No great man lives in vain
, declared Thomas Carlyle. The history of the world is but the biography of great men. The best political biography shows the truth of this concept. From the multi-volumed Victorian 'stained glass window' doorstoppers to the no-holds-barred probings of investigative contemporaries, few such biographies can be successful unless they place their subject in their life and times. Indeed one of the most difficult tasks of any biographer is to avoid the wisdom of hindsight by judging yesterday's heroes in the context of today's standards.
We live in a golden age of political biography. Few months go by without the appearance of a new 'essential' read. Even literary biographies, such as Claire Tomalin's recent study of Thomas Hardy, often have their 'political' aspect, quite properly in the case of Hardy, whose publishing interests in his later years were looked after by the future Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. A.N. Wilson once said that the best course for a putative biographer was to choose a subject already done, as this saved time on factual research, and then to take a complete contrary view, in which case observed Selina Hastings, then writing a new life of Evelyn Waugh, she would no doubt have to claim that Waugh was a very bad writer and a very nice man. For most political biographers though the opposite is the case, as the ideal subject is an, as yet, unwritten major figure. The problem, as for mountaineers, is that the number of virgin Himalayan peaks is rapidly diminishing. Often the only alternative is to explore a hitherto unknown, but lesser range, or take a new route to a famous summit, only at journey's end to find all too clear evidence of earlier explorers.
The first biography of a major figure, one who has held some of the great offices of state, may be the most rewarding, and challenging, of subjects, but there are many rooms in the mansion of political biography. Clearly no future biographer of Churchill is going to be short of readily available material. Indeed Roy Jenkins' Churchill (2001) stormed to the top of the best seller list without Jenkins having to leave his book-lined study at East Hendred at all, whilst his Asquith (1964) did likewise on the back of important primary research in newly available archives.
Four types of political biography are of particular interest, especially as examples of each have recently appeared to great acclaim: the first biography of a major figure; the second, or subsequent, biography of a hitherto under-estimated Prime Minister; a new biography of an indisputably front-rank Prime Minister; and the thematic 'group' biography. As my four political biographies to date fall roughly into these categories, I offer some observations on the particular problems of each genre, and how the recent examples have overcome them.
In 1984, I was invited to write the official, and first, biography of Selwyn Lloyd, former Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Speaker of the House of Commons. There were two advantages in the timing. Selwyn Lloyd's 490 boxes of papers had recently been deposited at Churchill College, Cambridge, and I was given exclusive access to them. Secondly, Lloyd had died, prematurely after sudden illness, but six years earlier, so the majority of his colleagues were still available for interview. In the next four years I interviewed nearly 500 people associated with Selwyn Lloyd's multi-faceted life, including Harold Macmillan who had dramatically dismissed him in the so-called Night of the Long Knives in July 1962, alongside one third of the Cabinet, 'the wrong third', as Harold Wilson, who also saw me, observed. So the book was based on such oral evidence; visits to the places associated with Lloyd, including, thanks to Mrs Thatcher's help, both Chequers (Lloyd's grace and favour residence, loaned to him by Macmillan as 'Lady Dorothy didn't like weeding other people's gardens') and 10 Downing Street; as well as the fascinating archive at Churchill College. People, places and papers make up an essential triptych for contemporary biography and help to give insights into what Stanley Baldwin called 'the endless adventure of ruling men'.
Selwyn Lloyd was succeeded as Chancellor of the Exchequer in July 1962 by Reginald Maudling, who until the appearance in 2004 of Lewis Baston's pioneering biography Reggie, could rightly lay claim to being the most important modern political figure (he had also been Home Secretary) to have gone unrecorded, a position now occupied by 'Bobbety' Salisbury. Baston's experience seems to have been remarkably similar to mine over Lloyd. He had co-operation from the family, and access to Maudling's voluminous papers, recently catalogued at Churchill College, Cambridge. Bastin's research is thorough and the book is a central contribution to the history of the post-war Conservative Party.
Following the publication of my Lloyd biography in 1989, I was invited by Alec Douglas-Home to write his official life (published in 1996, and now re-issued by Politico's). Although there had been two earlier lives, by John Dickie and Kenneth Young, neither book had been able to draw on Home's papers, to which I was granted exclusive access. Again there were many important interviewees. You must speak to David Bowes-Lyon's sister, advised Alec Home at one stage. This sister was, of course, the Queen Mother, who had known Home for over eighty years since childhood. The challenge of the Home biography was different from that of the Lloyd one. Home's Premiership came at the end of a long period of domination by his Party and only lasted a year. In that he was analagous to Lord Rosebery, also an aristocratic scion of Eton and Christ Church, and Prime Minister at the end of the Gladstone era, whose career and life have recently been triumphantly resurrected by Leo Mckinstry in his prize winning Rosebery (2005). With both Home and Rosebery, the Premiership was but one part of a lengthy career and a fascinating life, and the challenge of resurrecting a hitherto underestimated figure by close analysis of new material bore a rich harvest for McKinstry.
After the Home biography, indeed during its research, so that Alec Home called it my 'overtime', the Countess of Avon, invited me to write a new life of her husband, Anthony Eden (published in 2003), a commission unique in biographical history, as it was the second such authorised work, the first having been published in 1986 by Robert Rhodes James, also a biographer of Rosebery. Not only was this the second official life of Eden, it was also one of many. A similar situation obtained with Philip Williamson's brilliant Stanley Baldwin (1999). Williamson's solution was the right one, a work of real academic thoroughness, combining a cumulative survey of all known primary material with fresh judgments, soundly based, that give new insight into the Conservative Party in turbulent times.
The 'group' biography is notoriously difficult and it seems retrospectively reckless that my first book, The Uncrowned Prime Ministers (1980), a study of Sir Austen Chamberlain, Lord Curzon and Rab Butler in the light of their unexpected joint failure to achieve the Premiership, should have been an essay in this genre. Yet I was encouraged by many people, including Harold Macmillan, who had known all three figures, to persist, though Macmillan, only half jokingly, advised me, Of course it would make a more amusing book to have a fourth section on George Brown. And indeed it is Macmillan who is at the centre of what is one of the finest examples of this genre, Stuart Ball's The Guardsman: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World They Made (2002). In a sparkling book, Stuart Ball traces the careers of Macmillan, Bobbety Salisbury (then Cranborne), Oliver Lyttelton and Harry Crookshank, from Eton days through the trenches of the Western Front to the post-war Conservative Cabinets. The book will be an indispensable starting point for Salisbury's eventual first biographer, and will have an honoured place among the research materials for my next book, a life of Harold Macmillan, due from Chatto and Windus in 2009.
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