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Third, he insists on writing about his relations with women (in spite of putting her first he has not been too much of a mother’s boy to avoid them) with the cool precision and the faint suggestion that he was doing each one a favour that he applied to Madame Marcelle, the determined (but beautiful) Grenoble housewife. Even Françoise Girued, who was also his distinguished collaborator in the outstanding success of L’Express, the quality weekly he launched in 1953, is subjected to this treatment. This was none the less his finest hour. Apart from assembling an outstanding team of contributors which included François Mauriac and Sartre, as well as an in-house core of Girued, himself and Jean Daniel, he also associated Mendès-France, Mitterrand and Gaston Defferre with the paper. Its founding cause was the end of the war in Indo-China, which Mendès-France achieved with the help of Mitterrand as a Minister of the Interior at once subtle and determined. Its subsequent cause was the ending of the war in Algeria, which put Mitterrand on the other side and dragged on for another seven years, including a six-month period when Servan-Schreiber was re-embodied into the army and sent to take part in the ‘sale guerre’ on the edge of the desert. During these years he did not have to imagine his conversations or delude himself that he was at the centre of the stage. He really was there for once, and this shows in the quality of the narrative, which is, however, always easy to read because of both its pace and the simple directness of the French.





John Simon



This miniature is based on a 1992 review of Simon: A Political Biography by David Dutton (Aurum Press).





Simon Has been the biggest remaining gap in political biography of the first half of this century since 1977 when David Marquand handsomely filled the Ramsay MacDonald cavity. Simon was a pervasive if not exactly great figure of his day, and his day was a long one. He first held office under Asquith and he was still there on VE Day.

He was the only man in British political history apart from Rab Butler and James Callaghan to have been Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary (twice in Simon’s case) and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Palmerston would have made a quartet had he not refused the Exchequer when he was almost a boy, or at least so early in his career that he was still in 10 Downing Street nearly fifty years after he had declined to go to Number 11. After holding these three great offices of state, Callaghan became Prime Minister while Simon was thought lucky to be kept on by Churchill as a very disregarded Lord Chancellor who was never allowed to show his face in the councils of the war. The difference in their fates may be thought to illustrate the advantage of character (or, as some might put it, bearing) over intellect in politics.

Simon had a fine if sterile legal mind. All references to his success at the bar always stress the ‘quality’ of his practice, which I think can be interpreted to mean that he was best at the lucid exposition before a high-ranking judge (juries were much less his forte) of the complicated commercial affairs of those who could afford very large fees. His appearance was impressive and of an episcopal cast, which made him a worthy companion of Archbishop Lang of Canterbury in the common rooms of All Souls.

His personality was chilling but not impressively so, for he was ingratiating and unctuous, seeking a fellowship which nearly always eluded him. Asquith, when Simon was his thirty-eight-year-old Solicitor-General, christened him ‘the Impeccable’, and after a few chance social encounters with him complained that ‘the Impeccable’ was becoming ‘the Inevitable’. Nearly thirty years later Hugh Dalton (who in fact shared some of Simon’s characteristics including the look of a worldly prelate and an unfortunate tendency to call people by the wrong Christian names, but redeemed it by a rumbustious earthiness which Simon lacked) referred to him as ‘the snakiest of the lot’. Kingley Martin wrote an unforgettable sentence beginning ‘Many of those who have shivered as he took their arm …’. The 1930s Cabinet shivered when he invited his colleagues to call him ‘Jack’ and only Jimmy Thomas managed to do so. And Neville Chamberlain, not noted for warmth except to his sisters, complained that Simon ‘hasn’t a friend even in his own party’.

Between leaving the Woolsack in 1945 and his death in 1954 Simon spent many of his weekends at All Souls, of which college G. D. H. Cole, who combined being a too-prolific Left Book Club author of the 1930s with social fastidiousness, was then a professorial fellow. After one such weekend Simon encountered Cole on the platform of Oxford station and greeted him with excessive bonhomie. As the train came in, Cole, anxious to escape, said, ‘I must get along to my third-class compartment’ (it was before the days of standard class). Simon, eager not to be frustrated in his search for ecumenical companionship, said, ‘But I travel third myself,’ and loped after him. When the ticket collector came round they both, with varying degrees of embarrassment, produced first-class tickets.