George Osborne, the next editor of the Evening Standard, doesn’t have much professional experience of journalism – apart from a few weeks on The Times in 1993, after he left Oxford. Soon after, he left for Conservative Central Office, and you know what happened next. He did, though, do some student journalism at University as co-Editor of Isis magazine. I know because I was the Isis joint features editor at the time – as indeed was the present TLS History Editor.
I can’t pretend it was groundbreaking journalism. Osborne wrote a piece, “Spies Like Us”, about Oxford’s espionage history. He wrote another article, “Greed, Desperation and the Tuesday Game”, about Britain’s four leading poker players. Even that was higher brow than one of my contributions – “Around the World in 80 Lays”, the tale of Anne Cummings, a widely-travelled, octogenarian nymphomaniac.
As well as his six well-documented jobs, Osborne is also writing a book, “The Age of Unreason”, about the crisis in democracy and capitalism. David Cameron, too, is currently composing his memoirs. Neither of them, though, could claim to be a literary politician – a figure that has vanished off the face of the Earth. It’s not that they aren’t clever. Osborne was a history Demy – the word for a scholar at Magdalen College – and Cameron got a First in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Brasenose. It’s just that the days when MPs, Chancellors of the Exchequer and Prime Ministers were writers and intellectuals have gone.
Why has the literary politician disappeared? Partly, it’s a time thing. Politicians have much less spare time these days than they did even half a century ago. Yes, Osborne has now got enough spare moments for those six jobs – but he didn’t have them when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Being Chancellor is a demanding job, and the public expect it to be a demanding job.
That expectation of the professional, 24-7 politician wasn’t there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The last proper intellectual Prime Minister was Arthur Balfour, in Downing Street from 1902 until 1905. Balfour may not have been a great Prime Minister, but he was a serious philosopher. His series of Gifford Lectures in 1914 at Glasgow University, on “Theism and Humanism”, were published as a book in 1915. C. S. Lewis said it was one of the ten books that influenced him most.
Going a little further back, Gladstone wrote a three-volume, heavyweight book, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, 1858, before he became Prime Minister. Even when he was in Downing Street, he wrote Juventus Mundi: The gods and men of the heroic age (1869), a 577-page book. In that same administration, from 1868–74, he was hard at work on research for another classical book, Homeric Synchronism: An enquiry into the time and place of Homer (1876).
Late nineteenth-century politics was immersed in classical scholarship. When John Morley, Gladstone’s biographer, was reaching for an analogy for the Prime Minister remaining in office in his mid-eighties, he turned to the ancient Homeric leader, Nestor, King of Pylos – 110 years old when he fought in the Trojan War. Describing the ancient Gladstone, Morley quoted from The Iliad, Book One, and expected his readers to recognize the quotation: “Two generations of mortal men had he already seen pass away, who with him of old had been born and bred in sacred Pylos, and among the third generation, he held rule”. There was a stage when Gladstone’s Homer obsession got so great that it caused worries in the press. He was forced to write a letter to the Spectator, denying the suggestion that he began every day with “his old friend, Homer”.
Shades of Osborne, there, perhaps – with the implication that Gladstone wasn’t spending enough time on politics. But there’s quite a difference between a Homer addiction and Osborne’s job for BlackRock, the biggest fund manager in the world. And the big difference is money. Gladstone lived in an age where politicians weren’t paid. It was only in 1911 that MPs first got a salary, of £400. Until then, politics was largely a rich man’s game. The same rich man who was prepared to devote unpaid time to politics often devoted time to intellectual books, with no expectation of generous royalties.
Harold Macmillan was perhaps the last Prime Minister with the time and inclination to read erudite literature – he was helped, both intellectually and financially, by the family publishing business. He was also the last Conservative Prime Minister to get a First at Oxford before David Cameron – albeit in the early part of his Classics degree, not his Finals. Macmillan had to leave Balliol in 1914, curtailing his undergraduate studies, to fight in the war. When he was wounded at the Somme in 1916, he took refuge in a slit trench for ten hours, consoling himself with Aeschylus, in the original Greek.
Even though Osborne and Cameron, like Macmillan, are from well-off backgrounds, they belong to a generation of middle-class London professionals who have never worked so hard to keep a roof above their heads. Not much time for Aeschylus, then.
I grew up in Islington in the 1970s, where relaxed academics and poets could afford to live in double-fronted Georgian villas. Today, those same houses are occupied by Stakhanovite bankers and lawyers. Not only has the pay of those bankers and lawyers soared over the past forty years, but the relative earnings of academics and poets have also slumped. In 1960, a professor at Liverpool University was paid more than a striker at Liverpool Football Club. Admittedly, that was before the footballer’s maximum wage ended in 1961.
All the same, things have changed. The sort of ambitious types who want to become politicians and live in London just don’t have the time, and can’t afford, to write the sort of difficult books that won’t sell. When politicians do write books today, they are lucrative books, with huge advances. David Cameron was paid a reported £800,000 for his memoirs; Barack and Michelle Obama got a reported $60m between them. Even when politicians aren’t writing about themselves, they are writing big-advance biographies of other big-name politicians: whether it’s Boris Johnson on Winston Churchill, or William Hague on William Pitt. They aren’t the first politicians to do big-name biographies. Roy Jenkins, a generation younger than Macmillan, had patrician tastes in food and wine, but only semi-intellectual tastes in his writing. His biographical subjects included Churchill, Gladstone, Truman, Baldwin and Asquith – hardly obscure subjects, written about in an engaging but non-academic, non-literary style.
Boris Johnson and William Hague are both extremely clever men. They could have become academics if they’d wanted to. They are both now rich men, and could afford to write abstruse academic books or literary fiction – again, if they wanted to. Johnson did, in fact, write a novel, Seventy-Two Virgins, in 2005 – a political thriller which, with melancholy echoes today, revolves around Islamist terrorists and Parliamentary security. It didn’t sell nearly as well as his Churchill biography.
Publishers once shelled out big advances for low-selling literary fiction, subsidising those advances with the profits from blockbusters. Those days have gone. It isn’t just politicians who are likely to be less literary in a high-minded sense; it’s writers, too. Kingsley and Martin Amis were once both asked if they’d go on writing if they knew that no one would buy a single copy. They knew that the noble answer was yes. They were both honest enough to say no. All the modern financial and sociological pressures mean that any ambitious young man or woman in a hurry – aka any aspiring politician – will not devote time to writing, unless it is writing for a lot of money.
- Times Literary Supplement
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