Disraeli wrote a great novel. Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Roy Hattersley is a famed essayist. But are there any good writers among today's MPs? Johann Hari spends a week reading politicians' novels, including the new thriller by Iain Duncan Smith
Every six months or so, there is a predictable fuss when a literary grandee (more often than not V S Naipaul) complains that our politicians are philistines who can barely read, never mind write. Perhaps some brave soul could approach him and point out that we are in fact living in an era of unprecedented politico-literary bliss. We have a novelist as leader of Her Majesty's Opposition no less, two novelists in the cabinet, and at least seven novelists sitting as MPs. Yet could it be that Naipaul's capacious reading has somehow, incomprehensibly, not extended to Helen Liddell's Elite (Arrow), Peter Hain's The Peking Connection (Lawrence & Wishart), or Iain Duncan Smith's forthcoming Ithaca?
Elite is, without question, a work of extraordinary prescience. It was written in 1990, when Thatcher was tottering and Kinnock was expected to be the next Labour prime minister. Who then could have foreseen the day when an MP called Tony with a seat in the north-east of England - a man with "a famous smile" and "blue eyes that seemed to pierce" - would be the first Labour PM in two decades? That, after a few months in office, people would begin to say "he doesn't look as fit as he used to"? That he would have a fiercely clever, ambitious wife who "had taken a moderately astute politician, capitalised on his disarming good looks . . . and made him Leader"? That this wife would have "ruthlessly dieted, exercised and stretched herself to make her a suitable consort for Tony"?
Liddell was just as effective at predicting her own fate. Her heroine, Ann Clarke, becomes the first female Secretary of State for Scotland - a trick that her creator was to pull off less than a decade later. Admittedly, Ann Clarke is something of a fantasy figure: "Tall, with a rich fall of auburn hair, she strode loose-limbed as an athlete . . . This woman, they said, had everything . . . The strength of her presence brought a silence so still that the muted whirr of a tape recorder grew loud throughout the hall." Not even Helen Liddell's mother would say the same of our gallant author.
The plot is convoluted: the character begins as a figure from Jilly Cooper (lots of cunnilingus and Cartier jewels) but slowly turns into a figure from Elmore Leonard. Ann Clarke is leader of a far-left faction of the Labour Party that is increasingly capturing the public mood. Scots in particular are agitated about US nuclear bases and the abolition of social security, and "the beautiful young politician" Clarke massages their every worry. She is supported by a "workers' militia", which, under her secret control, is bombing financial institutions. Britain is sliding into chaos and revolution; poor old Tony turns to drink as Mrs Tony plots to bring down Ann ("she's a packaged piece of destruction, aimed straight at us!").
It transpires, however, that far from seeking the Labour leadership, as we are led to believe, Clarke has in fact been planted as a mole in the Labour Party by the CIA. Her task is to cause such havoc in the country that the United States can legitimately invade Britain, impose order, annex it as the 51st state and seize North Sea oil. As if that weren't bizarre enough, Liddell manages to draw in the Freemasons, Jack the Ripper and cameos from Barbara Castle and Margaret Thatcher. This book seems to be evidence that at least one cabinet minister has indeed tried powerful hallucinogenic drugs.
Ithaca, the novel by Iain Duncan Smith to be published by Robson Books next summer (just in time for IDS to take up a new career, no doubt), will confirm the whisper sweeping the Tory back benches that IDS's big problem is that he isn't terribly bright. The first two chapters have been leaked to the NS, and we can reveal that it does indeed offer intriguing insights into IDS's politics.
Ithaca is set in an idealised United States, which is revealing, because it is increasingly clear that IDS's politics are those of an American nationalist who happens to have been born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Less than a decade ago, IDS was campaign manager for John Redwood in his wacky bid to become Prime Minister - and Redwood has since openly proclaimed that he thinks Britain is much closer to the US than Europe and should aspire to join Nafta. IDS's imaginative universe is American, both in fiction and in politics. He places his characters in America just as he would place Britain's tax and public services policies there, too.
The thriller - in so far as Ithaca has a plot - is about an art fraud, just like in Jeffrey Archer's first published novel, Not a Penny Less, Not a Penny More. An American politician's past returns to haunt him when details of the fraud emerge. Is it just me, or is this a particularly unwise idea to plant in the minds of potential Tory voters? Memo to IDS: avoid reminding people of sleaze, lies, fraud and Archer.
