Maisie: Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast
Andy: Hello and welcome to another episode of page 94.
My name's Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm here in the Private Eye office with
Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen and DJ Taylor.
We are here for our summer culture special, specifically books.
Don't expect any opera or any film or anything else.
The book special, you might be listening to this on a beach
you might have brought with you.
Oh I dunno.
A Jack Reacher, a James Patterson.
Or maybe the diaries of Chips Channon.
Let's hope, 'cause this is Page 94, we're gonna be talking about political books.
DJ writes a lot of the reviews, although obviously we can't confirm
which ones he does or doesn't write.
But DJ, you read a lot of political books, as well as One Direction memoirs
and things in your line of work.
DJ Taylor: I do, and it's, quite interesting because whenever I propose
some kind of political tone for, the eye.
Ian, his lob always says, God, you're the only person I know who's in the least
interested in this terrible, substandard, disappearing, disparate genre.
And I think there is a way in which the, whole sort of atmosphere in which
political memoirs or books about politics get wr, get written and received has
changed over the last few decades.
there used to be.
Big commercial propositions, minister ministerial memoirs
would be serialized for huge sums of money, in Sunday newspapers.
and I always, the kind of touchstone of this, the thing I always remember,
'cause I, lived and worked in London then, this is 30 years ago.
And my wife, who's then working at Harper Collins, who.
Paid a fortune for the two volumes of Mrs.
Thatcher's memoirs and the first one, which was the Downing Street years,
came out on a particular Thursday.
And I can remember standing at Notting Hill Tube station and seeing the flash
of the powder blue cover all the way down the platform from various people
who had bought it on the day it came out.
It was
Adam: huge, wasn't it?
Yeah.
It was a big event that coming out.
DJ Taylor: Yeah, and I can think of other sort of similar books and in
fact any, certainly in the nineties, any Tory politician who was, anyone
could expect a deal for his book.
Norman Fowler wrote a book called Ministers Decide, which I, don't
think exactly set the wealth in ringing, but, it was a thing.
And then.
It because it sort degener my imagination
Helen: that it was the David Blanket memoir that was the last of those
incredibly big beast advances.
DJ Taylor: I think they, I think one of the problems was that, of course
the, really, back in the day, 40, 50 years ago, the really fruity ones,
the ones that were worth reading were always about Labour politicians.
because I remember even, the boring ones, I remember reading
James Callahan's memoirs time and Chance, that's very boring.
I they, yes.
But it's funny because of what he leaves out.
And the euphemism.
So you will get, you know when, you read what he writes about Barbara
Castle, A great soul, a fine socialist.
It was always a pleasure.
And when you think of how he completely stitched her up as soon as he became
Prime Minister, it's all very funny.
So it's one of those rather Delphi books, which is great.
It's funny for its emissions, for what it doesn't say.
but then you came, of course, Labour was then out of office.
No one was really interested in the Labour Party for years.
The Tories are always much more boring.
They don't tend to make as good political memoirs or exposes as they used to.
And then there came a time in the early two thousands when they were
so boring that no books were written.
remember, I remember the story.
I remember the eye featuring this story over 20 years ago.
When somebody proposed to write a biography of William Hague and
there were no takers, no publisher would've prepared to put up the money.
So it, I don't think it actually happened.
and but I think it's just, generally we are less interested.
We know more about politicians on a kind of day-to-day business
simply because of the, on rush of social media and knowing more about.
People's private lives, generally.
In the old days, you didn't really know very much about them.
you knew, they were the formal careers.
And if you wanted to know what had actually happened, in Parliament and how
MPS had compiled and got together, you quite often had to wait for the memoir
to find out about it, rather than seeing it in your newspaper the next morning.
It wasn't in WhatsApp.
no, there wasn't a WhatsApp group.
And so it was all fascinating.
And so when, when the survivors of the Labour Party, the, the Labour Party
and elegance of the early eighties actually began to write about what had
happened at conferences and how unions had come together and the block vote
had done something, and how one man, one vote had been chucked out because
one trade union leader was down the pub.
You tended not to find out until the memoirs were written, and I
think there's been a sea change.
I dunno.
Helen, what do you say?
But Only bears
Helen: a journey is quite good if you want.
Pre like into Labour beef and don't quote the bit of it
that, that I, that upsets me.
I do.
I
Adam: devoured her.
No, I needed her.
just those words every time.
It's just every,
Helen: it's like your George N'Golo cat impersonation.
She makes me feel very tense.
But, yeah, I know what you mean.
That there is a, what's happened, into that gap has now come the bite
back model, which is that bite back as a small publishing house owned by
Lord Ashcroft will just pound out at a biography of absolutely everybody.
