Robert Blake

Harold Nicolson was a diarist of genius who would have loved to make a success of public life or literature. He was an able but not outstanding diplomat who retired at 43, a journalist and broadcaster of talent, an MP for ten years and a junior minister in 1940-41. His literary achievements were voluminous, but few of his forty-odd books have lasted, apart from his study of Curzon, his lives of King George V and of Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase. A word, too, should be said for his life of his father, Lord Carnock, which he regarded as his best achievement. He wrote with care and in an elegant, limpid style: but there are times when one is reminded of Balfour’s remark about Asquith, whose clarity of speech, he observed, was a positive disadvantage when he had nothing to say. Nicolson’s diaries and letters make spendid reading, but he was neither a great littérateur nor a man of action. It was a tragi-comic delusion that, converted from National Labour to ‘real’ Labour, he supposed himself to be a possible Ambassador in Paris under Attlee’s government, and even at times dreamed of being Foreign Secretary.

In reviewing one of these books, I must ‘declare an interest’. Paul Johnson’s is a volume in the Mainstream Series of which I am an editor, although I have had no connection with this collection of essays other than strongly approving in principle that he should publish some of his most pungent and vigorous articles, which would otherwise have remained buried in journals and newspapers. Mr Conquest and Mr Johnson belonged in their day to the Left. Mr Johnson edited the New Statesman, and Mr Conquest has not always been a Conservative. Both have swung far away from their earlier beliefs, with something of the enthusiasm, fervour, vigour, conviction and single-mindedness of the convert. The traditional Conservative who never has and never could have voted for any other party must firmly suppress a slightly smug sense of having known the truth all along. Just as Anglican converts can be more Papal than the Pope, so too there is a danger that neo-Conservatives will be more Thatcherite than Thatcher, more Reaganite than Reagan.

Biographies of living people seldom come off. There is much to be said for gathering information about a person while he is still alive, as Mr Alastair Horne is now doing in the case of Mr Macmillan. But to publish in the subject’s lifetime is difficult. There are things in some people’s careers which it is impossible even to mention while they are living and many more which it is hard to treat in proper perspective. To steer the course between defamation and flattery, while at the same time avoiding grey caution, is not always easy. In spite of these and other problems Mr George Hutchinson has been remarkably successful in this short and admirably written biography. It is a portrait which is recognisable and vivid, essentially sympathetic but not uncritical. A valuable by-product is the author’s decision to reprint Iain Macleod’s piece from the Spectator about the manoeuvres for the succession in 1963. Since it takes more than one-eighth of his total of 150 pages, this may seem disproportionate, but it ought to be available somewhere in book form. It is one of the most remarkable articles ever written by an ex-minister.