Portraits and Miniatures (41 page)

This piece was a 1990
European
review of
Le Président,
by Franz-Olivier Giesbert (Editions du Seuil).

Franz-Olivier Giesbert, now editor-in-chief of
Le Figaro,
wrote a life of François Mitterrand, the aspiring French politician, in 1977. Now, thirteen years later, he has produced this second book,
Le Président,
on Mitterrand the successful statesman, who on grounds of impact on the political life of France and longevity in office, must stand an unchallenged second among the four presidents of the Fifth Republic.

Mitterrand presumably liked the first book, for he has collaborated a good deal with the production of the second. This suggests either a considerable tolerance on Mitterrand's part or an indifference to whether he is portrayed as amiable (which Giesbert certainly does not do), provided he is treated with a reluctant respect and admiration as an extraordinary political animal (which Giesbert equally certainly does do).

Giesbert is a highly successful journalist who, barely on the threshold of middle age, has established a star's reputation, both as a political writer and as an editor. Most good journalists write books because they feel they should master a less ephemeral medium than the column or the report. But, only too often, they then proceed to nullify this purpose by choosing the most ephemeral subjects and treating them in the most ephemeral way. In Britain, Hugo Young's
One Of Us
(about Margaret Thatcher) and Anthony Howard's life of the former Conservative minister R. A. Butler are notable and rare exceptions.

Superficially Giesbert is in the mould rather than the exception. He likes writing books about events on which the dust has
hardly settled: he likes reporting in direct speech conversations at which he was not present; and a certain addiction to reporters' clichés shines through the linguistic haze. People who are displeased even if unseen are too easily described as being ‘rouge de colère'.

That almost exhausts the criticisms, for Giesbert writes with a compelling penetration. He takes one over the terrain of the Mitterrand years with the impartial but pitiless clarity of a powerful searchlight sweeping across a convoluted tract of countryside. The ‘direct speech' technique may be presumptuous and unscholarly, but this is balanced by Giesbert's uncanny skill in avoiding false notes. His accounts carry a great ring of conviction. It is as difficult not to believe them as it is to stop reading his high-paced narrative.

His vignettes of Mitterrand's changing acolytes, allies and adversaries, Mauroy, Fabius, Rocard, Delors, Attali, and many others, are almost as good in a small way as the picture of the great spider at the centre of the web, silent, subtle, more predictable in method than in political position, which Giesbert cumulatively builds up. Essentially it is a portrait of ambiguity. All of his personality is founded upon it, according to Giesbert. ‘This man, in fact, is never the one that one believes he is. He is at once better and worse.' ‘François Mitterrand is never wholly himself nor wholly someone else.' The book's central message is that the President always takes great care to be elusive. His actions never follow his words. He is the greatest master of secrecy and dissimulation since Talleyrand.

So, Giesbert's compliments are distinctly barbed, even if apparently acceptable. To what extent are the barbs justified? I have never worked closely with Mitterrand. I ceased to be President of the European Community four months before he became President of the Republic. I was once summoned to have an hour's engaging conversation with him (in Buckingham Palace of all places, when he was in London on a state visit) during which I thought he exercised great charm.

But my major encounter with him was in Brussels eight years before that. As the challenger to the French government of the
time he wished to pay a day-long visit to the Commission. That was a perfectly reasonable request. Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the Opposition, paid one at about the same time. So did future Chancellor Helmut Kohl. However, the Giscard Government became very edgy about it. I cannot quite think why for I doubt if being photographed with me in the Berlaymont was going to win many votes in Château-Chinon, or anywhere else for that matter.

This did not prevent it being one of the trickiest diplomatic days I have ever spent. In order to avoid great
‘remous'
in Paris, I had to refrain from going down to meet him on the pavement or allowing him to meet an assembly of Commissioners in the Commission meeting room or proposing a formal toast at luncheon, all of which verged on being head of government treatment.