Politicians who write dreadful fiction are not confined to one side of the partisan divide. The Peking Connection (1995) is so bad that I am beginning to agree with John Pilger that Peter Hain should be tried at The Hague for crimes against humanity - not for sanctions against Iraq, you understand, but for crimes against literature. This is from the first page: "35 million people were employed to spread manure on their fields. For at least 4,000 years it had been the law that all excreta should be used as fertiliser and collectors called daily at every house with their barrows."
The plot centres on an attempt to kill leading figures in the ANC. The hero, Jim Evans, "an ordinary British scientist", who, intriguingly, is afraid to express sexual attraction to women because it is frowned on in the left-wing circles in which he socialises, stumbles across "a network of international intrigue" while on a delegation to China. He gradually uncovers a nuclear conspiracy linking China to apartheid South Africa. You might expect Hain, with his long experience in the anti-apartheid movement, to have interesting insights into this world, but sadly, this often impressive and candid politician has little to say that is original or surprising. Instead, he offers us literary Valium, with dialogue such as this: "The tragedy is that it all had a noble aim. Mao started the cultural revolution to rid the country of complacency, corruption and fossilised bureaucracy. He wanted to create the sense of a socialist crusade which followed liberation. But it became a . . ."
So are there any contemporary politicians who should not confine themselves to writing introductions to white papers or select committee reports? Actually, yes. There are two sitting MPs who could happily make a decent living from their fiction. The novels of Ann Widdecombe are - I'm surprised to say - undeniably impressive, challenging and morally complex. Her first novel, The Clematis Tree, explores with sensitivity and tact the difficulties confronted by a family caring for a disabled child as a bill on euthanasia passes through parliament. She even manages to write an ambiguous ending (ambiguity is strikingly absent from Widdecombe's politics), which can be read as sympathetic towards a relative who kills the disabled child.
Widdecombe is beaten to the title of Best Novelist in the House by the Labour MP and former journalist Chris Mullin, although he hasn't written anything since the excellent Year of the Fire Monkey (1991). His first novel, A Very British Coup, is still widely read and was reissued only last year by Politico's. The plot is a blast of red fire from another age. Written in 1982, it is very much a product of the Labour Party's fight against the hard-left Bennite faction that Mullin broadly supported. Put simply, it asks: what if a Bennite were elected in Britain today with a thumping majority?
Mullin opens the novel with an actual column written by Peregrine Worsthorne, in the days when he was at the heart of the Conservative establishment, before his reincarnation as a thoughtful contributor to the NS. Entitled "When treason can be right", it explains: "I could easily imagine myself being tempted into a treasonable disposition under a Labour government dominated by the Marxist left . . . Suppose, in these circumstances, one were approached by the CIA who sought to enlist one's help in seeking to 'destabilise' this far-left government. Would it necessarily be right to refuse co-operation?"
And so it comes to pass with the election as Labour prime minister of Harry Perkins, a former steelworker committed to "withdrawal from the Common Market, public control of finance, abolition of the House of Lords, the honours list and the public schools", not to mention unilaterally dismantling all British nuclear weapons and closing down all American air bases on our soil. The British establishment quickly moves against Perkins. Or, as the first line of the novel explains with delightful understatement: "The news that Harry Perkins was to become Prime Minister went down very badly in the Athenaeum."
The head of MI5 (cheekily named Sir Peregrine Craddock), the governors of the Bank of England, the proprietors of Britain's newspapers and the heads of the civil service gather together to pull off "a very British coup" - quiet, unknown to the public, and with no military involvement, but a coup as ruthless as the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. Paul Johnson called the novel "preposterous" at the time of its first publication, and, in many ways, it is. Yet as a historical record of Bennite fears and aspirations, it is remarkable. The Bennites genuinely believed in the British establishment not solely as a self-serving, self-protecting elite, but as a tiny cadre that gathered in smoky rooms to destroy the Labour left. The novel imagines - with a rather disturbing flourish - a British prime minister being able to snub the IMF by appealing to Moscow and Libya for huge loans.
But Mullin's work endures for more than its political significance. As a work of literature, it remains rewarding. Who could resist this description of a meeting of US intelligence chiefs: "The heaviness of their jowls lent gravity to the occasion."
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