From Major to minor

‘Lobbying,’ writes William Waldegrave in this extraordinary memoir, ‘takes many forms.’ But he has surely reported a variant hitherto unrecorded in the annals of politics. The Cardinal Archbishop of Cardiff (‘splendidly robed and well supported by priests and other attendants’) had come to lobby him (then an education minister) against the closure of a Catholic teacher-training college. After discussion the archbishop suggested their respective entourages leave the room.

Face to face and alone with Waldegrave, the archbishop told him he had a distinguished 16th-century ancestor, who was a candidate for beatification. The unspoken implication was left hanging. ‘The Roman Catholic college duly closed,’ adds Waldegrave, ‘and I heard no more about my potentially saintly ancestor.’

A Different Kind of Weather is packed with stories and vignettes, by turns funny, weird or sad; and can be read with great interest and amusement for these alone. But I would be failing in my duty to a friend if I did not tell him, and you, that for all its finely crafted readability, for all its luminous intelligence, for all its insight, for all its honesty and for all its wisdom, this is a strange and mournful book. It will sometimes infuriate those of us who are fond of William. We think better of him than he seems to think of himself.

He understands this, of course. There’s nothing a reviewer can say that this most self-knowing of men will not already have anticipated, no criticism anyone could make that he would not readily concede. He knows he’s been incredibly lucky not only in his birth, education and family connections, but also in his great intellect. He knows his friends’ opinion: that he rose, without reproach, to what most of us would call commanding heights.