This chapter argues that the genre of Political Life-Writing (PLW) reflects, and to some extent has shaped, hegemonic understandings of what UK politics is. PLW serves here as an umbrella term for three sub-genres: memoirs, diaries and letters, and biographies. This sub-categorisation does not capture all forms of life-writing by or about the politically active. Certainly, there are many other ways, such as oral history, of capturing auto/biographical memory.Footnote ¹ The three sub-genres are, however, highly recognisable types of books, which form a clear starting point for a consideration of how PLW has developed. It is books which are the focus of the chapter, though it must be stressed that they need to be considered in the context of a broader eco-system that links publishing, the media, and politics – a kind of political–celebrity–industrial complex.

In this world, the physical book has remained important, even given the audiobook boom and the advent of e-books. Yet opening and reading the physical book is only one mechanism by which the content of the text is disseminated. Furthermore, books are not merely texts. They are also cultural objects. During the twentieth century, they became cheaper and more accessible for purchase by working-class and middle-class individuals, who could now afford to fill their homes with ‘furniture books’.Footnote ² These could serve as statements of political and literary identity. Whether and which biographies, diaries, or memoirs of politicians are displayed in one’s home or office sends a message (if not always an easily decipherable one) about the opinions and values of the owner.

Biography as a genre has received less scholarly attention than memoirs and diaries, which have merited extensive discussion in the literature.Footnote ³ Key contributions have focused on the related themes of reputation management and official secrecy.Footnote ⁴ A number of works have explored how prominent politicians have sought to evade or bend the rules of confidentiality and to exploit their own privileged access to sources in order to cast themselves in a favourable perspective.Footnote ⁵ David Richards and Helen Mathers have extended the field of debate by exploring memoirs and diaries in the light of the ‘Westminster Model’ of politics and its attendant assumptions. They argue that ‘the narratives found in ministerial memoirs’ tend ‘to offer a heavily agency-centred account, driven by a concern with legacy and the desire to convey a particular version of history’.Footnote ⁶

This previous scholarship is of great value, but there are important issues which it fails to address. First, while it is acknowledged that much PLW is an elite exercise with a heavy masculine bias, the issue of race is neglected.Footnote ⁷ Second, there is an implicit, unstated assumption that the text of the book should be the central topic of enquiry. That is to say that, if books are important, it is because people pick them up, read them, and are influenced by the messages they contain. That, however, is only part of the truth. Audiences can become aware of books’ messages through a range of other mechanisms, such as blurbs, reviews, and author interviews (known collectively as ‘para-texts’). Third, the significance of PLW books as physical objects is forgotten – though the concept of ‘books as furniture’ and other non-textual uses have been explored productively by book historians in other settings.Footnote ⁸ Finally, there has been little effort to ascertain reader (or non-reader) response.Footnote ⁹ The materials gathered by the sociological research organisation Mass Observation (MO) are critical here. Explicit comments on political (auto) biography are fairly rare in the responses offered by ordinary people to MO ‘directives’. They certainly can’t be taken as representative of the views of the population. Nevertheless, they are often suggestive of ways in which PLW was regarded, consumed, and displayed.Footnote ¹⁰

Publishers’ choices about what to commission have generally been based upon an unstated hierarchy of who in politics is most important. For anyone versed in mainstream media coverage, this hierarchy seems highly intuitive. In terms of diaries and memoirs, prime ministers are the top, ministers next; advisers with beans to spill and gossipy backbench MPs are roughly on a par. Senior civil servants and ambassadors, who, in the era of ‘megaphone bureaucracy’, have increasingly been willing to publish frank memories, are also appealing prospects.Footnote ¹¹ By contrast, local government leaders, MEPs, and European Commissioners are generally not. The hierarchy is not unshifting: it is unsurprising that trade union leaders, during the 1970s and 1980s, were placed higher than they are today. It is fair to say, too, that literary quality and the inherent interest of the tale do count; the mere fact of having been in the Cabinet is not enough to guarantee a contract – though having been Prime Minister, however briefly, probably is.

Although women have been disadvantaged in terms of their ability to get into Westminster politics, it is not clear that, once they have managed it, they have been at a disadvantage in publishing life-writing. Krista Cowman notes that although only eighty women were elected as MPs between 1918 and 1964, thirteen of them (16%) produced autobiographical books.Footnote ¹² Calculating the equivalent rate for their much more numerous male peers would be laborious, but it seems likely that the women outperformed the men, doubtless partly due to perceived novelty value. Nevertheless, the reception of their works could be strongly gendered. In the 1970s, the former Labour Cabinet minister Richard Crossman controversially kick-started what was seen as a ‘new genre of near-contemporary diaries’.Footnote ¹³ His colleague Barbara Castle then followed suit. She came under fire for her indiscretions, leading The Guardian to spring to her defence. Her critics had suggested, the paper argued, ‘that Crossman was somehow to be forgiven because of the massiveness of his wayward intellect and his seriousness of purpose while Mrs. Castle is to be condemned because she is no more than a weak weeping woman with an eye for a quick buck’.Footnote ¹⁴

It is only a minority of the politically active, even at the elite level, who have a desire to publish in the first place. Some make a deliberate choice not to do so. For example, Labour leader Michael Foot, though a very accomplished writer, chose not to write his memoirs, and instead cooperated with biographers.Footnote ¹⁵ Cabinet ministers cannot take it for granted that they will be able to publish their recollections (and some interesting memoirs remain unpublished).Footnote ¹⁶ The size of the potential advance would sometimes be too small to buy enough time to write the book.Footnote ¹⁷ Political memoirs have not always been good commercial propositions. For example, Weidenfeld & Nicolson ‘lost a fortune’ on the Castle diaries.Footnote ¹⁸ There may be other reasons why they are commissioned, though. Publishers have sometimes been suspected of currying favour by giving politicians advances that were unlikely to be earnt back.Footnote ¹⁹

It is largely taken for granted that former prime ministers will write their memoirs, though this was far from ubiquitous before 1945. (This was partly because many former occupants of No. 10 were old and/or ill when they left office.) Dating back to Lloyd George, books by ex-prime ministers can be highly – and sometimes controversially – lucrative for their authors.Footnote ²⁰ Since then, all ex-prime ministers, apart from Rishi Sunak (as of 2025), have produced at least one volume, and several have published multiple volumes. However, May and Truss’s books were not formal autobiographies, but rather works which drew on the authors’ experiences to make wider political arguments.Footnote ²¹ One reviewer described May’s effort as ‘so boldly different it creates a mini-genre all of its own’.Footnote ²² Another commented, however, that ‘despite this ostensibly different approach, The Abuse of Power reveals itself as an attempt to rehabilitate May’s reputation after her acrimonious exit from Downing Street in 2019’.Footnote ²³

Those within the charmed Westminster circle are at an advantage when it comes to making it into print (though those within the most charmed circle of all, the secret services, have of course faced unique challenges).Footnote ²⁴ That is not to say, however, that less privileged political actors are always denied the opportunity to publish. Though communism has been a somewhat marginal force, communist autobiography was for a time a significant genre (or sub-genre). It ‘had an explicit “exemplary” function, providing a mirror to the party of the ideals’ which party members were expected to embody.Footnote ²⁵ Prominent extra-parliamentary campaigners, such as CND’s Bruce Kent, were also able to publish memoirs.Footnote ²⁶ Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murdered Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, has done so too (her book appeared before she became a member of the House of Lords).Footnote ²⁷ We may imagine, though, that many potential autobiographers have ruled themselves out of the running on the assumption (likely very often correct) that publishers will not want to print their stories.

