On the whole, I think our leaders are less in touch with the man in the street than they were fifty years ago. It has to do partly with the question of what takes chaps into politics now as opposed to what took them into politics then. Fifty years ago, most Labour Members fetched up in the House of Commons because they had got disturbed about what they saw around them in the places they lived in or knew, and felt the way to get something done about them was to get into the House. Keeping in touch with the ordinary man was not a problem. It was because they were in touch with the ordinary bloke that they thought about going into the House in the first place.
Nowadays, there are quite a lot of chaps who are in the House because the idea of sitting in Westminster and helping to govern the country appeals to them. They keep in touch with feeling in the constituencies, of course; they go back to them; hold their “surgeries” at weekends. But somehow it’s different.
Another thing is that life is more complicated and government more complex. An MP has to read a great deal – reports, economic surveys, and Bills. The Welfare State has required additional laws and regulations.
The men of my generation had to go through the mill. When I became a Socialist it meant that most members of the middle class, to which I belonged, felt that I had done something despicable.
Real persecution
Most members of the middle class who became Socialists had a pretty miserable time. You had to feel pretty strongly about your convictions to get through: you had to be willing to go out and be shot at.
A young Socialist lawyer would find that Liberal or Tory lawyers would not be willing to give him briefs. The parents of the girl he wanted to marry, and who wanted to marry him, would look down their noses at him. In some cases there would be real social persecution.
Today it is perfectly all right socially – and morally – to be middle class (even upper class) and believe in Socialism. Moreover, if you want to do something useful and constructive about social problems you can do it without becoming any less respectable. There are plenty of organisations which you can join, even if you are an Old Etonian, without people thinking you “red”. They might think you stupid, but not dangerous.
It was good for the men of my generation to be for many years a small minority. And it was good for us, in a different way, later, to be members of a small minority in Parliament. It was hard at the time, of course.
It was especially good for us to go back to being a tiny minority in the Thirties after having been
a majority in the Twenties. It gave us a sense of pace and a sense of proportion – very valuable things for a leader to have.
In the Thirties, with just forty-five of us there, you had to be able to get up and speak on anything. With that great mass of Tories opposite you, you learned to grin and bear it. And, of course, you learned a great deal sitting there day after day, night after night.
Just watching
I think the young men – and the older men – who came into Parliament as part of a huge Labour majority didn’t get the training we got. It’s a good thing for leaders of the House of Commons to have sat for some time in Opposition. Not too long. Too long a period of Opposition stales the mind. That was the trouble with the German Social Democrats: they had to criticise for so long, they lost the faculty for being constructive.
If you could plan these things, I think it would be a good thing for everybody to start in the House of Commons in Opposition. I think the Labour MP who starts off on the Government side misses something, and the man who starts off virtually as a Labour Minister, as several did just after the war, misses much more. It’s useful to have to sit in Opposition for your first few years, but it is particularly good for people to have to sit there unable to say very much while the ex-Ministers and the Privy Councillors are being called on all the time. Young chaps like me had to just sit there and keep quiet; but we could listen and watch points. Very important. Whoever the man is, and whatever his gifts of leadership, he needs a great deal of experience of the House of Commons.
If he doesn’t obtain the respect of his own party (and of the other side; I have yet to learn of a case in which a man who did not enjoy a great deal of respect from the Opposition had the respect of his own party) he will not get far in politics. He certainly will not get to the top.
In my lifetime the classic example of this is Lord Beaverbrook. People below the age of fifty, I am sure, do not realise how much this man counted in British politics during the First World War. He was worth millions of pounds, he had a great influence upon the Press – at a time when the influence of the Press was not only at its peak but was credited with being even higher. And he had, there is no doubt about it, a number of highly developed personal gifts – including a bold and colourful character – of the greatest political usefulness. But he did not obtain real political power, nor has he since. Not enough of his own party – let alone chaps on the other side of the House – trusted him.
