The TLS blog

Mandelson, the triumph

It is always good to see conventional wisdom overturned. Peter Mandelson's memoir was supposed to be a failure because only very popular politicians are supposed to do well from their books. In the past couple of weeks there has been much media muttering about how Denis Healey's sales had been the best among recent Labour memoirs because so many buyers had liked the beetle-browed sometime Chancellor of the Exchequer so much. The latest Private Eye cover, picking up the theme, shows New Labour's Prince of Darkness protesting 'I haven't sold out'  and being reminded that his book was 'so boring' and could hardly be expected to attract purchasers.

In truth, and to the delight of the excellent HarperCollins (ok; disclosure; my publisher as well as his), Mandelson's memoir, The Third Man, has been a storming chart-topping success. I can't even turn on my new iPad without being encouraged to buy an extra electronic copy. (No, Mr Crean, [see comment on previous post] I am not iPadding from Paddington Station) The book itself does not make its author more likeable - but then maybe that never did matter as much as we were told.

It is a story, heavily advertised on television as a bedtime story, in which the author reads to a child about his derring-does in the wicked world of politics. Its theme is how a glowering leader from the north is for ten years thwarted by his sunnier, southern companion in his lust to rule the whole kingdom - and how the story-teller, a sensitive idealist, becomes the victim of the northman’s unimaginably dark machinations.

Peter Mandelson shows Gordon Brown, whom only three months ago he was supporting to remain British Prime Minister, as, in truth, a very vengeful troll, paranoid and dangerous to all who ever crossed him. Tony Blair, his predecessor, is portrayed as lighter, quicker, but less hard-working and too weak to rid himself of his rival. The Third Man is the visionary communicator who once upon a time foresaw the strengths of both men but who, in his own four stints as a minister, becomes cursed to be crushed between them. Like many successful bedtime stories, much of Peter Mandelson’s tale is written as though the author were still a child himself, a brave lost boy lashing out in large black letters, more charcoal than crayon, some of them smudged by tears.

This is thus an unusual memoir – and not only because of the fairyland character of its writer. It is also a cautionary tale of our time, a reminder of the 1990s and how widespread was then the wish that something seemingly impossible might happen, that the Labour Party should finally become electable. I remember it well. John Major had become a Tory embarrassment. The idea that Labour dross might be turned to gold was highly attractive. When Mandelson began spinning Brown and Blair to the media his wizardry was much admired. It was in a good cause. Even when he became famed for the previously secret and not always pleasant tricks of his trade, he kept his allure. He was a modernist as well as a moderniser, not the first to exaggerate and deceive on behalf of Westminster masters but the first to make it fashionable. Spin was in the air.

The key moment in the book comes in May 1994 when the Labour leader, John Smith, dies suddenly and both Brown and Blair want his job. To be a servant of two masters has been a stock tale of woe for centuries. Read Goldoni and laugh again. While Brown is acknowledged as the senior, Mandelson and most of the media prefer sunny Blair. The strings pulled between Mandelson and the media in these days become a matter of obsession for Brown, of horror that his favourite conjuror’s tricks have been played against him.

 After a still disputed power-sharing deal, Blair wins the leadership, Brown ‘hates the world’, ‘New Labour’ wins the 1997 election and Mandelson, from a formal job in the Cabinet Office, remains for real purposes a spin-doctor in his previous role of woe. When he faces an internal party election, the Deputy Prime Minister compares him to a crab in a bottle. There is a compensating letter on his ‘predicament’ from the Prince of Wales who notes the ‘vulnerable and sensitive inner core’ that lies beneath the ‘inevitable outer carapace’. Mandelson  notes ‘how unthinkable it would have been for a fellow politician to have paused to reflect on what might lie beneath my outer shell or to grasp my ‘predicament’. This the first knot in a long rope of pity for himself and candid critiques for colleagues.

 When he gets his first ministerial department, he survives only six months. ‘It was my own mistakes that caused my downfall’ he writes, ‘but the engine of my destruction was Gordon Brown’. The mistake, taking a secret loan from a fellow minister, seems trivial now, Gordon Brown as an engine of destruction rather less so. Blair’s wife says of Brown ‘that a person who causes evil to another will in the end suffer his returns’. She is ‘angry and upset and worried for Tony’. On holiday in Corfu, Serena Rothschild (whose family, with Mick Jagger and Kate Moss, provides colour in this dark tale) asks Mandelson why he has so many enemies. He cites his clinging reputation as the creature behind the curtain, the ‘sinister minister’. If only a person were ‘like some Lego toy to be disassembled and refashioned at will’.