I thought Mitterrand behaved very well in the circumstances. The neurosis was on the other side. However, this book combined with that recollection makes me realize that Elysée politics, both ways round, are a fairly rough affair, perhaps a little more so than in most other democratic countries.

I also recollect that at lunch that day Mitterrand told me that he thought he would probably be too old to fight the 1981 presidential election. In 1990, with two presidential victories behind him, that may I suppose be regarded as mild supporting evidence for Giesbert's dictum that ‘
Il ne fait jamais ce qu'il dit, il ne dit jamais ce qu'il fait'.

This essay is based on a 1989
Observer
review of
Nehru
by M.J. Akbar (Viking).

Jawaharlal Nehru, born in 1889, was Prime Minister for the first seventeen years of Indian independence. The quarter century since has produced six Prime Ministers, but three of them - Shastri, Morarji Desai and Charan Singh - were short-lived. Nehru's daughter filled the office for sixteen of these twenty-five years and his grandson then added another four. It is a dynastic record without parallel in any democracy.

Among the Viceroys there were two Elgins and two Hardinges, but no English (or Scottish) political family in India or Britain has maintained that degree of individual pre-eminence over three generations. The Nehru feat is the more remarkable because India is much the most disparate country of the three. What also seems to me to be remarkable is that Mrs Gandhi, who was an immensely filial daughter and a somewhat perfunctory wife, did not call herself, and hence her son, Nehru, particularly as the Gandhi has no connection with the Mahatma.

Was the Nehru family feat sufficiently remarkable to call in question India's democratic credentials? Only superficially so, I think. The intervals, and particularly the Desai intrusion into Mrs Gandhi's reign, are an answer to that. Indian governments pay the Raj the unfortunate compliment of inheriting from it too great a taste for the use of political imprisonment, but that apart there can be little doubt that by the tests of freedom of expression, freedom of political manoeuvre and freedom of electoral choice, India has astonished the world by showing that a country does not need to be rich to be a liberal democracy.

Nehru was the primary architect of this, which alone would make him one of the great men of the twentieth century. Beyond this pluralism, he gave India in the 1950s a major presence on the world scene - a presence greater than, even with its somewhat more solid economy, it has today. The non-aligned movement, of which, flanked by Tito and Nasser, Nehru was the clear leader, sometimes seemed ‘holier-than-thou' and needed the resolution of Truman and Eisenhower for there to be something to be non-aligned between. But it gave to fissiparous India a valuable sense of the prestige of nationhood.

Nehru was accused of preaching conciliation abroad and practising ruthlessness at home. But his implacability was largely confined to anything touching the fragmentation of the country which had already lost Pakistan. He liked to think of himself as a Gandhian with Abraham Lincoln's problems. No doubt there were elements of vanity and double standards in the balance sheet. But the achievement and the sweep of his perceptions were by any standards formidable.

In addition he encapsulated three different and even contradictory strands of India's relationship with Britain and the West. For his first twenty-five years Nehru lived the slightly parasitical life of a rich Westernized Indian. His father, Motilal Nehru, later a notable Nationalist leader but at this stage an immensely successful, high-living advocate, a sort of F. E. Smith without the swashbuckling, appears in the early part of the book as a more interesting character than Jawaharlal Nehru was himself.

Jawaharlal emerges as a fairly dim Harrow schoolboy, Trinity College, Cambridge, chemistry undergraduate, and Inner Temple pupil barrister. He rather wanted to get away from Indians and recalled disdainfully (of his compatriots) E. M. Forster's remark that the reason the races could not meet was that the Indians bored the English. If they did I do not think that Nehru was at this stage an exception. He was a silk-shirted hedonist admiring but not really penetrating English life.

Back in India after seven years away he began to undergo a remarkable and forceful metamorphosis. He became Gandhi's disciple and heir, he converted his devoted father (who threw
away - or at any rate suspended use of - his champagne cellar and Western clothes), and together they began lives of alternating agitation and gaol. In Motilal's case this ended with his death in 1931, but in Jawaharlal's case it continued until he was released from his last spell in a Raj prison on 15 June 1945.