The hierarchy for biographical subjects is somewhat different. Biographies can be written of dead subjects as well as living ones, and the ‘forgotten’ or tragic individual may be more appealing as a choice than the moderately influential but uninspiring office-holder. Victor Grayson has merited repeat biographies in part because of his mysterious disappearance; John Stonehouse, because he faked his own death.Footnote ²⁸ By contrast, it seems inconceivable that anyone will ever publish a book on, say, Fred Peart, even though his relatively uneventful career has the potential to cast light on significant aspects of British politics.Footnote ²⁹ At the same time, unless there is a dramatic or scandalous angle, the broad sense of ‘who counts’ is roughly the same for biographies as for autobiographical writing. High-profile women have received a fair amount of biographical attention. However, given the assumption that members of parliament are at the top of the tree, and the historic experience of exclusion, it is hardly surprising that there are few biographies of women politicians of colour. The picture may be expected to change to a degree, given the more diverse composition of recent Cabinets, but at the moment Robin Bunce and Samara Linton’s biography of Diane Abbott stands out as a rare exception.Footnote ³⁰

It is plausible, then, to assert that PLW reinforces dominant understandings of what politics is, and where it takes place, simply by virtue of who the authors or subjects of the books are. The proliferation of political biographies – which is by no means common to every democratic country – can accentuate the belief that political developments are primarily driven by individual agency, even if this is not what all the various authors intend. As George Egerton has argued, ‘political memoir functions in modern cultures to conceptualize popular understanding of historical processes largely in terms of the dramas of political leadership’ rather than in terms of broader socio-economic forces.Footnote ³¹ Book titles carry their own messages: From Workshop to War Cabinet, A Life at the Centre, and The Downing Street Years.Footnote ³² The texts themselves often reproduce a Westminster-centred view. In his comparison of interwar social democratic memoirs, Stefan Berger notes that Labour Party authors presented narratives of progress in which elections and Parliament took pride of place. ‘The British autobiographies leave no doubt where they see the prime location of that overall move towards better times: in parliament and in the steady progress of Labour in increasing its parliamentary representation.’ German Social Democrats, for their part, placed much more stress on party work.Footnote ³³

It is hard to be precise about how popular the three sub-genres have been. Bestseller lists, library circulation figures, media or archival reports of book sales, and (for the more recent period) Nielsen BookScan can be helpful at the indicative level. But there is also the problem of weighting, that is, the issue of whether sales translated into impact, and whether that impact was short- or long-term. Churchill’s multi-volume The Second World War has achieved high sales across the decades since it was published, but it is hard to measure its reception by ordinary readers.Footnote ³⁴ (Serialisation in the American magazine Life apparently depressed sales of that publication, due in part to anti-British sentiment, though the reaction in the UK was likely much more positive.)Footnote ³⁵ In fact, the main claim that has been made for the book’s influence is of a different kind. David Reynolds’s landmark analysis suggests that, through his special access to sources that were unavailable to others, Churchill put himself ‘in command of history’. On the one hand, prior to the opening of the archives, subsequent accounts often relied on the information that he had chosen to provide. On the other, his periodisation and labelling of events had a profound influence on how the war was discussed.Footnote ³⁶

This case is simply a prominent example of a wider phenomenon. Memoirs (and diaries and letters) can be mined by journalists for juicy quotations, and citation by historians often gives them a residual legacy. In other words, though a mass readership naturally helps, autobiographical writing does not necessarily need one to achieve a lasting impact. In 1962, the academic (and future Labour MP) David Marquand reviewed the final volume of the memoirs of Hugh Dalton, a former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer. He compared them to the memoirs of Dalton’s former government colleagues. ‘History, especially the history of the working-class movement, has a built-in bias in favour of the literate intellectual, and against the inarticulate, the ill-educated, or the shy’, Marquand observed. Thus, ‘there may be a danger that Lord Dalton may be given an even more prominent place in history than he deserves, simply because his memoirs are so much franker, more attractive, and more readable than Lord [Clement] Attlee’s or Lord [Herbert] Morrison’s’.Footnote ³⁷

It should not be doubted that some members of the public do sit down and read books in all three sub-genres from cover to cover. Former Chancellor Denis Healey’s autobiography sold well, surely in part because of the quality of the writing.Footnote ³⁸ The diaries of rogue Tory Alan Clark, with their admixture of sex and self-pity, became a cultural phenomenon (and were adapted for television).Footnote ³⁹ Yet, even if some books are read thoroughly by many people, the claim for the centrality of PLW must rest on more than this. These types of books are generally accompanied by ‘para-texts’ – reviews, serialisations, interviews, and so forth.Footnote ⁴⁰ These are often very extensive, especially in the case of very high-profile politicians.

It is more than possible that many people both watched the TV documentary series The Downing Street Years and read Margaret Thatcher’s book of the same name, which it accompanied.Footnote ⁴¹ At the same time, it’s no secret that bibliophiles buy many books that they never read. Pragmatically, one is often able to extract key points from a review or serialisation, or to simply conclude that one doesn’t want or need to read it. One MO respondent noted of The Downing Street Years: ‘No I won’t be rushing out to buy it, but I am fascinated by the reaction to this book. Her star seemed to be on the wane over the summer …. The publication of the book has meant that suddenly she is being lauded again.’Footnote ⁴² Of course, the accounts given in para-texts may represent a book’s true content poorly. In 1995 The Sunday Times, desperate to whip up interest in their serialisation of Thatcher’s The Path To Power, created a questionable story about the book attacking John Major over Europe.Footnote ⁴³ Party conference season is a good time for publication; ‘revelations’ can be used by the publishers to drum up interest and exploited by the media as evidence of backbiting and splits.

The significance of memoirs (and other political books) as material objects should not be ignored. Signings offer members of the public the chance of a brief interaction with a famous politician in addition to the autographed souvenir. One Mass Observer, in an intensely detailed description of her bookshelves, noted that they held: ‘Many paperbacks, some political biographies – David Owen – Roy Jenkins – Shirley Williams etc. We were founder members of the SDP and have met them all.’Footnote ⁴⁴ (Years later, Williams called her memoirs Climbing the Bookshelves.)Footnote ⁴⁵ Piled high in bookshops, supermarkets, and discount stores, glossy autobiographies stand to make a visual impression upon many who have no intention even of reading the blurb. Another MO respondent commented: ‘Alastair Campbell’s “Blair Years“ are now remaindered at Poundland which I wouldn’t touch anyway!’Footnote ⁴⁶

As a boy, John Lennon lived with his aunt and uncle, who had Churchill’s volumes on display.Footnote ⁴⁷ This did not, however, endear their author to the future Beatle, who later discarded his given middle name, Winston. The books may well have been read, if not by Lennon, then by other family members. But the mere fact of putting them on the shelf served some kind of symbolic function. It does not, of course, follow that everyone who owned a book by a politician admired that person, or that there is any neat correlation between the books on a shelf and the politics of the shelf’s owner. Nonetheless, book collections do say something about the people who assemble them, who, indeed, may be making conscious statements about themselves and their politics through their decisions about what they exhibited – a kind of literary-political self-fashioning. One MO respondent who owned a large array of volumes, including Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, admitted: ‘I do not really need so many books I suppose having them is a form of vanity. My book cases look very impressive!’Footnote ⁴⁸

In contrast to memoirs and diaries, political biographies were well established as a genre at the start of the twentieth century. Victorian biographies, in general, have an almost legendary reputation for stodginess. Though this is not wholly undeserved, the picture needs to be qualified. To begin with, far from being uniformly deferential, many contemporaries were scathingly contemptuous of their political opponents. Consider, for example, Edward Harper’s pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone Answered: The Inconsistencies, Absurdities, and Contradictions in Mr Gladstone’s Public Career: Being a Letter to Him in Reply to His ‘Chapter of Autobiography’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The often tedious multi-volume works by ‘memory custodians’ need to be read in the light of the need of politicians’ relatives and supporters to cast them as statesmen, defending them against the vociferous attacks that they had often suffered while they were alive.

