‘He did it years before William Donaldson did The Henry Root Letters,’ said my husband querulously, as though I had accused him on peak-time television of saying the opposite.
The ‘he’ in question was Humphry Berkeley, who as a Cambridge undergraduate just after the second world war pursued an elaborate hoax by assuming the identity of a fictional public school headmaster, Rochester Sneath, to write embarrassing letters to the famous, eliciting risible replies. The collection was not published until 1974. The Henry Root Letters were published in 1980.
Berkeley wrote another book about leaving the Conservatives and joining Labour, published in 1972. It was called Crossing the Floor. The title was misleading because the phrase refers to MPs who move over to the opposing benches, and Berkeley had already lost his seat, in 1966 – partly, it was said, because the electors of Lancaster did not care for his prominent attempt to decriminalise homosexual acts. ‘The House didn’t like Humphry Berkeley,’ explained Leo Abse, the MP who carried through the reform in 1967. ‘He was an enfant terrible who never grew up.’
The phrase crossing the floor has been thoroughly supplanted by defecting. That is what Dan Poulter, MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, is universally said to have done by joining the Labour party. It is Cold War language. ‘Of the half million Russian refugees in western Germany,’ reported Life in 1950, ‘more than 100,000 fought in the Soviet army and defected to the West between 1946 and 1948.’ Churchill never said, ‘The opposition occupies the benches opposite, but the enemy sits behind you.’ Yet the language of warfare is applied to domestic politics of even the friendliest kind.
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