Portraits and Miniatures(84)

Clement Attlee (1945-51) saw himself and events less grandiloquently. He had no gift of narrative prose. But his training was historical, as were his continuing intellectual interests. He had an acute instinct for balance between change and continuity, and his laconic sense of proportion, which cut men and events down to size, owed much to his knowledge of the past.

Anthony Eden (1955-7) knew a lot about Persian and Arab history and came to acquire an encyclopaedic knowledge of the minutiae of diplomatic exchanges of the first half of this century. But his interests were more aesthetic than intellectual, and of this quartet his mind was probably the least conditioned by history, just as his term of office was much the shortest.

Its fourth member was Harold Macmillan (1957-63). He, like Attlee, had little of Churchill’s command over written English, and he could not therefore compete as a chronicler. But his knowledge was at least as great as Churchill’s, and indeed covered a wider span. He knew Greek and Roman history in a way that Churchill, whose interests were always concentrated on the past three hundred years, never did. Harold Macmillan was not a great writer of history (his six volumes of memoirs, unlike his wartime Mediterranean Diary, were pretty dull stuff). But his most characteristic speeches moved easily from the Peloponnesian War to the Battle of the Somme.

Since Harold Macmillan’s resignation in 1963 it has in Britain been gradually downhill nearly all the way so far as historical knowledge and interest are concerned. Alec Douglas Home (1963-4) has a history degree, but has maintained the amateur status of a gentleman commoner of Christ Church, Oxford; the knowledge of Harold Wilson (1964-70 and 1974-6) while by no means negligible is somewhat over-concentrated upon the American Civil War. Edward Heath (1970-4), although he thinks in broad and generous terms, has never much illuminated his speeches or writings with historical parallels going back beyond his own, now long, experience.

James Callaghan (1976-9) does not break the pattern, even though he, too, now likes to think broad. Margaret Thatcher (1979-90), while her own impact upon history will be great, is curiously bounded by her own period of office, and that of the previous Labour government. She is fond of argument by historical comparison, but it is almost invariably done in a scale of two, and her history does not often go back before 1974, the date of the beginning of the second Wilson Government. Nor does John Major (1990-?) or any likely alternative British Prime Minister show much sign of ability to reverse the trend.

The case could therefore be regarded as superficially proved: twenty-three years from 1940 to 1963 producing four Prime Ministers, of whom at least three were impregnated with historical sense; and thirty years from 1963 to 1993 with six Prime Ministers on an incline of descent towards indifference or ignorance. History appears to be in retreat.

Yet might it not have been the first rather than the second period that was exceptional? If we consider the eight preceding Prime Ministers who took office since 1900, this looks quite plausible. Arthur James Balfour (1902-5) brooded on the likelihood of cosmic doom when ‘the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude’, but this grand pessimism did not encourage much detailed historical application, even though one of his dominant political thoughts was that he was determined not to be like Robert Peel in 1846 and ‘betray his party’. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905-8) was an indolent Cambridge classicist who preferred French novels to English political biography, and managed more on a mixture of shrewdness and niceness than on historical thought or erudition.

H. H. Asquith (1908-16) had absorbed a lot of history, as his smoothly purring brain absorbed almost everything, and could have easily held a historical conversational candle to Attlee or Macmillan, as he frequently did to Churchill who was a young minister in his government. But he was no writer - except of personal letters to ladies, frequently penned with great fluency during Cabinet meetings over which he was presiding. Lloyd George (1916-22) made a lot of history, but he was always too much a man of the moment to be greatly influenced by historical lessons. In his oratory he preferred topographical imagery - ‘the great peaks … of honour, duty, patriotism and … sacrifice’ contrasted with ‘the enervating valley’ of selfishness - to historical analogy.

Bonar Law (1922-3) knew the works of Thomas Carlyle inside out, and his historical reading beyond the works of that ‘sage of Chelsea’, eclectic though these were, was remarkably thorough and wide for a commercially educated accountant of rather rigid views. Stanley Baldwin (1923, 1924-9 and 1935-7) loved the rhythms of the English countryside and had a strong sense of continuity, but although he claimed (not wholly plausibly) to have been most influenced by the writings of Sir Henry Maine, his favourite historical author was probably the somewhat more middle-brow Arthur Bryant.