Six months later he is back in government, abusing Brown while the Prime Minister lies in the Queen’s Bedroom at Hillsborough Castle promising to ‘protect’ him from a second destruction. Two years on, in a scandal less comprehensible than the first, he is fired for allowing incorrect briefings to be given to the press about an Indian businessman’s passport inquiry. While his closest friends desert him, Brown is ‘briefly warmer to me than at any time since my ‘betrayal’ in 1994’. This is merely the warmth of the destroyer who has won; ‘Gordon wants you buried’, Blair admits while attempting to lure Mandelson back for the next election campaign. Then comes 9/11 and the Iraq war and the sense, intensified in this version of the story, that for once, and on one issue only, Blair is free – not just to stay in power but to make decisions on his own.

The Third Man watches from the wings while a ‘cowed’ Blair considers moving Brown from the Treasury but balks at the dangers. Brown wants nothing bar the inheritance that for so long he has felt was his, an imminent date for Blair to retire. Blair describes Brown as ‘aggressive, brutal. . like something out of the Mafiosi’ but eventually has to give way. Mandelson is exiled in Brussels as an EU Commissioner. The servant and the two masters seem to have reached the end of their show until this year’s shock encore, in which Mandelson accepts a peerage from his destroyer and makes a ‘third return from the Cabinet dead’, arguably the greatest conjuring trick of  all. Blair is back too – retaining ‘a trainspotter’s interest in British politics’ and a deep care ‘about his own legacy’. The collapse of New Labour cannot be stopped, as all three know, but the last attempt at persuading the voters otherwise permits some last black reflection on the ‘scars’, the ‘mutually assured destruction’ and how it became ‘all so wretched between us’.

This one will sell and sell.

iPadding at last - and Mandelson too

This is the first post from my new iPad.

 I appreciate that I am late in this game and that there may be no new praise to give to this remarkable reading machine.

 I am not sure I have quite maximized it for writing.But doubtless that will come.

 Buying it was a success in itself, a morning trip to Regent St with TLS commercial director Jo Cogan, a wearily smiling promise from a boy in a blue T-shirt that an iPad might be available soon, a painstaking registration requiring memories of a password once used to buy Miles Davis CDs and long forgotten, a strict warning that if a machine should by any chance appear for me I must claim it within 24 hours or lose it to arrival, a fierce rejection of the thought that I might pay in advance to secure my stash (buying heroin must surely be easier than this), a return emptyhanded to the office and then, lo, an email that same afternoon congratulating me on my luck, the arrival (this time I mean 'arrival' while last time as this keyboard did not quite understand I meant 'a rival'), a lon queue to collect my prize that starred a cast of city boys, dons, civil servants and young men with £50 notes one would never see queuing for anything else (I meant a 'long' queue but I still cannot go back on this keyboard, a longer queue anyway than any I have stayed in voluntarily since the Hard Rock Cafe in 1975).

 So now I have it. More maybe later.

 To those who have asked about my review of Peter Mandelson (see last post), it is in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow.

Peter Mandelson again

I spent last night with Peter Mandelson’s memoir, The Third Man - about which more later perhaps after I’ve written the review. Some of the pleasure of it comes from the confirmation of Downing Street gossip that I once thought I knew and maybe then even cared about. There would have been even more pleasure if the dark events described had been happening in someone else's  country.

It has certainly been  peculiar to be taken back to political events that I watched so closely as Editor of The Times but which at the TLS now seem part of a wholly different life. On the subject of that life as it is now, there are two more pleasing reviews of the American edition of Spartacus Road - from Michael Korda in the Daily Beast and Barry Strauss in the Wall Street Journal.

Peregrine Prykke revisiting

Peregrine Prykke was the name of a keen young critic, fresh to the ‘London literary world’of the early 1970s, whose wide-eyed 'pilgrimage' around pubs, parties and poetry magazines was recorded in rhyming couplets by Clive James in 1974, reissued in an ‘improved version’ in 1976 and included in his 2003 collection, The Book of My Enemy. 

It is the 1976 edition that has been on my desk for the past few days, the orange paper cover faded to white around the spine and a pencil inscription declaring that at some unspecified date its price was lowered from £5 to £3. Inside, however, it is as fresh as ever. Last night I reread the whole thing.

Why? Well, for various reasons associated loosely with the management of the TLS, I’ve been seeing more than usual keen young critics. Although it would have been trite to advise that every one of them should read ‘Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage’ (all were much too smart for such advice: and some may have already translated it into French) I can still urge a new and wider readership for it here.