So there's one, actually the title of, Barbara Castle's.
red Queen in biography of hers has been repurposed for, Angela Rayna.
That's the new Angela Rayna one from Bite Back.
There's now a Kemi Badenoch one coming out because the assumption is that she
might win the Tory leadership race, but they are done in this very particular way.
I remember me, her, my colleague wrote one of them.
About Ed Miller Band and I offered to give him the pull quote, if you
only read one biography of Ed Miller Band this year, make it this one.
which he declined sadly.
But the model was very upfront about the fact that you tried to find a
couple of good news stories in it about it that no one had ever done before.
And you would, then get a decent amount of money from either the Sunday Times
or the mail and Sunday for an extract.
So they were written in a very different way rather than
being a kind of work of art.
They were written with a kind of specific intention to make money from that.
I
Adam: think you're right to identify the David Blanket book as being one of
the turning points on that 'cause there were two problems with that really.
One of which was that it came off the back of all of the shagging stories.
when he was revealed to be the government's most unlikely Mr.
Lover man in sort of 2004, 2005, had to resign from, the cabinet was given.
I think I.
Think I'm right in saying it was Harper Collins.
It's usually Harper Collins with all the big ion.
It usually was Harper Collins, and it was part of a deal that he did with his
great friend, Rebecca, Rebecca Brooks, which also earned him the, most boring
column in the sun for a few years after that as well, which got further and
further back in the book every week.
'cause it was, so tedious.
but, as part of that deal, he retained, he had a very good agent who retained
the serialization rights, which had become, even by that point, I think,
the way that you made money on books.
So it was fairly disastrous for the publishers, I think in that case.
It's
DJ Taylor: interesting you should make that point about the blanket
memoirs because, quite, serendipitously the other night I came across.
A column I wrote for the Independent on Sunday in 2010.
So that's 14 years ago.
And the column was complaining about Peter Mandelson's memoirs, which were,
full of the, full of that kind of thing.
and naming names and, dissing people.
He didn't like.
And I complained in the column that this was an example of what I call the celebr
ratification of the political memoir.
Whereas people previously, people had said what they thought had happened.
Discretely, and or sometimes not discretely if it was a Labour politician.
And now you have this kind of conscious clamoring from the, for the
limelight that hadn't previously, I think been a feature of the political
Adam: memoir.
There's only a few years before that the first lot of Alistair Campbell diaries
came out, which were build as extracts from, because he'd specifically left
out all of the Blair, Brown Wall stuff.
Even, then, brown was still in power and.
Alistair Campbell being a Labour man through and through was not gonna
do anything to compromise that.
You are
DJ Taylor: Even then, stuff was being el I think.
and if you wanted to and to also too, if you were writing, if you were a biographer
of one of these people, again, your toned had tended to be very feline and deft.
I always remember reading.
With great, I think in fact was so funny.
I think he ended up parroting it rather than reviewing it was, which was Philip
Ziegler's book about Edward Heath.
And it was clear that Ziegler, who I think had known Heath when he was a
foreign office clerk in the 1950s, had never really got over the experience.
And, you, I've never read aery that damned anybody with quite
such faint praise as did that.
But it was all very, I say done in a very thin line way.
And and it would be, there were those who might criticize Mr.
Heath for his aloof aloofness and his glacial qualities.
But talking to Mrs.
Enit Smith, who used to serve him tea in the house of comment, he said, she
said he was quite a nice man, I believe.
And he said the paragraph would falter to a close with this one,
and it was beautifully done.
But you would've had to have known your politics and known.
known how irony works to have appreciated exactly what Ziegel was doing.
But that's old school.
the, whole atmosphere in which subject.
subject, publisher and writer began about it.
it's, although it was published in the 2000, its last century, I think.
No, but
Andy: this is what I was curious about is which is more revealing and in which ways?
if it's someone telling their own story versus unauthorized or unauthorized
biography, they'll tell different.
DJ Taylor: you've led me, I think to the, book I was going to choose as one of my
favorite political biographies because at the time it was genuinely innovative and
the perspective was genuinely innovative.
there had been, there had, previously, back in the sixties and beyond, there
had been books, biographies of dead politicians written by their relics.
The one I was gonna choose because it really wasn't eye-opener for the time.
It was published in the early 1980s.
And that's Susan Crosslands bar of her husband, Tony Crossland,
Labour Foreign Secretary.
Died in office, in 19.
I was a schoolboy at the time.
I remember the great shock that he'd only been, her secretary of
State for about a year and a half.