The Victorian style of biography continued into the twentieth century. Roy Foster has provided a detailed analysis of Winston Churchill’s 1906 biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, showing how Winston manipulated evidence to suit his own views and political convenience.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nevertheless, such works did provide a useful service. They reproduced in extenso evidence to which the authors often had privileged access, albeit often in bowdlerised form. It is worth noting that when Lytton Strachey wrote his famous takedown of several Eminent Victorians, he did not trouble to do any archival research. He simply mined the worthy biographical doorstops on his subjects that had already been published.Footnote ⁵¹

None of the four figures discussed in Strachey’s book were politicians, but it likely had some effect on expanding the limits of the sayable. There was no general revolution, however. Frank revelations about politicians’ private lives long remained off-limits. Roy Harrod’s 1951 biography of Strachey’s lover John Maynard Keynes kept Keynes’s homosexual tendencies under wraps.Footnote ⁵² They were not publicly revealed until the first volume of Michael Holroyd’s biography of Strachey appeared in 1967.Footnote ⁵³ Though Keynes did end up in the Lords, he was not really a politician – but non-politicians need to be included in our discussion, because biographies of them could reveal information about politicians and affect how they were viewed.

Thus, in the fallout of World War I, the ‘battle of the memoirs’ between politicians was complemented by biographical attempts to vindicate the memories of deceased military men who could no longer speak for themselves. As John F. Naylor has shown, there were strenuous efforts by the Cabinet Office to regulate the use of official information in such works.Footnote ⁵⁴ There was, though, a recognised right to self-defence (or posthumous defence by others) when the person concerned had been attacked in print. But this could backfire. C. E. Callwell’s 1927 biography of Henry Wilson reproduced diary extracts revealing the conflict between the ‘brass hats’ (soldiers) and the ‘frocks’ (politicians), of whom Wilson had been extremely disdainful.Footnote ⁵⁵ The overall effect was to damage Wilson’s reputation, but it also brought inside information that could be used by future political biographers into the public domain.

Few interwar political biographies were as revealing as Callwell’s. However, overtly critical treatments did appear, such as Victor Germains’s The Tragedy of Winston Churchill (1931) and L. MacNeill Weir’s The Tragedy of Ramsay MacDonald (1938).Footnote ⁵⁶ Germains was a professional writer; Weir had been MacDonald’s private secretary. Up until this point, biographies tended to be written by journalists, or by people (often themselves politicians) who had had some acquaintance with the subject of their book. Post–World War II, academics became increasingly prominent as political biographers of the recently deceased. Keith Feiling, of Christ Church, Oxford, was a historian of the Tory Party in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His sympathetic biography of Neville Chamberlain appeared in 1946. It was written at the request of Chamberlain’s family and drew upon his papers.Footnote ⁵⁷ Whether or not G. M. Young should be described as an academic is a moot point: he held positions in Oxford at the start and end of his career but did freelance historical work for much of it. At any rate, he was Stanley Baldwin’s choice as a biographer, though the results (published in 1952) were the opposite of what the book’s subject would have wanted.Footnote ⁵⁸ We can observe here an important phase in the emergence of the discipline of ‘contemporary history’; note also (non-biographical) works by Lewis Namier and Reginald Bassett.Footnote ⁵⁹

Alan Bullock’s mammoth biography of Ernest Bevin (1960–83) was a landmark.Footnote ⁶⁰ Bullock was another Oxford figure. Though he relied in part on papers made available to him by Arthur Deakin, Bevin’s successor as head of the TGWU, he also drew on an impressive variety of other archives, as well as interviewing almost two hundred people. The proliferation of this type of scholarship was doubtless linked in part to the post-war expansion of the universities and the changing regime of disclosure of official records. The Public Records Act of 1958 created a framework by which most government papers would be released after fifty years. In 1967 this was amended to thirty years.Footnote ⁶¹ This meant that although Bullock was not able to draw on official records for his 1967 volume on Bevin’s period as wartime Minister of Labour, he could do so for the period of the Attlee government.

Private initiative also played a role. Hugh Dalton donated his archive to the LSE, and this (including his fascinating diary) became a valuable source for many writers. The Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge was opened in 1973 and attracted many important papers. The Beaverbrook Library was short-lived (1967–75), but its collections (originally gathered by Lord Beaverbrook himself) ended up in what are now the Parliamentary Archives. It has been credited with triggering the rise of ‘Lloyd George Studies’.Footnote ⁶²

The 1960s through the 1990s were a kind of high period for political biography. Here, one sees a variety of phenomena in parallel. First, the official biography of Churchill (1966–88).Footnote ⁶³ This has been portrayed, with a fair degree of justice, as a celebratory and uncritical chronicle that failed to offer systematic analysis, almost the apotheosis of the Victorian approach. But it, and its documentary companion volumes, made available a mass of information, plenty of which was not creditable to Churchill. There is no evidence that the authors/editors engaged in large-scale bowdlerisation. Second, those biographies of politicians that are written by other politicians. These could be very distinguished, as in the cases of Michael Foot on Bevan and Roy Jenkins on Asquith.Footnote ⁶⁴ Third, biographies written by journalists or independent scholars, such as John Grigg’s (incomplete) study of Lloyd George, Kenneth Harris on Attlee, and the former academic John Campbell on figures from F. E. Smith to Edward Heath.Footnote ⁶⁵ Fourth, academic biographies written for a mass market. Here, it is Ben Pimlott’s books on Hugh Dalton (1985) and Harold Wilson (1992) that stand out as works that reshaped the popular as well as the scholarly understanding of their subjects.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Dalton biography was unusual, in that it showed a neglected figure to have been genuinely politically consequential, and at the same time, a fascinating (if much-hated) person.Footnote ⁶⁷ Featuring repressed homosexuality, a dead daughter, reliance on risky prescription drugs, and a spectacular Budget leak that derailed the hero’s career, the tale was much more interesting than the life stories of most politicians. Pimlott may not have done the job perfectly, but he did it so well that it seems highly unlikely that a further biography of Dalton will be attempted. With Wilson, Pimlott did not have the same rich material to work with, but in a context in which Wilson’s reputation had sat very low since his retirement, the mere fact that a biographer found some positive things to say seemed like a radical intervention. It is this type of effect that many biographers strive for, but few achieve.

Pimlott was quite frank that – as a moderate social democrat and former Labour candidate – he wrote with a sense of political commitment. During the battles of the 1980s, writing about Dalton ‘became a way of expressing my own defiant belief that – contrary to a right-wing view that serious history was about the Establishment, and a left-wing one that true “labour history” looked only at the rank and file – Labour had a heritage in high politics, and high ideas, that needed examining’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet Pimlott himself was more than a little disenchanted with the genre. In his 1989 inaugural lecture, he observed that:

He called for ‘a radical with the arrogance of a Picasso or a Joyce to smash our encrusted expectations’.Footnote ⁶⁹ He later conceded that this call seemed ‘a bit earnest’ and also ‘rather millenarian’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Peter Clarke’s The Cripps Version (2002) did involve experimentation with genre conventions; it was led by the sources that Stafford Cripps had left in his own voice rather than providing a wholly rounded account of his career.Footnote ⁷¹ Clarke notes today that Pimlott ‘was right about the problem but unsure about the answer. His own work on Dalton actually changed the genre in its approach I think, certainly making a bigger public and literary impact than the existing convention of political biography’.Footnote ⁷² However, there has never been a fundamental disruption of the kind Pimlott hoped for.

