Henry Fairlie was the journalistic idol of my youth. I met him, I think, first in 1955 when he had just started writing his Political Commentary in The Spectator — and it was on the mischievous appeal of those early columns that we had invited him to come and address the Oxford University Labour Club. Certainly at the time he represented a total breath of fresh air in the then somewhat musty world of political journalism.
In the Observer the part-time novelist Hugh Massingham may have blazed a new narrative trail, with his ability weekly to follow E.M. Forster’s advice and tell a story; but it was Fairlie, with his buccaneering streak and instinct for irreverence, who completed the revolution in the coverage of British politics. At Ian Gilmour’s invitation he joined The Spectator — where for the first few months he wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Trimmer’ — in November 1954. By June 1956 — after some dispute over a running credit for wine bills — he had gone to the lusher pastures, in terms of both salary and expenses, of the Daily Mail. But by then his name was made, and the modern political column had been born.
He had not, of course, burst out of nowhere. For the four years immediately preceding his appointment to The Spectator he had been the chief political leader writer on the Times. But he chafed against the anonymity involved in that role (broken only when he engaged in a fierce correspondence with Dick Crossman in the letter columns of the New Statesman) and was only too delighted to enter the Vanity Fair world of weekly political journalism where, with his boyish charm, he found himself immediately at home. Not the least merit of this collection of his pieces — put together by a senior writer on Newsweek — is that it does justice to the sheer scale and scope of Fairlie’s interests.
We start with what could be called his miniaturist period — the vivid vignettes of such improbable socialists as Woodrow Wyatt (‘Woodrow, he says to himself, as he puffs out his chest and tramps through the division lobby, you are treading where Chetham trod’) or Maurice Edelman (immortally christened ‘the blue-blazer and brass-button boy of the Labour Party’) before proceeding to the American presidency and cosmic political themes.
Nor is that just a matter of editorial discretion. It also reflects the story of Fairlie’s own life. For, to this country’s great loss, he left the United Kingdom for the United States, first in 1965 for seven months and then in 1966 for good. Although his wife and three children returned barely a year later, the pater familias was never to pass through UK immigration again. There were rumours of outstanding writs against him from the Inland Revenue, even of threats to his liberty on the part of a tipstaff specially commissioned by the High Court but, whatever the reason, he obviously thought it prudent never to risk coming within British jurisprudence again.
Accordingly, at the age of 42 — or almost two decades older than Alistair Cooke was when he first crossed the Atlantic in the Thirties — he resolved to turn himself into a full-time reporter of the American political scene.
It was not initially an easy transformation. It so happened that I was living in Washington as the Observer’s correspondent when Fairlie arrived for his second (and lifetime) sojourn as basically a freelance with no other means of support apart from a £100-a-week column from John Junor’s Sunday Express. Nor could anyone accuse him of going native, or even of setting out to make himself popular. His first major journalistic exploit was a no-holds-barred assault on the Kennedys — and, in particular, on the funding of the then still being built Kennedy Library in Boston. Originally published in the Sunday Telegraph but picked up by a number of US newspapers, it was hardly calculated to commend him to the fly-blown courtiers of Camelot who, even under LBJ, continued to dominate the social scene. Alas, that noteworthy piece of bold, adventurous journalism does not find a place in these pages, which tend to be given over to grander and deeper issues. But at least it put Fairlie’s credentials on the table, credentials in which fearlessness (not to say recklessness — he firmly predicted, after all, a Carter victory over Reagan) always played a prominent part.
Whether because of that or not, Fairlie in economic terms never prospered in America. He had many loyal friends but, even they soon got tired of being regularly touched for ‘loans’. By the time I left, he was living in a tiny doll’s house down by the canal in Georgetown, but even that had to be given up well before his death in 1990. By then he was living (and sleeping) in the offices of the New Republic, the Washington liberal weekly that in the latter years of his life provided the main outlet for his work. But at least by that stage he could claim to have become a legend — and if this book does nothing else (its title pinched from what was intended to be his autobiography but the manuscript for which somehow either was lost or never got written) it should at least ensure that his fame outlasts that of ‘the solemn, safe men’ who according to J.K. Galbraith, ‘always make it’.
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