Dropped down dead, one weekend at his country place and, at the age of 59.
And she wrote this very intimate memoir, which didn't pull any
punches about how awful he could.
Be about what a womanizer he could be about how he rubbed people's backs up
about how he could have been Labour leader had he not been so abrasive and
annoyed everybody and been so arrogant.
And, it really was a and, an absolutely, eyewitness account
because she was there of his dying.
Which is not something you would ever get in any, any standard biography.
And so it was a real, for 1983 or whatever it was written, it was a real innovation
and stand and stands up even today because you learn, about the workings of politics,
in a way that you don't elsewhere.
Because Crossman will come home from Ka and say, bloody Tony, Ben.
I taught him at Oxford.
He was a complete credit in then, or no, I'm exaggerating.
But, Crosson was the man whom when, Tony Benu had.
Been his politics pupil.
'cause Crossland was briefly an Oxford dawn.
And on one occasion in the 1960s, Ben announced with great ceremony, from his
media appearances that he was determined, he had determined to slough off, the
reputation of being, being an intellectual to which Crossland said, to s slough off
a reputation, first necessary to have one.
And so that was the kind of.
Thing of which he was capable.
Those seventies,
Helen: memoirs aren't like that was, that is a particularly rich period, isn't it,
of political biographies and memoirs.
I decided not for once to Fay with my thoughts on Barbara Castle, but
Howard Wilson did once complain that basically he would sit around the
cabinet table and they were all.
Taking notes.
'cause Tony Ben was writing diaries.
There's Crossland Diaries.
Barbara Castle's had big chunky volumes of diaries.
So they, I dunno, why was it that is
Adam: annoying.
Helen: Why was it Adam?
He
Adam: couldn't talk.
He had a deal from Biden Felton Nicholson before he'd even left
Downing Street the first time.
That's right.
He was knocking out a book for them.
Yes.
Okay.
So
Andy: if we're pick, I mean I have said the format at the start, we're gonna pick
each of us one Desert Island political memoir, and then when we're, cast away.
Presumably the four of us together, we're gonna have four books, which
we can pass around between us.
So have, you settled on that?
I've settled on, I'm sorry to jump the gun, but Yeah, I would because
DJ Taylor: I, I would settle on the Crossman because it is so entertaining.
And if you want the real low down on those two periods of when Labour is in office,
late sixties late seventies that they, that really is a kind of how to guide from
someone who observed it all very, close hand without being a politician herself.
That's a good though.
And also being American too.
Okay.
So yeah, she was American Susan.
Crosson.
So you get a very interesting kind of, my God, what is this?
Occasionally.
Oh, very nice.
And Tony will come and explain something and, she'll say, you
mean you do that over here?
And so that too is rather, so you've got both the outside
Adam: of you and the under, very much the inside of you as well.
Works
Andy: perfectly.
Bell, Bryson.
Hey, good.
Anyway, Helen, who, how about yours?
Helen: I have picked the Sun King by Nancy Mitford, which is her biography
of Louis XIV and the building of Versailles, and it does a couple of
things that are really interesting.
One, it talks about the stultifying levels of.
Etiquette and the court precedents that be that overwhelmed the French
aristocracy, due to the idea that Libby the 14th could have lived in the
Louvre and could have lived in Paris.
Instead, he decided to live out in the countryside.
And there's this phrase used actually in her biography of Madame de Pompadour about
cooping up all of the French aristocrats in a perpetual house party at Versailles.
And you can really see in that, because he was a great.
Totalizing leader, he, was centralized all power to himself and he gathered
everyone who might have possibly been a rival power base around himself, but the
French became, the aristocracy, became so divorced from the, what was actually
happening that at that point, when you then go to the next King Louis the
15th, he was a little bit less good, and then Lou, the 16th, he was terrible at
managing that state bureaucratic machine.
You can see that actually in some ways, the building of
Versailles, the kind of first.
Domino that falls, that ends with the French Revolution.
And because, this is the woman who wrote about, you and non she was
very attuned to ideas about cast.
She's unbelievably fascinating on the madness.
It was a huge deal about what kind of seat you were allowed to
sit on in the King's presence.
So if you were low ranking noble, you might get a little like ottoman
or you might get a chair next.
If you've got a chair with a back then you were like, really one of the big boys.
Oh, okay.
Ditto.
If you were a Prince of the blood royal, you could put your, kneeling
stool straight on in chapel.
Everyone else would have it crooked and they would spend all their time in
chapel like nudging it towards until someone would look at them and go.
Come on.
only the Prince of Conde is allowed to do that.