Though excellent biographies have continued to appear, during the twenty-first century the genre arguably became less important to the national conversation. For example, Charles Moore’s official biography of Margaret Thatcher was a thorough and creditable work that included some revelations, but it was unlikely to shift readers’ established views.Footnote ⁷³ There has been a continued and perhaps growing trend for serving MPs to publish biographies (and other historical works). In 2017, Rachel Reeves performed a service by publishing Life of the Labour MP Alice Bacon, who rose to become a junior minister under Wilson.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet new and interesting subjects have seemed in short supply. Nick Thomas-Symonds, another shadow minister, has written biographies of Attlee, Bevan, and Wilson.Footnote ⁷⁵ The books are well-researched and include some interesting new information, but one cannot avoid the sense that familiar fields are being reploughed for relatively little reward.

Producing a compelling biography requires the location of a sweet spot: the significance and interest of the person; new documentary sources; and, if possible, interviews with friends, relatives, colleagues, and subordinates. When a politician had played a role, however minor, in either World War I or II, some level of interest was almost guaranteed. But the fact is that the lives of most politicians from the 1980s onwards have not been inherently worthy of study, even where they have colourful personalities and private lives. Their experiences before politics have generally revolved around getting into politics. At the same time, the rise of ‘sofa government’ has been accompanied by an apparent decline in the quality of governmental record-keeping. Strings of WhatsApp messages may well find their way into the hands of friendly journalists; they won’t necessarily be available to future historians, except perhaps when requisitioned for official purposes such as the public enquiry into the Covid pandemic.

Memoirs and biographies have often drawn upon diaries, thereby blurring the lines between the PLW sub-genres. Politicians have often made use of their own diaries (as well as of letters) when writing their autobiographies. Inevitably, this involves selectivity, and sometimes it has also involved bowdlerisation. This may be for reasons of official secrecy, to avoid embarrassing former colleagues, or for fear of legal action. It may also be done to burnish the image or the reputation of the diarist/memoirist. The same is true in respect of editions of diaries that politicians publish themselves, sometimes while still politically active.Footnote ⁷⁶ Families, friends, executors, and editors may also influence the shape of posthumous publication. The classic example is that of the Conservative MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. His lover Peter Coats provided Robert Rhodes James (a future Tory member of parliament) with a much-shortened transcript. However, it appears to have been Rhodes James’s own decision to undertake further expurgations, disguising Channon’s bisexuality, when he published the original edition in 1967.Footnote ⁷⁷

Reviewing the first volume of Simon Heffer’s new edition of Channon’s diary in 2021, Richard Davenport-Hines wrote: ‘To view the diaries as political history is to mistake them entirely. Political historians may be dismayed by the hectic partygoing and intolerant of the callous, reactionary frivolity of Channon’s parliamentary judgements. But the diaries are a piece of literary craft.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Though insightful about the genre aspirations of Channon (who had known Proust), Davenport-Hines made an error when he implied that normal political diaries are not literary. Beatrice Webb – not actually a politician but a social reformer with deep political connections – did much to cement the diary as a twentieth-century politico-literary genre. As Helen McCarthy shows in her contribution to this volume, Webb in her youth undertook a literary self-fashioning, allowing her private passions to shine through in her diary while cultivating an external image as the emotionless but efficient author of arid social-scientific texts. Webb’s reworking of her diary – once dismissed by her husband Sidney as the ‘scribblings of a woman’ – caused her ‘an agony of mind’ as she prepared her memoir of her early life for publication.Footnote ⁷⁹ Published as My Apprenticeship (1926), this may have been ‘an autobiography with the love affairs left out’, but it was also one with the literary artifice left in.Footnote ⁸⁰

‘One golden rule, if you want to be remembered, is to keep a diary’, Pimlott advised.Footnote ⁸¹ But, as he himself knew, not all diaries are equal. Creating a readable one is a skill that needs to be worked at. Dalton started his during World War I as a dry record of ordinary events. It took time for it to develop into a vehicle for commentary, thought, and planning.Footnote ⁸² In line with Pimlott’s dictum, a range of relatively minor figures (as well as bystanders or observers from outside the sphere of formal politics) succeeded in writing themselves into history. This was partly through the systematic recording of events, partly through literary skill, and partly through the relevant diaries being published.

Channon – a figure of little political consequence but of great observational power – is an obvious example. The diplomat Harold Nicolson, who served for ten years as a National Labour MP, was of somewhat greater significance. But, his colourful marriage to the author Vita Sackville-West notwithstanding, he would likely not feature so often in the indexes of historical works were it not for the published volumes of his diaries and letters.Footnote ⁸³ Reading them offered the chance to escape into another milieu.Footnote ⁸⁴ Similarly, Alan Clark would be little better remembered than the average Thatcher minister had he not published his salacious diaries.Footnote ⁸⁵ As well as providing material for historians, Clark appealed to ordinary readers through his apparent breach of genre conventions. ‘He is amusing – bitingly cynical & doesn’t spare himself’, noted one Mass Observer. ‘He sounds a clever amusing swine. Rather refreshing after all the political memoirs spilling the beans on colleagues.’Footnote ⁸⁶ A 1996 Observer article suggested that publishers were ‘beginning to consider the political memoir dead as a genre unless written with the ribald gusto of an Alan Clark’.Footnote ⁸⁷

But even plain accounts can be deceptive in their simplicity. The diary of the Edwardian Liberal minister J. A. Pease was, as its editors note, ‘primarily a record of things heard, seen, and done in Parliament and 10 Downing Street’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Family and constituency issues were not prioritised in Pease’s writing, though this did not necessarily mean that they were unimportant to him. The diary served as an aide memoire – that is to say, as a practical tool – and as such was not a complete description of political or personal life. Historians are frequently conscious of the potential pitfalls caused by diarists’ choices of focus – but their interpretations are inevitably shaped by those choices all the same.

Authors and editors often faced tough choices when deciding what material to include in published editions. Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle, and Tony Benn were among the diarists who produced far more text than could feasibly be included even in multi-volume books. Making selections involved judgement calls about what was important, relevant, and interesting. This could, of course, be influenced by hindsight. Ruth Winstone, editor of Benn’s diaries (while he was still alive), recalled:

It is always necessary to ask how closely published diaries follow the original texts. Crossman found that the transcript of his original tapes was ‘hardly readable’. He ‘decided therefore to re-dictate this whole first transcript in plain intelligible English’, recruiting Janet Morgan of Nuffield College to make sure ‘that the second version was faithful to the first’.Footnote ⁹⁰ After Crossman’s death, Morgan edited the remaining volumes. In her introduction to the third of these, she noted that she had ‘completed sentences, disentangled metaphors and corrected the grammar …. Of course in some places major textual surgery has been essential’.Footnote ⁹¹ It might be an exaggeration to say that published diaries are mere literary confections, but an editor may well be concerned to create a coherent, or even exciting, narrative from a mass of sometimes inchoate material.

This may be balanced, however, with the intent to educate the reader. Castle’s publisher, working on her diary for 1966, advised: ‘At this stage of the narrative it seems to me important to keep down the length of individual entries to achieve a sense of pace in the run up to the election. At the same time it is very interesting to show how government work continues inexorably even days from the announcement of an election.’Footnote ⁹² On a few occasions, the sheer readability of certain diaries has created a market for follow-up volumes written after the authors have left active political life. Politics thus blurs into entertainment – as perhaps it always has. In the preface to his post-parliamentary diary, the former Labour MP Chris Mullin notes wryly that ‘the political meeting is not dead. It has simply transferred to the literary festival’.Footnote ⁹³

What, then, is the state of British PLW in the mid-2020s? Conventional biography, arguably, has developed into a zombie genre. Many political lives are still published, yet, with some partial exceptions such as Tom Baldwin’s biography of Keir Starmer, they do little to shape the reputations of their subjects or the contours of historical debate.Footnote ⁹⁴ Books such as Anthony Seldon’s Truss At 10, which are focused on an individual yet eschew a cradle-to-grave approach, seem more pertinent to the national conversation.Footnote ⁹⁵ Autobiographies, for their part, have long suffered an image problem. Some authors sought to battle this, consciously presenting their own books as different from ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’ political memoirs.Footnote ⁹⁶ Publicity for Boris Johnson’s Unleashed claimed that it shattered the mould of the modern prime ministerial memoir.Footnote ⁹⁷ Breaking with genre conventions is thus presented as a mark of authenticity.

