Monthly Archives: October 2024

Book review

The Blair Years (2) by Alastair Campbell, 2007

There were a few additional observations I wanted to add to my earlier review of Campbell’s fascinating diaries of the years he spent as Tony Blair’s press secretary, from 1994-2003.

One of the contentious policies the Starmer Government has been pursuing since the 2024 General Election is the levying VAT on the fees paid for private education. Campbell always was to the left of Blair on educational issues, advising him against sending his kids to the grant-maintained Oratory school, and he is a strong supporter of the current Government’s plans. This policy idea was originally floated in the early years of Blair’s leadership prior to him becoming Prime Minister – and when it came up he killed the idea stone dead without any debate. He considered it a tax on education and could not understand why any Government would even consider the idea. To him it was unthinkable. I mention this point simply to underline the fact that while the Starmer Government is obviously very far to the right of the policy positions taken during the Corbyn years, there remains some important differences between its policies and those of New Labour. Blair would never have countenanced something as radical as VAT on school fees – Starmer is pushing ahead with the idea despite a lot of well-resourced opposition and limited evidence that the policy is causing the party some electoral damage. In other words he is probably doing it because he believes it is the right thing to do, not simply because it is politically expedient.

The second point that I originally overlooked is an exchange Campbell shares (page 101) between himself and Mo Mowlam, at the time a shadow minister for Northern Ireland, who was to go on to play a key role in the Good Friday Agreement. At the time the Labour Party, still in opposition, was rocked by Harriet Harman’s controversial decision to send her children to grammar school. Campbell’s role as always was to ensure all Labour MPs stayed on-message and defended the party line, whatever their personal feelings on the issue. He recounts his version of events:

“We were still struggling to get anyone to defend her (Harman) on TV, but eventually I persuaded Mo to do it, only half jokingly saying that if she didn’t I’d reveal her stepchildren were at a public school.”

This is horrendous. A Shadow Minister is forced to go on television to defend a position she doesn’t agree with because otherwise a party official will expose damaging information about her family to the media. This isn’t a half-joke, it’s blackmail. The fact that Campbell thought it acceptable to include in this book – presumably to show how far he was prepared to go to support Blair – is appalling, and makes one wonder what dark arts and deviousness were left out.

Finally, during the 2024 general election campaign it was hard to find a single commentator not referring to Labour’s ‘ming vase’ campaign strategy. The phrase was used so relentlessly that it almost lost all meaning, so I was struck by the fact that the phrase is first recorded in these diaries. It isn’t just an echo of the New Labour strategy, it is the New Labour strategy.

“TB told me about his last dinner with Roy Jenkins at Derry’s….” I see you Tony, as someone carrying an exquisite, beautiful. hand-painted vase over a slippery floor and as you proceed across the floor, vase in hand, you can see your destination and you can see the likes of Harriet Harman and Clare Short lunging towards you, and you don’t know whether to run or tiptoe”.

In this original version of the strategy, it’s not the leadership who are going to drop the vase – instead they might have it struck from their hand by outspoken or clumsy Shadow Ministers or party spokespersons. So the strategy is not simply one of taking no risks, but also of shackling any Shadow Ministers seen as likely to say something out of turn. Roy Jenkins was a progressive Labour Cabinet Minister in the sixties and seventies, but had done his best to destroy the party in the eighties by setting up the SDP (which was to eventually merge with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats). You can interpret the fact that Blair adopted him as one of his senior (albeit unofficial) advisors as either evidence of Blair’s willingness to think outside the box and break rules, or of his innate conservatism.

The diaries were a mine of interesting insights such as this into both the Blair years themselves and their reflection in what might one day be called the Starmer years. Or maybe not.

The Blair Years (2) by Alastair Campbell, 2007

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Book review

The Harpole Report, by J L Carr, 1972

I am a great admirer of J L Carr, particularly his 1980 novella A Month in the Country, and therefore my expectations for The Harpole Report were high. While it doesn’t reach the heights of A Month, on its own terms this was an enjoyable little novel. It is told in the form of report by an unknown author, commissioned by Harpole himself into his last term as a teacher. This ends up being simply a framing device rather than the more ominous introduction to a report into a serious incident – it never really becomes clear why the report is required, but by the time that becomes apparent the reader cares little for that minor anachronism. The report’s author uses and quotes from a wide variety of sources, including the school logbook – a kind of official record or diary – as well as correspondence, diaries, and other official and less than official sources.

Stories set in schools are usually written for children, be it the slapstick comedy of St Trinian’s and St Custards, or adventures in the manner of Enid Blyton and her successors. I can’t recall reading another novel told from the perspective of the long-suffering teaching staff. This novel is grounded in personal experience – Carr was a primary school teacher for almost 40 years, including 15 years as a Head. It opens with his avatar, Harpole, being temporarily given the headship of the Church of England primary school of Tampling St. Nicholas. The setting is the early 1970’s, at a point where much of education was still dominated by attitudes from the pre-war era (Tampling is described as being “run along the lines which were the height of fashion when Chadband (the former head) was trained in the 1920s by men who learnt their educational practices in the early years of the century”) and progressive attitudes towards education were hard to find. Corporal punishment, even for younger children, was commonplace, the curriculum unchanged for decades, and schools still maintained a ‘backward class’ taught by an untrained teaching assistant.

