Portraits and Miniatures(115)

It is autobiography by manifesto, with party conferences (not the fratricide of Morecambe, which is left far behind, but the black ties of the Conservative agents’ dinner and the gratifying embarrassment of the standing ovations) erected into stations of the cross. It was Blackpool that made him in 1981 when he had become party chairman, but it was also Blackpool that was the scene of his breaking in 1983, when he honourably and quickly decided that he should not go on as a liability to Mrs Thatcher. And 1990 at Brighton - ‘my final speech to a party conference’ - was sufficiently l’ultima lacrima that it required extensive quotation, rarely a good recipe for memoirs.

The interesting question that remains is what was it that turned Cecil Parkinson, the railwayman’s left-wing son from Lancashire, into the most perfectly attuned to the Home Counties machine politics of the Conservative Party of any of his contemporaries. He notes with faint worry that Willie Whitelaw, whom he half admires, hated being chairman of the party, whereas he loved it. (Rab Butler also disliked it, but he is a bit outside Parkinson’s historical sweep.) And it must be stressed that Parkinson did not, in my view, love the Conservative Party because he could not find anything else to love or any other role to perform successfully. The evidence from this book as from elsewhere suggests that he was a competent departmental minister, a bit dogged by dogma, but not more.

Parkinson’s nearest rival for Conservative Associations’ favourite of the decade was, I suppose, the man whom he constantly proclaims as his friend, Norman Tebbit. Yet Tebbit, more abrasive, more original and, in a curious way, more intellectual than Parkinson, is not really the man for leafy suburban garden fêtes in the way that is Parkinson. Tebbit is to be wheeled out occasionally for big and rough jobs, but not to be wasted. He is of course Essex man in a way that Parkinson is not. But while Essex man may be alleged to have provided the marginal votes of Thatcherism it is Hertfordshire man who has the more central position on the M25 and is cosier for the chairmen, the treasurers and the ladies’ sections.

Politics have moved on, and Cecil Parkinson has not been so narrowly confined that he cannot enjoy the Bahamas, golf and skiing. Nevertheless, his book reminds me of a forty-year-old story of a politically obsessed Labour MP who on a delegation visit to Switzerland was shown a breathtaking view of the Matterhorn and said, ‘Ee, I wouldn’t like to go canvassing up there.’

Parkinson’s canvassing days and indeed his conferencing roller coaster days of triumph and setback are as much over as are mine. But I think he will have a niche in history that will have nothing to do with his troubles. He may well look in retrospect as quintessential a figure of the 1980s as was, say, George Brown of the 1960s or Selwyn Lloyd of the 1950s.





Enoch Powell



The Lives of Enoch Powell by Patrick Cosgrave (The Bodley Head), reviewed by me in the Observer in April 1989.





The Central thesis of a 1989 biography of Enoch Powell is that he alone and single-handed determined the results of two general elections: by his last-minute endorsement of Conservatism in 1970 he created the Heath Government, and by his anti-European ‘vote Labour’ speech in the February 1974 campaign he snatched away the power that he had reluctantly given and allowed Wilson his ‘tit-for-tat with Teddy Heath’.

Hyperbole apart, this is an odd claim in a hagiographic biography, for these were the two most perverse and deleterious election results in recent British history. In 1970 Labour deserved to win and it would have been better both for its future as a party of government and for British interests in Europe had it done so. In 1974, by contrast, Labour did not deserve to win, Harold Wilson had little idea what to do with his victory once he had achieved it, and the course was set for both the weak leadership and the trade union   excesses of the late 1970s which between them destroyed one of the two best instruments of left-of-centre government in the world (the other was the Brandt/Schmidt SPD) since Roosevelt’s Democratic Party.

All this can of course be given some teleological justification by saying that it was a necessary vale of sorrows on the way to the sunny uplands of Thatcherism. But this will not wholly do, for Mr Powell is by no means a strict enough Thatcherite, and I am not sure that Mr Cosgrave is either.

However, Enoch Powell’s role as an architect of misfortune is not nearly as strong as Cosgrave presents it, not because the misfortunes did not occur, but because he was far less in control than this implies. His key 1970 speech did not take place until thirty-six hours before the poll, and it was for him in unusually convoluted terms. It requires a great deal of faith in the immanent power of every word of the hero to believe that these late words bestowed victory on Mr Heath. I think two jumbo jets in the May trade figures had more to do with it. And the most that Powell did was to cease during that campaign to be quite as much of a nuisance to Heath as he had been during the latter’s not very skilful five years as leader of the opposition.