Diaries have retained more vitality and relevance, albeit partly through defining themselves in relation to the idea that tedious, score-settling accounts are the autobiographical norm. The jacket copy of Norman Fowler’s 2023 volume, covering his years as a minister under Thatcher and Major emphasises: ‘These are not the diaries of an ex-minister seeking to justify their own record.’Footnote ⁹⁸ Authors can aspire to transcend genre and join the ‘pantheon of truly great diarists’ that includes Chips Channon and Alan Clark.Footnote ⁹⁹ Sasha Swire recalled in the preface to the paperback of her Diary of an MP’s Wife: ‘I read the edited proofs [of the hardback] during the first national lockdown [in] March 2020, and felt rather like Chips Channon re-reading his own diary, “frequently horrified by the scandalous tone it has”.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Clearly, an element of pride accompanied the horror.

Herein lies a paradox. The works that are often viewed as the ‘best’ examples of PLW are those which are seen to be, in some way, distanced from conventional political concerns; that is, they breach expected genre conventions by being personal, confessional, and apparently careless of reputation. Yet such books themselves reinforce a view of politics which is Westminster-centred and which reflects, to a great extent, the perspectives of a small number of privileged white men. Arguably, it also reinforces the ‘two-party politics’ assumptions of Westminster and mainstream political journalism even when, as today, that model corresponds poorly to reality. Like any other books, works in the PLW genre are produced not by lone auteurs, but by networks of authors, editors, agents, publishers, printers, and so forth, as well as being influenced (often) by the rules of official secrecy. Similarly, the shifting genre conventions of PLW have been shaped collectively, and through creative tension: by politicians, civil servants, journalists, reviewers, the publishing industry, and the expectations of ordinary readers. And these genre conventions have generally reflected and reinforced a rather narrow, elite perception of what politics is, albeit one that includes a significant element of disenchantment.

This chapter will discuss novels that form part of the ‘parliamentary’ genre, particularly by authors with direct personal experience of being an MP or minister, or those who had a close relationship with such figures. It surveys the course of this genre, highlighting its tropes and focusing on the post-war period, the time of its supposed dissolution. The motives of such authors varied, although one was always to make money. If that motive was constant, there was a definite shift from celebrating to almost denigrating the world of Westminster. This was due in part to changes in the literary market and the nature of the popular novel, but also to shifts in how those in politics looked upon their own activities – and attempted to find ways of evoking a positive (i.e., remunerative) response from readers. By emphasising the influence of gender, the chapter supplies insights into what was a transforming – but in crucial instances, a not very transforming – post-war political culture.

In 1996 the acerbic Labour MP Gerald Kaufman claimed parliamentary novels were ‘on the whole unutterable trash’.Footnote ¹ Certainly by the 1990s the great days of the genre many credited Benjamin Disraeli and Anthony Trollope with giving life, were widely thought to be well behind it. In the 1920s Morris Edmund Speare gave a neat summary of the tropes evident in such novels during their heyday, writing that:

These were the stories of great men, told to help those excluded from drawing rooms and castles understand their real-life leaders’ dilemmas. For many took these fictions to reflect actual politics.Footnote ³

Writing in 1991, Christopher Harvie confirmed Speare’s view regarding the importance of parliamentary novels in reconciling humble readers to the Westminster model.Footnote ⁴ He recognised that like all genres, this one contained elements from other genres, such as melodrama, thriller and comedy, stating it ‘merged “entertainment” and ideology to produce a useful political discourse for a traditional society intent on social and economic change’. The parliamentary novel consequently played a significant part in the elite’s strategy of incorporating the increasing number of voters within the existing representative system. It helped create an imagined community in which great men worked disinterestedly on behalf of the nation, one that emphasised the centrality of political institutions to the national and imperial identity.

The political intentions behind Disraeli’s Sybil are well known. In the novel he called upon the aristocracy to assume leadership in an industrialising society to bridge the gap between the Two Nations. Moreover, while Disraeli’s novels were not uncritical of politics and parliament, he presented them as the only route through which the propertied classes could transcend the crisis. According to Harvie, Disraeli succeeded: indeed, his novels formed a basic document of parliamentarianism, of a piece with the new Palace of Westminster and Walter Bagehot’s English Constitution.

Like Disraeli, Trollope sought to entertain but also to educate. And like Disraeli he was often critical about the practice of politics – being especially fearful of the impact of the parvenu politician, the demagogue and a press intent on exploiting popular ignorance. But he still idealised Westminster (and was himself a defeated Liberal candidate in 1868). As Trollope wrote in Can You Forgive Her? (1864) of the lamps that guard the entry to the Member?s Lobby of the House of Commons:

As a result, he believed in the benevolent power of politics, but only so long as it remained in the hands of exceptional men who were members of an aristocracy of mind and money.

Trollope and Disraeli laid down tropes that would populate parliamentary novels for generations to come.Footnote ⁵ But if the genre played an important part in promoting acceptance of an elite-led national political culture, it did not do so simply due to its authors’ skills. It was, according to Harvie, due to a seamless web that existed between publishers, literary politicians, journalists and commentators, which meant the novel could be a place for the expression of serious political ideas. This culture was, however, cast asunder thanks to changes wrought by the First World War. That was because, in 1918, the electorate massively increased, while the impact of educational improvement and changes in publishing increased the number of readers: voters tripled, and the number of published books increased even more in the two decades that followed 1918. Such new voters and readers had different interests from their pre-war counterparts and did not necessarily want the kind of novels popular in the nineteenth century. According to this narrative, therefore, the entry of the working class – and women – onto the political stage meant that the parliamentary novel became almost irrelevant.

Harvie’s assessment of what remained of the parliamentary novel at the time The Centre of Things was published was consequently damning and echoed that of Gerald Kaufman. He believed fictions about Westminster had descended into diversions for tired passengers at airports, their authors forced to include sex scenes to attract readers. This chapter makes no claims for the unacknowledged artistry of those who wrote such novels in the post-war period; but it seeks to rescue them from such high-handed condescension. As Harvie himself had pointed out, even Disraeli sought to entertain readers and threw in the odd romance to beguile them. Thus, while many male authors continued to emphasise the significance of a traditional patriarchal vision of Westminster, the entry of a number of female authors sought to challenge that vision. However deracinated literary critics might have considered the parliamentary novel by the end of the twentieth century, it was a genre that still had something to say about politics.

Maurice Edelman

The Labour MP Maurice Edelman was one of a number – including David Walder, William Clark and C. P. Snow – who continued to contribute to the parliamentary novel during the post-war period. Their work was probably more influential than that of their predecessors: it was sold in paperback and often adapted for stage and television, frequently by Ronald Millar, who later helped Margaret Thatcher finesse her most important speeches. Despite their party differences, they painted a remarkably similar and familiar picture. Much like the Victorians, they defined the parameters of political action as the country house weekend, Cabinet room and Commons chamber, although some added Whitehall and Washington. It was a universe dominated by Westminster, over which presided wily Prime Ministers; humble party members, constituents and women rarely intruded into this world, and when they did, it was not a good sign.