Harpole makes some tentative attempts to modernise the school, moves that are fiercely resisted by the Education board, his teaching staff, his recalcitrant janitor, and the parents. Some of the minor battles, such as whether to fly a flag at the start of each school day, are lost, but slowly through stubbornness and dedication Harpole begins to get his way. The ferocity with which Harpole’s attempts to drag the school into the modern era are resisted prove the source for much of the novel’s comedy.

In addition to completing the school log, Harpole keeps a personal journal revealing more detailed information which he often wants to keep out of the official record. Although many of his innovations are modest at times he shows signs of what could almost be described as radicalism. He proposes that caning be abolished – which provokes a response accusing him of encouraging “acts of the utmost depravity” – and that students stop referring to teachers as ‘Sir’ and ‘Miss’. Each proposed step forward is met with fierce resistance, not least from the education authorities that see him as a trouble-maker. Even a simple request for a new blackboard is met with astonishment at his effrontery. Despite this resistance he slowly begins to reform his school, encouraging outside visits for each class, (which inevitably go disastrously), securing support for some of his children who are being mistreated at home, and winning the confidence of his staff.

Two sets of correspondence are threaded through the narrative. Harpole’s letters to his fiancé, Edith Wardle, unanswered apart from her ‘Dear John’ telling him she has found love elsewhere, are dominated by details of his missing spanner – it’s not hard to see why she moved on. His place as teacher of the Scholarship class, a group of students identified as having the potential to pass the 11+ and go on to grammar school, has been taken by a supply teacher and recent Cambridge graduate, Miss Foxberrow. her letters to her sister are full of her lively independence of thought. References to Harpole are initially mocking, but her admiration for him slowly grows, particularly when he confronts a parental bully, Mr Bullitt. beating him with a cricket bat. Immediately after the fight she describes her reaction:

“a great hush had descended on the building and it was evident that all lessons had ceased and everyone was listening in petrified rapture. GH then turns towards me his eyes positively glittering, and hackles rampant (with me quite limp with adoration and the joyous expectation of being dragged off to his cave and debauched).”

There is a hint of the origins of A Month in the Country in the scene when Harpole and Miss Foxberrow are out in the country on a date of sorts, visiting a remote church in Ferry Farthingale in the sea-marshes.

“She then pointed out an area of decomposed painting above the nave arcade. This showed three ancient lords in fine raiment parading in a field of lilies and the three same, naked (with even the hair around their parts scorched off) in a fiery furnace.”

This medieval wall painting is precisely the type of relic that Birkin is employed to restore. The fruition of George and Emma’s relationship in such unlikely circumstances is one of the many delights of the book. If you haven’t discovered J L Carr yet, this might not be my recommended starting point, but on its own terms it is a witty and enjoyable novella.

The Harpole Report, by J L Carr, 1972

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Book review

Heatwave, by Penelope Lively, 2009

Penelope Lively’s Heatwave is set during the course of a long hot summer in rural Oxfordshire. The narrator, Pauline rents one of a pair of cottages; the other is the home of her daughter Teresa, Teresa’s husband Maurice and their young son Luke. The pair of cottages are somewhat ominously called World’s End, not a reference to the Edgar Wright film but portentous nonetheless. Pauline is a proof-reader; Maurice an author, while Teresa cares for Luke. Maurice is writing what sounds like a very pretentious history of English tourism and as part of his working routine he regularly goes back to London for meetings. He is also visited from time to time by his publisher, James and James’s girlfriend, Carol. The other inhabitants of World’s End also travel up to London from time to time – while secluded it is obviously not that remote, and these are urban, middle class people comfortable with popping off to Paris for the weekend or Venice for a month.

It is obvious from early on that Maurice is a ‘bad un’. Think Martin, the sleazy brother-in-law from Fleabag. He (44) is quite a bit older than Teresa (29) who hero-worships him. Teresa’s archetype, the long suffering wife who accepts her lot without protest, is established early – on the very first page Pauline compares her to a Hardy heroine “betrayed no doubt”. Pauline, long divorced from her philandering husband Harry, recognises the signs of Maurice’s likely adultery well before Teresa does, although the reader is given even earlier clues of his wandering. Pauline is reluctant to tell her daughter of her suspicions, waiting for some concrete evidence. She recalls the details of her own marriage to a serially unfaithful husband, who now writes to her occasionally from America where he is a college professor. Other than the slow passage of the summer and occasional trips out to cheesy tourist attractions as ‘research’ for Maurice’s awful book, the action is slow. Pauline remains watchful towards Maurice but never confronts him, and time is marked by the changing agricultural landscape and the steadily warming weather. Slowly Teresa begins to develop her own suspicions, but is also reluctant to face the issue or even discuss it with her mother. We are offered other relationships for comparison – Pauline’s bookseller friend and his agoraphobic wife, and the author of the book Pauline is proof-reading, stranded in remote Wales. Happy relationships in Heatwave are rare.