The hero, Perry, is an early baby-boomer whose mother has an upwardly mobile ambition for her son. His parents, indeed, bear some small resemblance to those of Christopher Hitchens as described in his new memoir, Hitch 22. At Perry's  'Indirect Grant Semi-Public Grammar/ Fee-paying Approved Labour-camp cum Crammer' his early intellectual hero is F.R Looseleaf, master of ‘the Felt Creative Thought/ The Force of Thought, of Life Felt to the Full'.

From that point he is lost. At Cambridge there arrives in his life Doc Stein, master of 'tags in very tongue , alive and dead/ Trinitro-Ruritanian, Infra-Red/ Low-Temperature Etruscan, Serb, Seismography/ Deoxyribose, X-ray,Crystallography’. While F.R. Leavis is sadly dead, George Steiner is fully active back in Cambridge as admiring TLS readers well know. There is a chance here to join him in his most influential middle years.

Cambridge completed, he meets in a Soho pub Ian Hammerhead, his first editor, who passes on his ‘first great principle’ of being commissioned: that ‘I take bitter with my double scotch’. While Ian Hamilton too has passed on to the great bar in the sky, Al Alvarez, who gives Perry excellent financial advice under the name L.L. El Al, is still worth attention from the young. In London today we no longer find ‘Richard Bierstein, rich in jest/ whose task it is empirically to test/ The thousand different kinds and strengths of ale/ Great Britain’s countless pubs have got for sale’.

But with Richard Boston, to general regret, having followed the fate of his sometime literary, ecological magazine, we still, of course, have Seamus Feamus, the now even more famous Nobel Prize winner for poetry, whom James places in the same bar with all the other Belfast poets called Seamus. Marvyn Grabb, the giant of TV arts programmes, graces us still even though the profligacy of the ‘State Arts Hand-out panel’ which organises Festivities for reconciling literary cliques does not – or, anyway, not for much longer.

Roger McGough is now the distinguished presenter of Poetry Please on Radio Four for a Sunday afternoon. But here he can be caught alongside his fellow Liverpudlian, the then very fashionable Brian Patten as “A double-act beneath a sheet of satin/ Complete with cardboard head and frayed rope tail./The Panto Horse from Liverpool! Can’t fail./From each end of the horse line emanated/ Alternately until its case was stated.’

The highlight of Perry’s short literary life (and there! I’ve revealed the end: it is indeed all too literally a short life, tragically concluded after Perry’s debut book of criticism bites some of the hands that have fed him) is a meeting with the acclaimed American Bob Lull at which his flattery is faultless. Yes, we now lack Robert Lowell, Kingsley ‘King Kong’ Amis, Norman ‘Moonbase’ Mailer and Harold ‘Half-Pint’ Pinter too. But a fresh young critic, new to London or a denizen of the literary festival circuit then unknown, may still meet Big John Gross, much revered former editor of the TLS, Greer Garstleigh , Australian compatriot of the author, Mag Scrabble, Clara Tomahawk, Lady Freesia Fruitcake and Kingsley’s son, ‘Kid Kong’, who read the poem at its 1974 premier.

There should surely be a revival, a further  republication, a new improved version of Clive James’s wondrous work. How else will  the young learn their trade?

Talking slavery in Ohio

A reader from Toledo, Ohio, called on the telephone just now (a rare enough thing in these email days) to say that he had bought my Spartacus Road in the new Overlook Press American edition (for which I thanked him politely) and had been shocked and horrified at my imputation that Spartacus was not trying to end slavery and to make mankind free.

He had bought the book on the strength of a favourable review in the Sunday edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in which there was no mention of so heretical a thought. Surely the ending of the evil of slavery was the whole purpose of the revolt and, while the writer's (ie my) experiences on the Spartacus Road were of great interest, the descriptions of cancer especially so, the effect was spoilt by by failure to accept the central point of the whole story.

I thanked him again. A writer should be properly grateful when a reader reads a thoughtful review and then calls across the Atlantic. I pointed out that there was no evidence that Spartacus sought freedom for anyone but his own band. Yes, he did not want to be a slave himself but no, he had no more ambition to end slavery than anyone else at the time and for nineteen hundred years later.

There was silence at the end of the phone. Then a certain coolness. Lack of evidence seemed to be no defence at all against my caller's confidence in a self-evident truth. I tried another approach. Roman slavery, I suggested, was not quite like the American kind. It was very little do with race - or, at least, little to do with any particular race.  The Romans were notably even-handed in their view that other peoples could be enslaved, all other peoples, whatever their skin colour, hair colour, size, sex and other variants in the human appearance. They occasionally debated whether certain types were better for certain tasks, but only in the most desultory way.