As had Trollope, these authors were believed to lift the veil that still separated politicians from the public, humanising the country’s leaders at a time when many still did not care to do so on their own behalf and when the press just about retained a respectable distance. At the same time, they heightened the sense that politics was a worthwhile, important and even glamorous pursuit.

First elected an MP in 1945, Edelman remained on the backbenches throughout his career. A journalist by profession, Who Goes Home (1953) was his first parliamentary novel and during the 1960s he also wrote a number of similarly themed television plays. If popular, some critics looked down on his work as ‘journeyman fictioneering’ confined within ‘a smoothly operated formula’, meaning it was ‘just the thing for undemanding deck-chairs’.Footnote ⁶ His protagonists were predominantly upper class and glamorous Tories; these are political celebrities: in Who Goes Home, the hero Erskine even has his fashion sense praised in Vogue. If Labour’s trade union MPs barely featured in Edelman’s stories then neither did the kind of grammar school products starting to find a place within Conservative ranks. Edelman presumed readers wanted to know about the private lives of these elevated figures. As Manningham the ‘revered commentator’ on Parliamentary life in Who Goes Home claimed: ‘Of course the British public like to know their Prime Minister. But what they know is myth. It’s the same with every politician.’Footnote ⁷ Edelman promised to go beyond the myth, while creating some myths of his own. Reviewers lauded his ‘authenticity’ and expressed their pleasure in being allowed to overhear private conversations. As one wrote of The Prime Minister’s Daughter: ‘I liked the sense of being let into those corridors and lobbies of power: it flatters.’Footnote ⁸ Quite how this critic knew whether Edelman was giving them a bona fide picture of behind-the-scenes political life is of course moot. But he definitely gave them what they believed to be an authentic picture, the circle being closed when Labour MP Richard Crossman, on first becoming a minister in 1964 considered he was ‘living in a Maurice Edelman novel’.Footnote ⁹ Ironically it was the publication of Crossman’s diaries and those of other leading figures that finally lifted the veil on Westminster without the help of any novelist.Footnote ¹⁰

When Edelman raised the curtain he revealed – unlike Crossman – a workable system, one underpinned by tradition and largely run by men of honour. As Melville, the protagonist of both The Minister (1961) and The Prime Minister’s Daughter, says of the Commons:

So far, so Trollope. But if there was something noble in a politician’s pursuit of public duty, Edelman was at pains to underline that it came at a private cost being preoccupied by the contrast between the public and private lives of the elite. This he did, not to expose hypocrisy, but to demonstrate how difficult it was to be a politician. As one reviewer remarked of Who Goes Home, it was essentially an ‘exposure of the vulnerability of the public figure to private attack’.Footnote ¹² Indeed, such was the focus on the personal in The Minister one critic claimed it ‘hardly qualifies as political at all’.Footnote ¹³ Another asserted of The Prime Minister’s Daughter that it was ‘concerned with politics almost entirely as an arena of action where personal destinies and ambitions are fulfilled or destroyed. There is little real ideological content or conflict’.Footnote ¹⁴ Similarly, of his 1968 BBC2 play A Matter of Principle, the issue of how far the press should report political secrets was said to have been obscured by the extent to which Edelman presented it as a purely private battle between a journalist and politician with whose wife the former had slept.Footnote ¹⁵

Edelman’s focus on the personal element in political life was deliberate. Writing about his 1970 adaptation of The Prime Minister’s Daughter for ITV he claimed: ‘A politician lives at two levels. When he’s doing his job, he’s on stage.… But when he’s alone with his personal problems and tensions and conflicts, he shares the common humanity of everybody else’. Thus, he argued, his play asked: ‘How much and how little should – or can – children communicate with their parents? How close, without smothering them, can parents get to children? How responsible are parents for the sins of their children – and children for the sins of their parents?’Footnote ¹⁶ These were, for sure, not ‘political’ questions, but they were ones with which any adult viewer might identify and, on that basis, sympathise with the Prime Minister whose troubles Edelman outlined.

Politicians in Edelman’s world were trapped by the very system they operated. To make this point he often discussed a politician’s face, his smile. In some hands this focus might have been used to expose hypocrisy but Edelman uses it to suggest tragedy. In Who Goes Home he refers to his protagonist’s ‘famous smile, the Constituency Smile, the Erskine Smile.… In its absolute form it was his election photograph’, the face which Erskine presented to the world.Footnote ¹⁷ This mask was however necessary due the demands of politics, not the least of which was public expectation. During a rare heart-to-heart talk, Melville’s daughter asks him why he never smiles:

When the scene was enacted for television, viewers could see actor David Langdon subtly convey the sadness in Melville’s eyes as he performed his ‘TV smile’.

According to Edelman, politicians are caught within this mask, one they are forced to wear by the nature of their work. As a character in Who Goes Home observes, politics is ‘a sort of theatre, stuffed with unreality’ which means, declares another, every politician must possess ‘a double persona, the one he is to his constituents and the public, and the one he is to his pillow. The public one is the bowdlerised version. All the swear words and the dirty bits have been taken out’. Indeed, Edelman has the novel’s wise Prime Minister state: ‘The Party system is a system of organized conscience. It’s bad for the soul, but good for the nation’ – and it is a burden those who aspire to exercise power simply have to accept.Footnote ¹⁹

Tory Novelists

On his death in 1975 Edelman was described as ‘one of the last of the “literary MPs”’.Footnote ²⁰ He was hardly that. The Thatcher-Major years saw the publication of an unprecedented number of works, written by ministers and ex-ministers (Douglas Hurd, Tim Renton and Michael Spicer), the Chief Whip in the Lords (Bertie Denham), backbench MPs (Nigel West), former MPs (Jeffrey Archer) and ex-Central Office officials (Michael Dobbs). As with earlier parliamentary novels, their appeal lay in appearing to give readers an authentic view of politics. Like those produced by Maurice Edelman in the 1950s and 1960s, they were mainly aimed at the ‘middle-brow’ market, where sales of 30,000 were considered decent. A few, however, achieved mass sales: Dobbs’ House of Cards trilogy (1989–94) ultimately sold nearly 1.5 million copies worldwide.Footnote ²¹ His novels did so well partly because they were adapted for television, something that also helped Archer’s First Among Equals (1984) become a bestseller.

Evoking the excitement of being part of life-or-death decisions, close cabinet votes and critical Commons divisions, if these were hyper-real accounts of Parliamentary life meant to entertain, they also conveyed the banality of politics. Some were crime thrillers with their tongues firmly in their cheek, in which MPs performed the time-served role of amateur detective. But all had something to say about real politics. West’s Murder in the Commons (1992) and Murder in the Lords (1994) saw Conservative Phillip North solve two homicides while the author made none-too subtle defences of privatisation and MPs’ outside interests.

In contrast, Spicer specialised in dystopian Cold War fantasies. His first novel Final Act (1981) warned of the consequences of appeasing Moscow. Set in a near future in which Europe is under direct Soviet rule, Britain’s political parties are largely run by the London High Commission of the USSR. Indicating his own hostility to the EEC, Spicer has the Conservative party morph into the European Unity Party whose main object is to placate Moscow. Describing a revolt against Britain being completely integrated into the Soviet Empire, Spicer has it fail because it comes too late: Britons should have been more alert in the 1980s. Prime Minister Spy (1986) was another paranoid fantasy. It was however unlikely Moscow would ever have adopted the scheme outlined in the novel, which involved the KGB ensuring Adolf Hitler’s son becomes Conservative Prime Minister so he can lead Britain into the Warsaw Pact.