It's, absolutely fascinating and it's incredibly heavy details, but it also
gives you a portrait of an absolute monarch and why that can sometimes
be a brilliant thing if your absolute monarch is good at running the country,
but also it can be completely fatal.
Thing.
And that is the joy being an absolute ruler.
You were in charge of absolutely everything until you are
DJ Taylor: beheaded.
And of course, she brought her own mitford desk.
Tamra to do you know what?
Raymond Mortimer, the Bloomsbury critic once asked Nancy Midford what she really
thought of Louis xiv, and her reply was.
Absolute heaven, darling.
Adam: Can I say the chair thing doesn't stop either.
Famous diplomatic incident in the early eighties when Francois Miron
comes over to Downing Street and gets very cross about the idea that Mrs.
Thatcher is gonna get a chair with arms on and he's gonna get one without arms.
And this is literally, there are memos going back and forth
between the Eli Palace and Downey Street for weeks over this.
So
Helen: I'm really not surprised.
'cause every time they have a state banquet, people will slave over the
seating arrangements, that kind of stuff.
In politics now, there is such an exquisite sense.
Of status, but I think if you don't see it from the inside you, it's
very hard to understand why people do things that are otherwise illogical.
But everybody in politics has got this exquisitely calibrated sense of who's up
and who's down, and they're constantly working within that environment.
It bleeds into absolutely every decision that everybody makes is this
like constant antennae alertness.
Andy: But we're like that in this office to be fair.
So true.
But we've all got arms on our chest.
Thank God.
I think there's only one chair
Adam: with arms at the cabinet table.
There is.
That was the problem.
The Prime Minister has a chair with arms.
I see.
The meeting was in the cabinet room.
It was in the, I see.
And this was all explained to, to, to president Miter on,
but he was having none of it.
He said, no, if she has arms then I must have arms as well.
And the way they got round it was to, put two armchair next to the,
next to the fireplace instead.
And not sit at the cabinet table.
All very clever.
See the art of compromise.
Andy: Do you wanna hear a slightly, relevant Louis the 14th anecdote,
which does actually have echoes in politics from the last month.
Helen: Yes, of course.
Of course.
I want to hear that.
Tell us.
Andy: Louis IV, was a young-ish, middle-aged man, and he developed a
very painful, fistula in his bottom.
There was a gap where there shouldn't have been a gap.
It was very painful, requires surgery.
the surgery was obviously very rudimentary at the time, but, the
court appointed a surgeon who, practiced, researched, developed his
own tools to carry out this procedure.
It really was groundbreaking at the time.
Eventually carried out the procedure.
The king lived.
And, medicine had taken a bit of a step forwards anyway because of
the way the court was at the time.
Some members of it, started claiming that they too had this terrible condition and
others, and this is where we come to the parallels with today, started wearing
bandages on their bottoms as if they had the same, fist year as Louis xiv.
And where does that bring us to?
It brings us to people wearing bandages on their ears.
As a tribute to Donald Trump after he was shot.
Adam: I think it brings you back to the intro to this podcast where he said, we're
gonna be talking about culture this week.
Somehow we got onto the King of France's art.
Andy: it just shows everything, everything echoes throughout eternity.
But that is
Helen: one of the nice things about reading, like particularly 18th century,
memoirs and historical documents, is that people are very open about
bodily functions, and particularly when it comes to the king, right?
Whatever was happening with the king's body was everybody's business.
So you do get these?
Absolutely.
There's a really long discussion in one of the Chronicles about what
might be the problem with, Henry II's, penis, which goes on for some, it's
a subject to much debate at court, why he can't have any children.
Same thing with Louis the 16th.
there's just a kind of openness that.
We would now, it is more now like I think we took a kind of detour during
the Victorian age where people tried to delicately cover some of that stuff up.
Adam: I think we're back to, Tony and Cherie now, aren't we?
Andy: Welcome back, Adam.
We come to you.
it's gonna be Tony Blair's journey, isn't it's not gonna be Tony Blair's a journey.
if I'm
Adam: stuck on a desert island.
I don't want that image in my head.
No.
I've chosen two.
It's quite appropriate for Desert Island actually.
'cause they, there're about 600 pages each, so I'm gonna be able to build a raft
at, and we really, no honorable mention has to go to, Michael Block's biography
of Jeremy Thorpe, which just has.
For as much as anything else, the backstory behind it because, Michael
Block approached Jeremy Thorpe.
Now we all know one thing about Jeremy Thorpe, which is that he tried to have his
boyfriend shot and shot his dog instead.
Hubub: Yeah.