Of the preceding twenty-three years he had spent almost nine of them incarcerated. There is a too comfortable impression in Britain today that for someone of Nehru's stature these imprisonments were the equivalent of a reading and writing rest cure on the island in the lake of Udaipur; and that any boredom was made tolerable by the prospect on release of the adulation of the crowds and a no-hard-feelings singing of ‘Forty Years On' with the provincial governor. Only the adulation of the crowds had reality. For the rest the long gaol sojourns were as depressing as they were unhealthy.

Within fifteen months of the last one, however, Nehru was Prime Minister; within two years he was apparently the lover of the Vicereine (which might be regarded as a more seductive embrace than Harrow songs, although Akbar seemed commend-ably uninterested in this relationship); and within ten he was putting on a remarkably good show as the patronizer of the leaders of the Western world.

He became the arbitrator of the future of the Commonwealth. Churchill, who twenty-five years before had called Gandhi a seditious Middle Temple lawyer posing as a half-naked fakir, took to telling Nehru in private letters that he was ‘the Light of Asia'. And Eisenhower, who had allowed Dulles for most of the 1950s to preach against India's immoral neutralism, ended the decade by coming on a state visit to Delhi and paying a notable tribute.

Mr Akbar therefore has a splendid subject, and publishing a quarter of a century after Nehru's death was a good vantage-point, provided he could avoid being oppressed by the bulk of S. Gopal's authoritative three-volume 1976 biography. Does he succeed? I cannot quite decide. He is a notable journalist, and he writes compellingly with vividness and passion. But he writes journalist's history.

Maybe in substance he does achieve proportion and perspective: I certainly feel that I understand the balance of Nehru's life better for having read him. But he never achieves a reflective style. He is a natural polemicist (and - an anti-partition Muslim himself - he has a polemical sub-theme, which is to put all the blame for dismemberment on Jinnah), so that even when he strives for balance his method is to refute one polemical passage with another polemical passage the other way.

His book also demonstrates the width of the gap between the Indian and the British literary traditions. There is some odd English. Governments are constantly ‘protesting' activities of ‘the hostiles' with weapons nefariously ‘gifted'. And in the passages dealing with anything British, the solecisms are thick upon the ground. Mountbatten is a sufficiently central character that it is a pity for Akbar to inform us that he was always known as Dicky and not ‘Dickie', as he himself invariably wrote it. And there are many others of a similar degree of unimportance. Furthermore, I have never read a book which so cried out for pictures, and which has none. I longed, for instance, to be able to look at one of Motilal Nehru - which is a tribute to the strength of the narrative. Indeed there are times when Akbar himself seems to be referring to and describing his own non-existent illustrations. Were they in the Indian edition, but could not be afforded in the enterprise culture of modern Britain?

This is based on a 1992
Observer
review of Lord Parkinson's memoirs,
Right at the Centre
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson).

This Book is to me a disappointment. I thought it might provide a companion volume to the rich delights of the memoirs with which Lord Young of Graffham marked the completion of the economic miracle of the 1980s and his own decline into silence. However, Lord Parkinson is a much better politician than was Lord Young, and is not similarly addicted to strangulated jargon. As a result this is quite a good although intensely political book, with nothing much in it for those who are not enthralled by how Michael Portillo became ‘a deservedly popular minister' or how ‘Eric Ward, our excellent Central Office agent in Yorkshire' rearranged the order of a meeting so that Parkinson could hasten back down the motorway ‘with headlights on at full speed' (but it was all legal, for the boys in blue were part of the plot) to be at Margaret Thatcher's side within two hours.

There is, as might be expected, a great deal of Lady Thatcher in the book, and indeed Parkinson straightforwardly sums up his life as having been ‘a Thatcherite ministerial career'. He begins with fifty pages on her downfall, which moves him, with the literary assistance of Lord McAlpine, into the poetry of a Chinese proverb about ‘dragons in shallow waters being the sport of shrimps'.