Patrician Politics

Hurd and Renton specialised in thrillers that evoked and commented on contemporary events. The former had been writing novels since before his election to the Commons in 1973 and continued to do so, even after becoming a junior minister in 1979.Footnote ²² The Palace of Enchantments (1985), co-authored with his Private Secretary at the Foreign Office, was Hurd’s sixth but the only one published during the Conservative period in power, which saw him become Home and later Foreign Secretary. Renton started writing only after he left frontline politics in 1992, prior to which he had been Thatcher’s last Chief Whip and Major’s first Minister for the Arts. Both men were of the same generation and class, having been born in the early 1930s and educated at Eton and Oxbridge; they also shared the same kind of liberal One Nation Toryism which Thatcher described as ‘wet’. The hereditary peer Denham enjoyed a similar background with this pair. If his four novels published between 1979 and 1997 had more crime than politics, even Foxhunt (1988) has mounting inner-city discontent as part of its background.

Like those produced by Hurd and Renton, Denham’s novels expressed a cautious idealism about the parliamentary system. These fictions also paint a picture of politics best left in the hands of rational, patrician, pragmatic men, those very much like their authors. They depict dangers within parliamentary democracy that only men of this stripe can negotiate, notably the overweening influence of party and the short sightedness of the people, perils Trollope had also recognised.

The Palace of Enchantments has a City banker take his American counterpart on a tour of London.Footnote ²³ Passing a suburban street replete with roses, Virginia creepers, a red pillar box and ‘small gables and pediments in architectural confusion’, Hurd has him claim:

This vision was one that would have frustrated those Thatcherites keen to turn Britain into a nation of striving entrepreneurs. Hurd believed such moderation was moreover based on an ultimately sound parliamentary system, one largely composed of men dedicated to selfless public service. To make this point he has a German banker speak of the democratic nature of the Palace of Westminster while explaining why the novel’s hero, Edward Dunsford, had abandoned a lucrative career in finance for the uncertainties of politics:

Renton’s Hostage to Fortune (1997) expanded on the apparent reality of this ‘service’ by having a Conservative Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition combine in the national interest to support Britain’s entry into the Euro. In the real world, this policy was strongly opposed by the deposed Thatcher’s still-vocal supporters. In Renton’s novel however the Prime Minister believes Britain will benefit from the move but is aware many in his party oppose the measure and so, as both are good men, the two leaders put partisan considerations aside and do the right thing. The constitution is moreover, Renton suggests, still sound, for when politicians fail to show the right leadership the Queen acts as a fail-safe. In A Dangerous Edge (1994) when the personal ambitions of a Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister bring the Cabinet to deadlock, the monarch forces the latter to declare an election, one which sees both lose their seats, allowing her to call for the novel’s righteous hero to form a new government.

Written while his leader was preparing to mount an attack on the post-war consensus, Denham’s The Man Who Lost His Shadow (1979) also depicts the mutual respect uniting men of good character on both sides of the House – even those like Jimmy Spiller, a working class ex-Communist Labour MP, and the Conservative shadow Home Secretary Sir John Elton, who disagree on every aspect of politics. Denham’s hero across his four novels is Derek Thryde, a Lords whip and something of a throwback, whose universe comprises country houses, loyal retainers, pink gins and fox hunting. This comforting society is complemented by a parliament whose timeworn but grand architecture Denham describes in loving detail, along with some of the more arcane but still effective chapters of legislative procedure. Denham’s is a world of sound and living tradition, one whose heroes are ‘self-effacing’ and whose villains are ‘aggressively self-confident’ bounders. Even the press is benign, with Thyrde writing of Lobby journalists that their ‘ethical standards are higher than any other section of the Press in the country, probably the world’.Footnote ²⁴

Soap-Opera Westminster

Although they were well regarded as literary efforts, only one of Hurd’s novels, Scotch on the Rocks (1973), was adapted for television. In contrast, the works of Jeffrey Archer were so popular they were habitually adapted for the small screen. Aiming at a transatlantic audience, Archer to begin with fought shy of depicting British politics for fear of alienating American readers. Indeed, two early novels, Shall We Tell the President? (1977) and The Prodigal Daughter (1982) tackled US politics. This emphasis changed with his fifth outing, First Among Equals (1984), described by his publisher as ‘The book he was born to write’.Footnote ²⁵ For Archer had only turned to novels after his time as a Conservative MP ended abruptly when, fearing bankruptcy, he stood down after just five years in the Commons. The change of career proved extremely lucrative. Archer’s novels adhered to a popular formula, one that involved struggles for power and wealth between small groups of highly motivated and often over-sexed men, leading one critic to comment snootily that they ‘rely on little more than the lust for money, sex and power’.Footnote ²⁶ First Among Equals applied this blueprint to Westminster, charting the lives and loves of four young MPs entering the Commons in 1964, each ambitious to become Prime Minister. Archer sets his protagonists’ struggles against real events, with versions of Wilson, Heath, Thatcher and others making appearances although party politics, at least in terms of policy, is rarely mentioned. Few looked upon First Amongst Equals as a serious political document. Conservative party chair Norman Tebbit even claimed an Archer novel was ideal hospital reading because it ‘requires no mental effort’.Footnote ²⁷ Yet, whatever his quality as a writer, Archer projected a glamorised vision of Westminster, one that quickly sold a million copies and when adapted for television reached seven million viewers.

Archer’s MPs are balanced in partisan terms, with two each from Labour and the Conservatives, although one of the former defects to the Social Democratic Party. They also come from contrasting classes. Although two originate from landed backgrounds, money troubles plague Simon Kerslake (Archer’s middle-class Tory), while Labour MP Raymond Gould has emerged from the back streets of Leeds to become a barrister. Archer presents being an MP as a poorly paid and insecure occupation, meaning that when Kerslake struggles to pay his sons’ school fees, he comes to a lucrative arrangement with a property developer who wants introductions to useful people. Archer does not, however, see anything wrong with this relationship and is at pains to stress that Kerslake’s integrity remains intact.

If the four MPs’ private lives all suffer due to their grand passion, Archer presents their desire to be Prime Minister as righteous, for if they are personally ambitious, they are ultimately well-motivated men. When Northern Ireland Secretary, Kerslake is nearly assassinated when the IRA booby-trap his car and despite incredible pain he staggers to the Commons to make a speech so as to prevent the defeat of his plan for peace. Gould also shows himself a man of honour when he resigns from the Labour Front Bench after the Wilson government devalued sterling, having publicly just opposed such a move. Similarly, Labour and Conservative cooperate to ensure a wrongfully convicted man gets justice. Archer, then, meant his story to show Westminster in positive terms.

When the novel was adapted into a ten-part ITV series in 1986, producer Mervyn Watson claimed it was a ‘serious drama … [which] delves deep into the working of the MPs and the whole political system’. Reflecting the number of scenes to be shot there, the production company Granada even invested a considerable sum in carefully reconstructing the Commons Chamber, emphasising the centrality Archer’s novel gave the arena.Footnote ²⁸ Yet few television reviewers believed the series had anything positive to say about Westminster. Noting the number of naked women on view, the future Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger even described the series as embodying ‘politics-with-nipples’.Footnote ²⁹ Many saw the series in terms of Dallas and Dynasty, then-popular American soap operas about the rich and powerful. As one critic had it, the series was a ‘political soap at its slipperiest, and no one is safe from the suds of corruption that float out of every doorway.’Footnote ³⁰ Indeed, some looked upon the adaptation as containing ‘a hard kernel of cynicism’ in which politics was ‘nothing more than snakes-and-ladders, anything other than the clash of ego and ambition’ and whose four protagonists were ‘motivated purely by self-interest and a lust for power’.Footnote ³¹ According to Mary Kenny in the Daily Mail ‘Archer brilliantly exposes the hollow obsessions which make so many politicians tick’ while in its Sunday counterpart Alan Coren said of the MPs, ‘not only are the four candidates venal. Shifty, toadying and egomaniacal, they are also pinheads’.Footnote ³² Robert Kilroy-Silk, about to embark on a populist media career having just resigned as a Labour MP, was one of the few to notice that Archer’s protagonists did have values and distinct ideas. But he still considered the series depicted MPs as a whole as ‘ruthlessly ambitious, manipulative and self-seeking’, just as they were, he claimed, in real life.Footnote ³³

Despite his commercial success, Archer remained a frustrated politician. As First Among Equals showed, he looked on his absence from the Commons in the same way Trollope had mourned his own exclusion. But in 1985, between the publication of the novel and its television adaptation, Archer made a return to Conservative politics, when at Thatcher’s insistence, he was appointed Deputy Chairman of the party. As an ironic coda to what viewers were then watching on the screen, halfway through the series Archer’s ambitions were again thwarted, when he resigned, having been discovered paying money to a prostitute in an attempt to buy her silence. Unlike Raymond Gould, who survived a blackmail attempt after an encounter with an escort, Archer would not make Prime Minister.