Adam: never talked about this.
lived in, he had Parkinson's disease for a very long time, retired
from public life, and was a bit of a mystery for all this time.
Michael Block approached him and persuaded him to, cooperate with this
biography and persuaded other various of his friends to speak as well.
But it was done on his urgent insistence was the way Michael Block put it, that
it should not appear in his lifetime.
Andy: Oh, okay.
Adam: Jeremy Thorpe, everyone thought was a death door, then went on to
live for another quarter of a century.
So this manuscript, which is Red hot, I mean it's not just about Norman Scott.
It's about an awful lot of other boyfriends as well, and FBI intercepting
letters from him to a boyfriend in San Francisco and affairs with
Guardsman and policemen and all.
it, it's a cracking, cracking tale to it.
I have to say to.
Slightly better and more concisely in John Preston's, very English scandal,
which was one that was adapted by Russ of t Davis into that TV drama.
but it is still a hell of a read, that one.
But, my, my biggie, my, top one I'm gonna, nominate is actually Chris Mullin.
he's done about four now, but the, the first volume of those was a view from the
Foothills, which gives, as we were talking about before, DJ, that sort of insider
outside view and for younger listeners.
Chris Mullin was a, Labour MP to the left of the party.
kind very much that, and he was brought in as a junior minister.
And this is one of the most extraordinary things about him.
It makes you realize how much politics has changed in the last 20 years.
He was a minister in, that enormous department of transport in the regions
and local government and Priti much everything else that press over.
Yeah.
But along with Michael MEChA, who was another of those figures, who
in today's Labour party, you just cannot imagine either of them
being brought into the tent at all.
But the really interesting thing about this is that he knows, Chris Mullin
knows exactly why he's been brought into the tent, and that is because he
was a very, he was a sort of awkward squad back bencher who was head of the
home affairs committee and Tony Blair's.
A job offer to him is essentially is just to bring him in and ensure that
he can't cause any more trouble on the back benches and shut him up for a bit.
So there's this tension throughout his period as a minister, two, two
periods as a minister, which are covered in this volume of him being
inside the government and having, being very much resenting it in a ways.
He actually starts off trying to turn down the job and is persuaded by Tony Ba, who
he refers to all the way through as in capitals as the man, which is slightly.
Andy: I think that's a good feature of lots of biographies.
In fact, story in general requires your protagonist to be so blackout
is a perfect example of it, right?
Because he's in the middle of most of the systems he is in.
There is someone to kick Baldrick and there is someone above him who is tick by.
Yeah.
There's the general, there's the Prince or whoever, and so that's a perfect example
of that, where there's a, there's a.
Attention and the structure.
You're not getting a view right from the top.
I think
Adam: it's always much, much more interesting to hear from slightly
more junior people and slightly more outside people than it is from extremely
polished performers who've got an eye to their, their post ministerial career
and, what boards they're gonna sit on.
Certainly,
Helen: that's what I think.
It's not just a kind of Rosen krants and giland a dead thing, which is.
Part of it, is it is actually more interesting to see the sideways view
onto the kind of very big events.
But I also think most successful, really successful politicians do not have a
lot of self-reflection and self-doubt.
It is not something that is an asset in politics.
I just interviewed Tony Blair a couple of weeks ago and he was, he's such
a convincing advocate for whatever he's doing because he doesn't look
in the rear view mirror constantly and rack his brains over all the
things that could have gone wrong.
And I think you have to have that.
Personality type, that very charismatic, always looking forward.
I think people would say the same about Thatcher, right?
Is that she didn't look backwards.
She was always onto the next thing.
It was forward.
And I think that characteristic makes you a very bad writer, right?
So by definition, I think Chris Mullin is probably a good writer, but all
the things that made him a good writer probably made him a bad minister.
DJ Taylor: particularly the Mrs.
Thatcher's legendary.
Self-absorbed.
I remember, Charles Moore, who wrote the very good three volume,
the authorized life of Mrs.
Thatcher, saying that he was once, having family lunch with Mrs.
Thatcher and some small children came and pressed their faces against
the window and wait a minute.
And Mrs.
Thatcher was completely flummoxed and just said.
What are they doing?
Why are they behaving in that way?
and Charles said that she clearly, despite having been a mother and lived,
seven years, had no idea of the way in which small children behaved and what you
they did if you let them outta the room.
And they were waving and this was completely baffling to her that.
That they might as well have been, might, apes jumping up and down
for the, and again, it's the self absorption, the complete focus.
the only thing is that the light burning at the end of the tunnel
that you're moving towards.
And I, and it needs, it needs a kind of, it needs a special kind
of, amanuensis or chronicler or, observer, I think to bring that off.
