Lord Young of Graffham
A 1990 Spectator review of The Enterprise Years by Lord Young (Headline).
David Young (or ‘Lord’ Young as he apparently wishes to be known to his intimates in the literary world) has been Mrs Thatcher’s substitute for Churchill’s (or ‘Winston’ as she respectfully prefers to call him) Lord Woolton. They both came to politics from a business background, although both admitted to a brief flirtation with socialism in their youth. They both entered the House of Lords to become ministers. And they were both attracted by the chairmanship of the Conservative Party, but the department store manager from Liverpool was one of the most successful occupants of that great office of state, whereas the property developer from Finchley found his way firmly blocked by Willie Whitelaw acting like a constable blocking the gentlemen’s entrance into the pavilion.
The differences between Fred, 1st Earl of Woolton, and David, Lord Young of Graffham, were, however, about as great as those between ‘Winston’ and the Iron Lady. ‘Uncle Fred’ had a wonderful even if sometimes unctuous political touch, whereas ‘Uncle David’ (as he was not widely known in the House of Lords) had practically none, except for a certain ability to choose between competing firms of advertising agents. If Disraeli’s fame is summed up by ‘peace with honour’, Asquith’s by ‘effortless superiority’ and Churchill’s by ‘blood, sweat and tears’, so Lord Young’s must rest on his immortal phrase delivered in the darkest days of the 1987 election: ‘If these are the ads she wants, then these are the ads she gets.’
Since hearing that throbbing aria Mr Norman Tebbit has never been quite the same man. He recognized that his days as maître en titre were effectively over. For the most part, Mr Tebbit has taken his rejection with a stiff upper lip, although enlisting with Lord Whitelaw as a rather improbable joint guardian of the gentlemen’s entrance. He endured in silence the publication barely three months after the 1987 events of a short book by Rodney Tyler which seemed to draw heavily on Lord Young’s diary, and which indeed put into circulation the little phrase about the advertisements. It was only when Mr Tebbit felt that his noble supplanter had let down the Faerie Queene that he spoke out, although he has compensated for his three years of restraint by the force, not to say the viciousness, with which he has eventually done so.
I find it difficult to decide where I stand in this Young-Tebbit clash. It rather reminds me of my feeling about whether it is better that the Fayed Brothers or Tiny Rowland should own Harrods. But it is impossible not to sympathize with Mrs Thatcher’s persistent bad luck with favourites. It is easy to understand that she wanted a principal boy with more spring in his legs than Geoffrey Howe and more romantic-looking than Nigel Lawson. Tebbit (‘the assassin’, as he is apparently known to his admirers) has an air perhaps a little too menacing to play in anything except Treasure Island, but Lord Young (the minister who brought her ‘achievements rather than problems’) was surely cut out for a real Jack and the Beanstalk role. Alas, it turned out that even he was more interested in getting to the top of the beanstalk (and in indiscreetly revealing what she said to him on the way up) than in cutting it down in her service. So she was left with only Mr Cecil Parkinson to rely on. And he, like Mr Norman Fowler, Mr Peter Walker et al., may soon begin to find the call of spending more time with his family too strong to resist.
Lord Young’s book has some virtues as well as faults. He emerges from it as a more and not less attractive character than I had thought him. He writes well about his family background, of his pietistic feeling as a member of an immigrant group, and of pride in his material success without in any way wishing to slough off this background. He is moving on his relations with his equally talented brother, the former chairman of the BBC, who died in 1986. He is also true to his subtitle, ‘A Businessman in the Cabinet’. He may have been thrusting, but to an unusual extent he was interested in the details, often the tedious details, of administering his departments rather than in the higher politics that swirled around the Cabinet table.
This has its disadvantages as well as its advantages. It produces some dull narrative and some odd English. This latter misfortune is partly the result of a stylistic trick of using adjectives as nouns and nouns as adjectives. But it also comes from an addiction to opaque jargon. Although as a minister Lord Young was inordinately interested in presentation and treated his public relations adviser as at least as important as his permanent secretary, I find it difficult to believe that, because of their language, all of his announcements had as much impact as he could have hoped. I am still puzzling over one which he describes as ‘probably as far-reaching as any that I made during my time in Government’. ‘We announced’, he writes, ‘the additional spectrum for the existing cellular telephone service that would serve to relieve congestion within the M25.’ After reading that four times I sympathize with Lord Young’s feelings of ‘culture shock’ which he, again four times, says he experienced on moving to a new job.