Everyone everywhere kept slaves, well everywhere we know of. No one knows if Spartacus and his band had been slaves or freemen at home before they became Roman slaves; there were probably both kinds in the armies that defeated the Romans so terrifyingly regularly beween 73 and 71. Changing one' own designation was the key, not changing the system. More silence at the end of the phone. So was I suggesting that the slaves brought to America had been slaves  in Africa? Well some of them had been, I began, before recognising that the 'not my period' defence, so useful in so many academic arguments, was much the best one to deploy at this point. I stopped. He seemed almost satisfied. He said he was going to recommend that one of his best friends buy my book too - and that I might be hearing from him.

I thanked him again - most sincerely.

Back in the sack

 ‘Pro Roscio’ was the shortened title of the first proper Latin book I ever read, from pages that are back beside me now this morning, the two words still overwritten by hand in bright blue ink on a grey cloth cover faded by schoolboy use and abuse. Why? Well, there has arrived at the TLS a bright green-and-yellow copy of this speech, Pro Sexto Roscio, that Cicero gave in 80 BC; and tonight, in celebration of that, I'm going to read it again.

Celebration? Yes, absolutely. There is something peculiarly enjoyable about a new book that has meant alot as an old book. I even found myself rereading Wind in the Willows the other day just because it had arrived as a crisp Oxford World's Classic. Ratty and Mole filled a Summer evening better than any June party.

My original copy of E.H.Donkin’s 1916 Pro Roscio has survived its last forty years rather better than its first fifty. Among its fragile pages there is much side-lining, underlining and micro-lettering between the lines, the means by which a stumbling translation could be made aloud at the master’s demand. The first sentence, heavily marked, has still some of the magic of the first memory of anything: ‘Credo ego vos, iudices, mirari  quid sit quod cum tot summi oratores hominesque nobilissimi sedeant. .. .’ the words with which Cicero is justifying to the jury the appearance of one so young and inexperienced a man as himself in a case of such criminal and political weight as that of Sextus Roscius, accused of parricide by allies of an all-powerful dictator. If only one Latin sentence were to stay for a lifetime, this is surely a substantial improvement on 'Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres'.

 You may think that it does not reflect well on P. Stothard, Lower 6th Classics, 1966, that he still possesses one of his school’s Donkins, a text which could certainly have served another generation at least, telling its inspirational story of how Marcus Tullius Cicero, aged only 26, took on the tyrannical establishment of his time and saved an innocent farmer from being sewn up in a bag, thrown into the river Tiber and drowned. Too late for that now. Perhaps there were extenuating circumstances for its removal from its proper home. I wish I could say I made extensive use of it. What I did achieve, I can safely say, was to save it from the depradations of being further read.

Roscius was accused of killing his father in a case that Cicero claimed was a conspiracy to ensure that his valuable farmlands could be divided between allies of the dictator Sulla. Much of the discussion over the centuries has been about the known facts, few as they are, the motives of the main players and the institutional laws under which the trial was conducted. Did Roscius deserve the not-guilty verdict that Cicero won for him? Wasn’t he more like a rural loner, just the sort that would blow away a father in town, than Cicero's rustic innocent, the sort that felt nervous beyond his own fields and hedgerows. As the editor of the new CUP edition, Andrew R. Dyck, argues, his approach has had to be ‘rethought with reference to the needs and questions posed by today’s students’. I’m looking forward to seeing how he does that.

Was it the punishment itself that saved Roscius? That is what we were once told, as I recall. Apart from the declaratory introduction to the speech, the description of the peculiar Roman penalty reserved for parricide – varied at times with addition of a viper, a cock and an ape – was the passage which, to judge by the density of ink and pencil, most of the Donkin’s previous owners seem to have noticed most. This nasty fate, as Dyck points out in his introduction, was not meant to be a deterrent, as Cicero claimed, but was more likely to have been a ritual for removing something strange and nasty from the body politic; hermaphrodites and other freaks might also, it seems, have found themselves choking to death in a leather sack with only some very cross creatures for comfort.

No matter what the original motivation was, discussion of the ‘gruesome and unique punishment’, as Dyck describes it, was definitely an attraction of the speech to the young and curious. (We did not yet have the benefit of comparing the Chinese version, pictured above.) When Cicero grew older, grander, more pompous and often less likeable than the man of 80 BC (and before his own hands and tongue were nailed to the woodwork where he had made his speeches) he became ‘slightly embarrassed by the purple passage about the parricide’s sack’. But the Pro Roscio was still a speech he recommended that his own son should read. It likened prosecutors to dogs, assassins to gladiators and became a standard in the oratory schools. Donkin and Dyck are in a distinguished tradition of its explicators. Since no small part of the political context was the argument of the time about how to change Rome’s traditional voting methods, there may even be some new echoes.