The novel opens on a warm May day, with everyone apparently “poised for this agreeable summer of industry and companionship“. Or so they believed, the narrator silently suggests. As summer passes the stresses within Maurice and Teresa’s relationship are exposed and his infidelity becomes all the more obvious. Pauline spends much of her time reminiscing. Some reviewers – in fact most, I think – claim that the damage caused by Harry’s infidelity is inter-generational and is in some obscure way the cause of Maurice’s unfaithfulness, as if Teresa has sought out a father figure for a husband who will repeat his behaviour. I am not convinced we are fated to repeat our parents’ mistakes, but Heatwave certainly seems to suggest it is unavoidable unless a dramatic break with the past is made.

Heatwave reminded me of Howards End in its portrait of a rural idyll threatened by modernisation, the way the characters live halfway between town and country and the novels’ sudden melodramatic ending in which a brutal and arbitrary form of justice is meted out. Another novel I was reminded of was J L Carr’s A Month in the Country which follows a similar structure, but is much more gentle and perhaps even kind in its treatment of its equally flawed characters.

Often, finding a way to end these reviews can be the hardest part of writing them. You can’t just stop (as some novelists do, irritatingly) – you are always on the lookout for a way of summing things up neatly with an appropriate sign-off. Many bloggers end with an invitation to readers to comment and provide their own thoughts. But one option that is not open to us it the deus ex machina out of the blue approach to ending that Lively uses in Heatwave. It was such an abrupt conclusion that it left me feeling a little cheated if I am honest.

Heatwave, by Penelope Lively, 2009

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Book review

What about Men? Caitlin Moran, 2023

What indeed? Caitlin Moran is an excellent columnist. I enjoy her writing; it is usually insightful and broadly progressive. But does her style of writing – pithy, with a punchline every few hundred words – convert well into a book that grapples with the serious question of the crisis of modern masculinity?

There are multiple issues with this book that undermine its overall impact and effectiveness. Stuart Jefferies, reviewing the book in the Guardian, does an extremely good job of identifying these issues and I am not going to try and duplicate his points, almost all of which I support (although re-reading the review at a later date he does give Moran both barrels and doesn’t take much time looking for any redeeming features). While reading the text I constantly found myself disputing Moran’s observations and not in a good way. They were not thought-provoking so much as smugly wrong. To offer one example, when the author uses the term ‘men’ she appears to refer to a very specific sub-set of men, largely defined as ‘blokes I know’. They are almost all in her age group, heterosexual, and British. A chapter about porn-addiction, based on an interview with a twenty-something young man, stands out because it gives a voice to a different group. Claims such as “your T-shirt collection is, to you, as your wife’s lovingly collated wardrobe of second-hand Chanel, designer jeans and Zara brogues is to her” just aren’t funny because they don’t derive from any observable reality. Isn’t that observation only true of Moran’s husband and their mates? Not many women I know have a collection of second-hand Chanel designer jeans and I am reasonably close to Moran’s demographic. I appreciate this is intended as tongue in cheek humour, but it falls at the first hurdle because it is neither funny nor relatable.

Which is a huge pity, because the subjects Moran writes about – the crisis of toxic masculinity in this country – is profoundly serious. It is literally killing men, through suicide, differential life expectancy, and poor health care. Moran addresses all these subjects, but rarely gets to grips with them before a punchline is required.

Perhaps the fault is mine, in reading this book as a text rather than a series of chapters grouped around the same topic. A fine distinction perhaps but what I mean is What About Men might work better if read one chapter a week rather than straight through like a novel. Some of the more

There is, unquestionably, a dialling it in aspect to this book. Her habit of twitter-sourcing content doesn’t inspire confidence that the book has been carefully researched for example. Most of the conclusions she draws about men are simply stating the obvious – the amount of original insight is minuscule. As a quick gallop through the main issues of modern masculinity, a starter text if you like, this would be fine for someone who hadn’t read a newspaper or spoken to a man in the last few years. Perhaps that’s the real audience – teenagers? But the problem with that idea is that in my experience teenagers are profoundly better informed on issues of sexuality and gender that 99.9% of people of Moran’s generation. I think, in fact I am pretty sure, that most teenagers would be appalled if they read her generalisations on sex, gender and masculinity. Her real audience is obviously the people who buy books and give them to one another for birthdays and Christmas without really expecting them to be read. Why would you bother properly researching a book if you know most people are going to skip to the chapters about sex?

What about Men? Caitlin Moran, 2023

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