Rumours of death somewhat exaggerated

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is rarely dull in print and this book is no exception. It is a rattling good read, although more because of its knowledge of insiders’ gossip, its pithy judgments of both men and measures and the rhythm of its prose than because of the force of its central thesis.

His judgments of men may be pithy, but they also often hit the mark. For instance, he recognises the Tory party’s recurrent faiblesse for charming mountebanks. So, he has Disraeli and Macmillan bang to rights and, while acknowledging Churchill’s greatness in 1940, he can say with perfect accuracy, ‘Churchill may have been the grandson of a duke, an Old Harrovian and a hussar officer, but he wasn’t a gentleman.’ However, why he thinks these three things are the qualifications of a gentleman he does not make clear. In other instances, too, the pith is more important than the accuracy of the barb. So, while he gives Lord Whitelaw the credit for spotting Archer as a wrong ’un and the poll tax as ‘trouble’, it does not stop him from describing Whitelaw as ‘at worst an ineffectual booby’. Anyone who saw Whitelaw at work realised that his old bufferdom was one of his most effective weapons. Equally, when cantering through the history of the party before he himself began to grace the fringes of the Westminster village, Wheatcroft rightly fingers Prime Minister Salisbury as an anti-democrat, but makes him seem less interesting than he was by failing to point out how the newly pragmatic post-1867 Tory nevertheless ruthlessly used the politics of democracy to dominate his party and, for much of the time, the nation for over 20 years.

Nevertheless, his knowledge of more recent events and of modern gossip is usually impeccable and this reviewer found himself nodding enthusiastically at many of his political opinions.