Probably.
I was gonna, what I was gonna mention actually, apropos, and again, he stands
in a quite interesting relation to the people that he's writing about.
Is Woodrow Wyatt's Three volumes of political diaries because Wyatt, although
Wyatt was an absolute, it might be
Helen: who he was.
'cause I'm afraid all I'm getting is probably a Tory
minister and father of Petro.
No,
DJ Taylor: no.
Father Petro, no.
Woodrow White's a very interesting case 'cause he was a Labour, he was a right
wing Labour MP in the fifties and sixties.
Lost his seat in 1970, became and then converted in a, oh, he
was actually a cross bench pier.
But, an absolute.
Acolyte of Mrs.
Thatcher's and helped write her speeches and as soon as Thatcher went,
immediately transferred himself to John Major and was his kind of fact totem
and fixed major up with Rupert Murdoch.
and, was, and it was was actually it's never mentioned in anybody's memoirs.
I think he gets one mention in Mrs.
Thatcher's two volumes, which I think he would've been very sad about.
but he's always there and he sees them in their most sort of intimate moments.
He's very self-centreed.
He's always out, for what Woodrow and.
Can get outta these, but you do get unguarded moments where, Major will
suddenly drop his mask of niceness and say something really quite catty about
someone like John Prescott or, and there, there really is a sense that there's a
sense of terrible sense of corruption, obviously in sleaziness and, things
happening because people in offices in the city pick up the phone to their friend,
the Tory minister and, sorting things.
But there's a, it's, tremendously a fairy, I suppose
Helen: If you read the chips Chan, the giant Simon Heifer
edited volumes of his diaries.
'cause what I, from what I read of the reviews of that, they said he's on,
he's just an figure on the periphery of lots of extraordinary stuff.
DJ Taylor: I would've said my own view of him, of chips would be that he
was never, he never imagined anything politically despite his ambitions.
And so you, although he's, there, there's an awful lot of names turn up and that
he's quite perceptive, I think, about some of the people he comes across.
But you are really, in terms of the really big issues, you're only getting crumbs.
I think from the tables of the Great.
That would be my
Andy: thought.
I dunno what you think is there, just, is there another thing about whether or not
these people are likable to the reader?
Does it matter?
Because a lot of the people we've described are writing.
Unpleasant things about friends, colleagues, partners, whatever it is,
they don't all come across very well.
You're in a room full of journalists.
we're not gonna complain about that.
We do.
They have to have the, do they have to have the courage to be
unpleasant in order to guarantee
DJ Taylor: a good book.
I suppose what I would say about that is that you, you have to import into this.
If we are talking about persona, which is what it.
Ultimately it's all about, you have to import into this, the
literary idea, I suppose the Anthony Poll idea of the personal myth.
If you can gauge either through the memoir or through the biography
what it was that they thought was important about themselves and what
they were trying to project through, and the way in which their lives
politically or non-politically.
Were made bearable to them by the kind of myths about themselves that they
projected, then that's interesting.
And it makes even the most abrasive or, unpromising looking subject appear.
it's take someone like John Prescott, whom no political memoir at the time has
a good word for, even John Major loath.
Prescott, this is the, you get this in the Woodrow Wire Diaries.
But, Prescott had his personal myth.
he had the personal myth, he had the chip, he had the upbringing, he had, and
you can see him projecting it through his political life with sometimes very
unfortunate results, but sometimes with results that are amusing and sometimes
results that tell you a great deal about Prescott and the way that he.
Thought of conceived of himself.
and I find this is very useful.
It's it's like the James Callahan was exactly the same.
I remember, and this is a, it's funny,
Helen: Jim in the memoir, isn't it?
When he is, as he, he's also shocking.
He acts about all the people that he hates.
DJ Taylor: Let me tell you a story which is in highly germane because It, it's
to do with the Crossland memoir that, I, that we were just talking about.
And when I was a boy of 17 at school, Callahan turned up at Norris
Cathedral and it was decided that he ought to be introduced to the
young friends of Norris Cathedral.
Now, I wasn't a young friend, but my friend Crispin was, and
he dragged me along and said, come on, we're a bit short.
Come and say hello to the Prime Minister.
So there I was on a Saturday morning at the end of a very,
a lot, a line of teenagers.
Shaking hands with Callahan.
So he stopped and he looked, I remember this so vividly, and he looked at me and
he went, so what are you going to do?
which the Senate, to which I said, as you would at that age, I said, I'm thinking
you're gonna Oxford Prime Minister.