Lord Northcliffe was another, and similar example. A leader has got to be trusted. When men start distrusting him he stops being a leader.
Mention of Lord Beaverbrook reminds me that next to character – or integrity – comes judgement. I put them in that order because true judgement is found, in my view, only in men of character. Judgement, indeed, presupposes character. Judgement comes from the capacity of learning from one’s mistakes, which requires humility.
Nervous strain
A man may rise to the top without judgement, but he will not stay there very long. Sir Anthony Eden is the best example of this I know.
Judgement, at any rate when exercised over a long period in everyday practical politics, is rarely found in men who do not have a strong physical constitution. Only men of very strong constitution can stand up to the nervous and physical strain of prolonged argument, especially in time of crisis.
An equable temperament, a strong constitution, and freedom from any excessive appetite of any kind are the three most important bases of a good, sound judgement. A man who lacks one of them will not be in a position of political power long before coming a cropper, and bringing his party down into the bargain. Judgement is required in order to be able to deal with men and with matters of moment. The problem of getting a Cabinet to work together is a profoundly difficult one, one which is to a very great extent veiled by the tradition of Cabinet secrecy and Cabinet responsibility.
A good leader must understand human nature, and particularly the human nature of the particular group of men he has as his lieutenants, in relation to the particular stresses and strains of the day. He must also have good tactical judgement – know what issues to exploit in the House of Commons, how to make the most of them, and which ones to go easy on. You can’t conduct a full-out dialectical battle on the floor of the House of Commons from the beginning of a Parliamentary session to the end, with everything full out the whole time.
There are the weak points and the strong points in the enemy’s case. A good Leader of the Opposition must be capable of leaping to his feet within a moment or two of the announcement of a new move by the Government, and attacking it in terms which the whole of his party can immediately grasp and rise to.
Ready to act
On the other hand, he must be equally capable of holding himself on a tight rein, and making sure that in the interests of getting off to a flying start he will not compromise the Opposition’s case. In cricketing language, he has to be ready and willing to go out and hook one off his eyebrows over the pavilion: but he has also got to move over and let a fast one go by the off-stump without nibbling at it, whatever the barrackers say.
Courage is important. A leader must have it in order to make big decisions which may, even if they are the correct ones, make him look a fool, a coward, or a renegade, in the short, or even the long, term.
Decisions about sacking people are often harder than those about policy. If he doesn’t display courage, the chances are that he will never become the leader, or that if he does, he won’t last very long.
A leader must have guts. He must be ready to act swiftly however much he has sweated about what is the right thing to do. Grown men, who know the score, do not want their leader to be continually beating his breast, and advertising his agonies. They want decision and action. Self-examination in public is the privilege of the rank and file.
Finally, of course, a man who wishes to lead in politics must, on balance, enjoy being a politician. By enjoying, I don’t mean the excitement and the pleasure of it, but the much deeper satisfaction that comes to a man who believes that what he is doing does honour to himself and his friends and is of social value.
We hear a great deal, nowadays, about the alleged intrigue, knifing and backbiting in politics. I think it is worthwhile bearing in mind that this kind of picture of politics is created largely by the politicians who have failed to get to the top. The kind of politician who leaks to the Press, or gossips to the third-rate novelist, is, in my experience, usually just that intriguing, egoistically ambitious and feuding kind of personality who fails to be accepted as a leader.
There is one thing about politics that I think cannot be disputed: if a man stays in them long enough, they nearly always reveal him for what he is, and he tends to get not only what he deserves, but to find in his fate the reflection of his own strength and weakness.
The intriguers are usually the victims of intrigue. The indiscreet usually perish by their indiscretion. Politicians sometimes get stabbed in the back; more usually it is the fault in their heel that destroys them.
This is an extract from “Attlee’s Great Contemporaries: the Politics of Character”, edited and introduced by Frank Field, with an afterword by Peter Hennessy, to be published this month by Continuum (£16.99)
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