One week near the beginning of the 1930s, the diary section of the New Statesman briefly recorded the case of Mr F Cole of Barnet, who had applied to have his rates reduced because of the “lowered tone” of the street in which he lived. The reason he gave was that a Mr G P Harding, who was a bus driver, had moved into the street and passed to and from his work wearing his uniform.
At about the same time the magazine felt obliged to defend the Jarrow marchers from criticisms, aired by observers in the conservative press, that some of these supposedly impoverished unemployed men appeared to be walking to London in new boots. This, it seems, had been taken as proof that the march was a dishonest stunt, if not part of a Bolshevik plot.
There were moments, reading back numbers of the NS, when I wanted to leap down the tunnel of history and poke people in the eye. There is surely no reasoning with opinions like those.
I was reading the back numbers because I had landed the pleasant job of selecting the articles to go into the “Twentieth Century Statesman” series (see the issues of 29 November and 6 December), this magazine’s principal contribution to millennium fever. And the pleasantness of the work was increased, rather than reduced, by the bad behaviour of Mr Cole of Barnet. I liked the feeling of indignation it gave me.
The Depression, I found, was the moment when the NS began to shed its tone of condescension. So confident was the earlier NS that it knew what was best for the working classes, and so close was it to the bosom of the Establishment of its time that the writing often seems like political Mrs Beeton.
But the collapse of the interwar economy and the refusal of successive governments to embrace radical solutions to popular misery pushed the magazine into a rage and a righteousness that are intoxicating to read today. With Keynes and G D H Cole up its sleeve, the NS had the answers. History itself was getting ready to poke Mr Cole of Barnet in the eye.
The moment of climax, however, did not come when I had expected it to – at the election landslide of 1945 – but earlier. Kingsley Martin, editor from the thirties to the fifties, saw the fall of Chamberlain in 1940 as the turning point for the left. “The greatest achievement of the new Churchill-Labour government,” declared a leading article, “has been its recognition of the nature of total war and its willingness to face the revolutionary changes which the waging of such a war implies.” The election of 1945, when it came, appeared as a decision not to reverse those changes, rather than to begin them.
From there, you might say, it was all downhill – by 1950, the NS itself was admitting that Labour, having kept its promises and exhausted its mandate, was adrift. The left never recovered the righteous momentum it had in the late thirties. And yet, though perhaps the crusading best was past, the class war was not over and the journalism could still catch the heart.
To read today Malcolm Muggeridge’s attack on Eden in the aftermath of Suez (a “deluded figure” from an “expiring imperial system”) is like hearing Henry V at Agincourt. It is a magnificent rallying cry in the class war, a denunciation of stupidity and privilege so brilliant and so vicious that you could readily join the march to burn down Brideshead after reading it.
To read Paul Johnson’s dispatch from the Paris barricades in 1968 is just as thrilling. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, to join the heady debates at the Faculty of Letters, to contemplate the wholesale transformation of society, to throw a revolutionary stone at a CRS man in the name of democratie de la rue. Bolt the door, Mr Cole of Barnet, we’re coming for you at last.
Sad, they may say. Where’s your revolution now? And your nationalisation? And your socialism? And for that matter, look what became of Muggeridge and Johnson, both renegades from the one true path.
I have often grumbled that I was born too late. My parents read this stuff fresh (we lived in Ireland; for a time in the fifties their mail-order copy used to arrive with little bits snipped out by some eager Irish censor) and they must have had the full, joyous impact of it. I am left to sniff it second-hand from the yellowing pages of the bound volumes; it’s just not fair.
From the 1970s the rot really sets in. The best pieces, it seemed to me, were no longer indignant or inspiring; they observed the pageant of disillusionment. Dennis Potter on the apotheosis of Alf Garnett; Peter Jenkins on Nixon, the maniac in the White House; David Caute’s sketch of the champagne socialist who proclaimed himself ready to give away all his money, except that “it would be a drop in the ocean, wouldn’t it?”
The NS‘s world is traditionally nostalgic – ever since the days when it used to mark Beatrice Webb’s birthdays, it has had a tendency to retrospection, and none of the bigger anniversaries has passed without some form of special supplement. But it is also prone to blame and bitterness.
Many associated with the paper in the 1970s and 1980s view it as a time when the plot was lost and the Martin inheritance squandered. Much ink has been expended in the apportioning of blame.
Reading the back numbers now this seems an empty argument. Certainly mistakes were made. Richard Crossman’s covers, which I can remember my mother complaining of at the time, look sadly misconceived. The transition to newsier journalism also brought a depressing decline in readability and a loss of authority.
But the NS did not become a really bad magazine, and even from this distance in time there is something eye-catching in almost every edition. My favourite piece of them all, Martyn Harris’s heartbreaking report on a South Wales by-election, comes from 1982, a period decried by some NS purists as barren.
The talk in Gower, Harris wrote, was of 90 per cent unemployment by the year 2000, and the by-election candidates were merely “three nice men, carefully manoeuvring over the barren middle ground of social meliorism”. Writing from the Labour heartland, he was saying, “Prepare to meet thy doom”.
Another Depression, you might say, another cause for indignation and another reason for the NS and its great ideas to reclaim the high ground. Well, no. You don’t pull off the same trick twice, or if you do it is as farce. Ian Jack’s diary of 1986 showed us the tangled modern world of Wapping and the Sun, walnut oil and yuppies – much too confusing for class war.
I’m not suggesting that there is nothing to be angry about any more, because there is obviously plenty; what is missing today is certainty. Muggeridge in 1956 and Johnson in 1968 both knew they had the answers and whether they were proved right or wrong is beside the point; I envy them their certainty.
Opinion journalism is everywhere now, and goodness knows there is no shortage of angry writing, simulated and genuine. But we have no ideologies and no certainties. Almost no one believes any more that a coherent plan, put into action with conviction, will inevitably solve most of our problems. Yet for decades just such a belief infused the pages of the NS and every hand was turned enthusiastically to the task of making it happen.
It was a good plan, in its time. What a joy it must have been to trot into work plotting the comeuppance of Mr Cole of Barnet and his ilk! No wonder Kingsley Martin was able to elevate the New Statesman to the position of the Times of the left, as his obituarist put it.
When Tony Blair stood on the brink of election victory in 1997, after 18 ghastly years, the NS invited contributors to write a few words explaining how they would vote. The great majority, unsurprisingly, plumped for Labour, but what is striking about their words is the lack of enthusiasm; they seem disillusioned with Blair even before he starts. Certainty, and the sort of hope that goes with it, were conspicuous by their absence.
We should be grateful. We are not being bombed. Hardship of the kind experienced by the Jarrow men, and by millions of other families in the 1930s, is virtually unknown. Focus groups may be bad, but they are surely a better place to shape policy than around the dinner tables of Blenheim and Chatsworth. We live in less interesting times.
Brian Cathcart’s book, “The Case of Stephen Lawrence” (Viking, £16.99), which followed his weekly columns on the Lawrence inquiry for the “NS”, has won the Crime Writers’ Association/Macallan award for non-fiction, 1999
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