to the strength of the narrative. Indeed there are times when Akbar himself seems to be referring to and describing his own non-existent illustrations. Were they in the Indian edition, but could not be afforded in the enterprise culture of modern Britain?
Cecil Parkinson
This is based on a 1992 Observer review of Lord Parkinson’s memoirs, Right at the Centre (Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
This Book is to me a disappointment. I thought it might provide a companion volume to the rich delights of the memoirs with which Lord Young of Graffham marked the completion of the economic miracle of the 1980s and his own decline into silence. However, Lord Parkinson is a much better politician than was Lord Young, and is not similarly addicted to strangulated jargon. As a result this is quite a good although intensely political book, with nothing much in it for those who are not enthralled by how Michael Portillo became ‘a deservedly popular minister’ or how ‘Eric Ward, our excellent Central Office agent in Yorkshire’ rearranged the order of a meeting so that Parkinson could hasten back down the motorway ‘with headlights on at full speed’ (but it was all legal, for the boys in blue were part of the plot) to be at Margaret Thatcher’s side within two hours.
There is, as might be expected, a great deal of Lady Thatcher in the book, and indeed Parkinson straightforwardly sums up his life as having been ‘a Thatcherite ministerial career’. He begins with fifty pages on her downfall, which moves him, with the literary assistance of Lord McAlpine, into the poetry of a Chinese proverb about ‘dragons in shallow waters being the sport of shrimps’.
Then we have forty pages that cover everything from the author’s birth in 1931 to his entry into active Conservative politics a third of a century later. He began in the small railway junction town of Carnforth (where Gladstone was anxious to discover the politics of the stationmaster after the Queen’s famous en clair telegram on the murder of Gordon - ‘these news are too dreadful’ - had passed through that functionary’s hands). Parkinson does not tell us about this, being more concerned in those days with his membership of the Labour League of Youth than with high Victorian politics. He writes frankly and well about this period, although he allows his parents to remain very shadowy figures.
In 1952, having just attended as a Bevanite supporter the most blood-letting of all Labour Party Conferences at Morecambe, he went to Cambridge, and during three years in that university underwent an unexplained transformation from slightly truculent left-winger to excessively clean-cut runner and glee-singer who was happy to become a management trainee with the Metal Box Company. From there he elided into being a City accountant, a member of the Hertfordshire bourgeoisie, and a natural and neighbourly Conservative activist.
The rest of the book, except for a rather dignified six pages (‘manly’ is the faintly mocking adjective which I cannot get out of my mind) about his parental and matrimonial troubles, is all politics, and politics seen very much from the level of the plain and not from the high peaks of questioning thought.