So Callahan looked at me and he looked suddenly wistful and crestfallen,
and he said to me, there are other places, And then, went off down the
line and I thought, that's a bit odd.
And then five years later I read Susan Crosslands book, which contains
the account of Callahan sitting in cabinet with Crossland and all
the Oxford firsts who constituted the Wilson and Callahan cabinet.
And saying very, saying, I suppose you all think that I'd, if I'd been
to Oxford, I'd have got a second.
And Crossland immensely.
Patronizingly says, no Jim, actually, you'd have probably got a first.
'cause you do actually have this ability to separate.
Obviously I was collateral in a war that I didn't know was being fought.
And that was why Callahan said to me, there are other places, and
carried on down the line because they, and again, he has supposed,
when he arrived at 10 Downing Street in, this is not in his memoir.
I think it might, I think it's in his, might be in Bernard o' Donahue's book.
But, when he arrives at 10 Downing Street, he sits down at his desk and turned
to his aide and said, there are many cleverer people than me at the Labour
Party, but I am here and they are there.
Thought,
Helen: wow, this is a bit, so yeah.
Incredible level, like defensiveness coming in.
Personal myth.
Can I ask, and maybe this is a question for both of you, but maybe
Adam more, which is, what is the bitchiest of the seventies memoirs?
Because there is a period of An exquisite period of beef
Adam: Glimmers of Twilight.
Joe Haynes 2003.
It's his.
At least his second volume of, of biography about
working with Harold Wilson.
But it's the one where he really decide, possibly not every
se he was Press Secretary.
Yeah, And part of that, in a cabinet along with Bernard Donahue you
mentioned, and Marcia Falconer, Marcia Williams, sorry, lady Falconer.
and, the big revelation in two th the 2003, but which he hadn't talked to
mention up until that point was there was actually a murder plot at some point.
Darl Wilson's personal position, Joe Stone proposed doing away
with his political secretary.
Let's knock her off.
That's right.
And he could make it look like an overdose, which is
just quite extraordinary.
And, he still had it.
So again, it was Joe Haynes, who is about 5,000 years old now, who popped
up quite recently still, again, with the story about, Harold Wilson was
having an affair with, with, another one, another member of his staff.
DJ Taylor: There's a Harold Wilson rehabilitation going on.
At the moment.
Yes.
And he, there's a stares context for this.
And Wilson, of course, he was derided in the years after he had been Prime
Minister, but I can just see there, there are moves afoot to rehabilitate here.
Can I also
Adam: just say, just for listeners reading us who may be thinking of, reading up on
this stuff, do not read Marcia Williams.
Lady Falcon does own biography of her time in down street, which is even
called Downing Street in perspective, which tells you everything about
how boring a Mandy it's going to be.
It almost
Helen: actually Smells of od you know, O de par, doesn't it?
It's, but it's a very delicate little book, it's very weirdly,
thankfully very short Unlike some of the memoirs from that period.
One could mention,
Andy: here's, a thing.
who knows?
Some of our listeners might be people who were MPS until recently.
Some of those people may be writing books even now about the last 14 years.
What advice would you give to someone who's trying to put together
a cracking political memoir?
Put
Adam: the dirty bits in.
That's what we want is the gossip.
that's what we come away from this.
what you want is the personalities, the fallings out and the bitchiness.
Now
Andy: doesn't that contradict what DJ was saying about the
celebr ratification of the memoir?
is there any way we can reclaim the height?
Of, you only found my advice,
DJ Taylor: my advice to anybody sitting down with this environment
be don't let on what you are doing.
Never give the faintest indication that you are taking notes that you have any
interest in this kind of thing at all.
Because it's the,
it's the outside.
It's the complete unknown.
It's the unthought of candidate, I think sometimes who produces
the best kind of book.
Helen: I think you have to decide whether or not you're trying to write an apology
for your life and perspective, right?
Or if you're trying to write an actually objective, interesting, honest book.
'cause there is a value in both of them.
I think that what DJ was saying about the kind of personal
mythmaking is really true.
I do want to understand what was in Tony Blair's mind as the
war of over Iraq approached.
That's fundamentally quite interesting.
It's not the same as getting a kind of much more objective assessment.
So I think what I've learned is you maybe do a mix of reading, memoir and biography
because you will, it is interesting to see inside a person's head, but
it also inevitably is quite limited.
Have you got a pick, Andy?
Andy: Nadine Dories is the plot of course, obviously that is,
Helen: oh, I have such a great book in so many ways.
Just the way that it's basically Nadine series of coffees in five
Hartford Street I hear, and she puts in every single time I switch the
Otter transcription app on in my phone.
