Portraits and Miniatures(118)

This book ends with Sakharov’s release from the Gorky exile. For six and a half years he had been deprived of a telephone but late one evening one was suddenly installed in his apartment there. He was warned to expect a call the next morning. When it came through it was Gorbachev himself who told him that he was free to return to Moscow and ‘go back to his patriotic work’. Most people would have dissolved in a mixture of deference and gratitude. Instead Sakharov began to argue about other detainees and eventually hung up on Gorbachev in a huff.

That unselfish self-righteousness is no doubt what made him a great man. His was the voice that could not keep quiet. It was the more remarkable because he was always at least half a supporter of a reformed Soviet system, who disapproved of Solzhenitsyn’s flip into a detached blanket hostility. Sakharov nearly killed himself by hunger strikes to get his step-daughter-in-law permission to go and live in Massachusetts. It was the last thing he would have wanted for himself.





Herbert Samuel



An Observer review of a ‘political life’ of Samuel by Bernard Wasserstein, published in 1992 (OUP).





Herbert Samuel was an able and diligent man of high public spirit who lived for a very long time, occupied a wide variety of public positions between 1905 and 1955, although not the ones he most coveted, was a slight disappointment in most of them, often made false judgements, most notably over Hitler, which was surprising for a leading member of the old Anglo-Jewish community, yet accumulated over the decades a considerable reputation for sagacity and integrity. He was made an OM at eighty-eight, a rare honour for any non-Prime Ministerial politician, and he died at ninety-two. ‘He was vewy nearly a great man,’ said Bobbety (5th Marquis of) Salisbury, who had as much difficulty with his ‘r’s as do one or two other politicians.

Samuel published his own discreet Memoirs in 1945, and in 1957 John Bowle, a schoolmaster who had had an adventurous career at both Westminster and Eton, wrote a friendly ‘living’ biography. This was an odd matching of writer and subject, for Samuel, who was intensely puritanical on anything to do with sex, which made his two brief tenures of the Home Office Liberal with only a capital ‘L,’ was a dedicated scourge of homosexuals.

Despite these publications there was a gap waiting to be filled and Professor Wasserstein, who is British by upbringing but is now Dean of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University, does so definitively. He is fully aware of the plodding and unspontaneous aspects of Samuel, and indeed draws devastating attention to the limitations this set to his friendships and his popularity. Yet, although thoroughly comprehending the boring side of Samuel, Wasserstein never himself seems to be bored by it. If he were an undisciplined writer this might have been a recipe for disaster, but as he is the reverse and has managed to fit the whole ninety-two years into a neat 170,000 words, it works out very well.

In addition, Professor Wasserstein, while not a pedantic writer, is an extremely accurate one. Almost his only solecism, let alone significant error of fact, is inserting two or three redundant hyphens in Lady Violet Bonham Carter. This latter tiny mistake has, however, a certain symbolic quality, for during the first half of his career Samuel probably admired the father of Violet Asquith (as she was then) more than anyone else, yet was totally excluded from his intimate circle, whereas his first cousin, the more worldly Edwin Montagu, in spite of going on to commit the double apostasy of marrying Venetia Stanley and serving under Lloyd George, was very much part of it. In correspondence with that lady Asquith habitually referred to Montagu as ‘the Assyrian’ and to Samuel as ‘the infant Samuel’. Both were mocking, but there was no doubt which was the more dismissive.

Nor did Asquith greatly admire Samuel’s public ability. In a Cabinet order of quality that he drew up for private amusement in 1915 he placed him eleventh out of the sixteen he categorized, with below him only a ‘tail’ of five equal lasts between whom he could not be bothered to differentiate. But this was nothing compared with the dislike Samuel aroused in Lloyd George (which it must be said was mutual, although ingested by Samuel and extruded by Lloyd George). With almost schoolboy petulance (at the age of seventy-five) Lloyd George referred to him as ‘the politician he hated most’, and this was not the anger of a moment or provoked by Samuel’s pro-Munich stance, for six years earlier he had spoken in a public speech of ‘the flaccid oleaginous Whiggery of Samuel’, and four years before that he had written of him as ‘underhanded and grasping’.

There was obviously some special irritant quality about a Liberal politician who was so coolly treated by Asquith when he was in his forties and so excoriated by Lloyd George when he was in his sixties. Yet he did not really deserve either treatment. Lloyd George’s strictures in particular were very wide of the mark. Samuel was not ‘underhanded’, but naïve and over-trusting, although often insensitive to his audience or his interlocutor. He would not have dreamt of behaving as Lloyd George did with the manipulation of his notorious private political fund. Nor was he grasping. He never sought personal fortune (he had quite a lot of money to begin with, but that is by no means necessarily a prophylactic against greed, and it began to run thin during World War II), and he was the one minister involved in the Marconi scandal (because he was Postmaster-General; the others were Lloyd George himself, Lord Reading and the Master of Elibank) whose behaviour was spotless. His weakness was that he liked high public appointments, but, with one possible exception (when he was not successful), there is no evidence that he behaved badly in order to get them. The trouble was more that he behaved with technical efficiency but unimaginative insensitivity when he had got them. The possible exception was that his fruitless desire in the late 1930s to be a very elderly Viceroy of India may have predisposed him towards Neville Chamberlain and Munich.