Such it's a really unnecessary level of detail about all the journalism that she
did in this kind of really excited way.
Andy: I know, I just, that's not my, that's not my pick, obviously.
It's, it's, breaking the code by Charles Brandeth.
Who was before he was Mr.
Cuddly jumpers and teddies.
He was an MP for Chester, between 1992 and 1997 before which he was also Mr.
Cuddly jumpers and teddies on morning tv.
So it's a very bizarre, brief political career that he had.
This,
Adam: this kind of hits both our marks, doesn't it?
'cause it's that sort of insider outsider review.
And if I know anything about DAR Grant, it's gonna be very
gossipy and name dropping.
Exactly.
Andy: It's a really good book.
it's very, it's big, but it's a, it's.
it's off-putting big, but actually if you wanna book about the collapse of the
nineties, major government It gets it because he doesn't have anything to lose.
Firstly, he knows he's gonna lose his suit.
Yes.
That's it.
so you really want someone who's got no further ambition at the
point they're writing this.
it's in diary format.
It's in, real time.
so he and I think he said afterwards, one of the keys is to write it on the day.
'cause otherwise you start tidying and you start improving.
You think, oh, just sand that off on all of this.
If you write it on the day, you really do get it.
and it's during this phenomenally unsuccessful time.
And that's always more interesting to read than the years where everything's
going magnificently and you are just.
getting on with it, but it's, it's the time of David Miller and, Steven Shagger
Norris and his five mistresses and all of it's a time of, every, page practic base.
We're
Helen: so based, so that's all we want to read about, basically
is just down street shagging.
It's terrible.
It's,
Andy: a really interesting time of every page is another disaster
and he's reacting to it, saying.
What Steve Norris and it's, it is, so you're getting a proper, fresh, emotional
reaction from him, which is interesting,
Helen: But I would defend that because I think the, thing about politics is that
it's a bit like the way that, economics in the 20th century had belief that
everybody acted rationally and you could work out systems, and then they went,
oh, actually, most of the time people are acting in very irrational ways.
Politics is immersive by that, which is.
That you e everything would go well if only people didn't
keep doing stupid things.
And so it's really interesting to find out all the ways, all the human fallibilities,
yes, like you say, it is just the person who's had an affair with their secretary
that then tanks an incredibly important policy or they don't get to talk about
it because you know some, someone assaulted a goose on a highway and that's
dominates in news agenda for a week.
That's why I think these things are.
A brilliant 'cause they talk about the way the best laid plans end up
crumbling in the face of just weird and stupid things that humans do.
Andy: Yeah.
And, justification for the book being interesting in a political way, apart from
all the gossip, is that Brandreth was, in the Whipps office and the Whipps office,
the ways of the whips were very secretive, for almost the entire 20th century.
it wasn't, it was not really a known thing.
And he's, that's why the book is called Breaking the Code, it's also
really rude about lots of people.
In a way that you probably wouldn't publish today about people's
looks and things like that.
It's quite.
I've reread a few bits of went, oh, that is old style offensive.
That is genuinely really rude about Harriet Harman or whatever.
And yeah.
Yeah, I think, and that's
Helen: quite useful in a way because it also does tell you
what the actual untied up way that people were talking about stuff.
And like in reflection, I wrote Profile of Harriet Harman a couple
years ago, and if you go back to the clippings about her, they are just.
So unbelievably offensive.
she's shrill, she's whiny.
She's obsessive, and you've just begin to, this organ used to call
DJ Taylor: her Hattie Har person.
Helen: yeah.
Back in that day.
There's a lot and about how she was, women's rights obsessive, but
you'd get to then like by revisiting unvarnished versions of the past, rather
than what everyone would like to say that they were doing, you go, okay.
Yeah.
the homophobia of the seventies, the incredible sexism that
Harmon faced, you actually get to confront that kind of head on.
Yeah.
Andy: Okay.
So as you, the listener, head off to your desert island or wherever you're going.
You can take with you these four books.
Charles Brown, just Breaking the Code.
Susan
Adam: Crosslands Life of Tony Crossland, Chris Mullins of you from the Foothills,
Helen: Nancy Mitford, the Sun King,
Adam: and you're definitely gonna be over your baggage allowance.
Andy: So that's it for this summer book Special.
Hope you've enjoyed it.
We'll be back with more topical material in a fortnight's time.
Who knows what it'll be about.
Find out then.
Until then, go and buy the magazine or subscribe@privatehyphen.co.uk.
Thanks to Adam Helen and DJ and to the producer Matt Hill of Aret and Cordio.
And to you for listening.
Bye for now.