Houses of Cards

Michael Dobbs was over twenty years younger than Denham, Hurd and Renton and was born almost a decade after Archer. Of a different generation, he was also a graduate of the University of Nottingham rather than Oxbridge and never became an MP. From the mid-1970s, he did, however, work for the Conservative party in various roles, including advising Thatcher while in Opposition and acting as Tebbit’s chief of staff when he was Chairman prior to and during the 1987 general election. Dobbs also worked for Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising agency with intimate Conservative party links. After Thatcher’s third election triumph, he left Central Office when criticism of Tebbit’s management of the 1987 campaign led to acrimony with Number 10. With Thatcher gone, he returned to assist John Major as Deputy Chairman and became a peer after David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010.

Dobbs began to write during his post-1987 hiatus, so beginning a second career as a prolific novelist. House of Cards (1989), his first and most famous novel, charted the rise of Francis Urquhart, from Chief Whip in a failing Conservative government to the verge of Number 10. As Dobbs paints him, Urquhart is an antediluvian figure, one at home on the grouse moor rather than taking advice from an advertising agency. A hard-up member of the landed elite who took up politics only after being forced to sell off his family estate, he resents being surrounded by modern Tories, pushy grammar school types to whom he has to defer. Such mediocrities, as Urquhart sees them, have only succeeded thanks to their superficially amenable television manner. Unable to take any more, Urquhart turns the power and knowledge of the Chief Whip to eliminate those standing between him and Number 10. Such is his desire for power Dobbs’ cold-hearted protagonist even murders to achieve his ends. Yet, when threatened with exposure by a young investigative female journalist, Urquhart throws himself from the top of the Palace of Westminster, allowing normal politics to resume.

The very kind of Tory Dobbs has Urquhart detest, the author undoubtedly indulged in some playful intra-party stereotyping; and while Urquhart dominates the novel his dreadful plot ends in failure. When Andrew Davies adapted Dobbs’ novel for BBC1 in 1990 he transformed it into a very different piece of work. No Conservative, Davies gave House of Cards a darkly comic edge the novel lacked, parodying the parliamentary novel by turning qualities previous novelists working in that genre had praised against themselves, and critiquing how real Conservatives exercised power. For Urquhart in Davies’ hands becomes the inhuman embodiment of the pursuit and exercise of political authority. Moreover, in this bleaker vision, Davies has Urquhart succeed: rather than commit suicide he throws his accuser to her death.

The series was extremely popular. Timing helped: its first two episodes were broadcast while Conservative MPs divested themselves of Thatcher and chose another leader. If First Among Equals was compared to a soap opera, critics saw House of Cards in Shakespearean terms; according to one critic, it was ‘Richard III in modern dress’.Footnote ³⁴ Many drew parallels with ongoing real-life events, and while some thought Davies guilty of hyperbole, others believed that ‘as in the best satire, exaggeration reveals a truth’.Footnote ³⁵ Responding to the success of the series, Dobbs resurrected Urquhart to live on as Prime Minister in two further novels, both of which Davies adapted. In his hands, To Play the King (BBC, 1993) and Final Cut (BBC, 1995) drew parallels between Urquhart and Thatcher, ones absent in the original series and Dobbs’ novels. In the latter, Urquhart even wants his own version of the Falklands War – by which he means a cynically engineered conflict – and his downfall, like Thatcher’s, is precipitated by the resignation of a Foreign Secretary over Europe.

Urquhart nonetheless remains the embodiment of traditional political power: as Davies has him say in To Play the King, ‘The forces that drive me come from centuries of history’. A self-described ‘loyal servant of the state’ Urquhart exploits those who demonstrate ‘human’ qualities. Indeed, the recognisably Thatcherite policies pursued by his government are themselves criticised for their ‘sheer lack of humanity’ by a Prince Charles–like monarch in the 1993 series. Very unusually, Davies implicates viewers in these policies by having Urquhart address them directly through the camera. Looking at viewers in To Play the King he declares:

From this speech, there is an immediate dissolve to a group believed to be IRA terrorists being shot down by the military while out shopping, evoking the murder of unarmed Irish terror suspects on Gibraltar in 1988. They have been killed on Urquhart’s orders, and, the act having been accomplished, he turns to viewers and, anticipating any queasiness on their part, states: ‘I thought you liked strong leadership’. In The Final Cut, Urquhart also reminds viewers that if they want a strong leader, which was said to have attracted many to Thatcher, then whatever that person does, they ‘partake in it’.

In the concluding series, Urquhart becomes the victim of his own cold-hearted approach to power. Knowing her husband’s days in office are numbered, Urquhart’s wife wants him to avoid the kind of humiliation that befell Thatcher. Having already started a liaison with the Prime Minister’s security advisor, Commander Corder, she has him arrange Urquhart’s assassination while unveiling a statue to Thatcher’s memory. Once the act is over, Davies has Corder immediately approach Urquhart’s closest rival and effectively anoint him on behalf of the security services stating that ‘anything you need, we’re right behind you’. In this way, Davies merges the parliamentary novel with the conspiracy genre, suggesting the central role of dark and secret forces in British politics.Footnote ³⁶ In Dobbs’ third novel, Urquhart was also assassinated, but while it would have been little comfort to his protagonist, his death was not the product of any conspiracy. For Dobbs did not have the same political outlook as his television interpreter; indeed, as he archly put it, in contrast to those cynics at the BBC he believed politics could still consist of ‘truth, justice and [the] triumph of good’.Footnote ³⁷

Tory Men and Their Women

Tory novels of this period were stories by men about men, with women restricted to their accustomed role as their protagonists’ hobbies, hindrances or helpmates. In First Among Equals, apart from Archer’s fictionalised Thatcher, women play all of these roles. Raymond Gould, the one who makes it to Number 10, not only survives blackmail from a prostitute – he also has an affair with an American lawyer. News of the latter (but not the former) comes to the attention of Gould’s much-neglected wife, who spends most of the novel stuck in Leeds where she does her husband’s constituency work. Yet even this self-sacrificing spouse can only take so much, inducing Gould’s mistress to give up the man she still loves because she fears a divorce will stop him becoming Prime Minister. Gould’s wife similarly forgives her husband for all his erring so he can remain on course for Downing Street.

If these novels suggest a good woman in politics is one who sublimates herself to her husband’s ambition, they also indicate that women could be too ambitious, a favourite Trollopian trope. Edward Dunsford, in Hurd’s The Palace of Enchantments, has a wife more ruthless than he is, to the extent that she urges him to abandon his principles when they are politically inconvenient. Indeed, early in the novel, Dunsford figures ‘life without women, though still difficult, would be a damned sight simpler’.Footnote ³⁸ When his wife leaves Dunsford because he puts principle before ambition, he becomes a happier man. Varying this theme, in Renton’s The Dangerous Edge, the protagonist’s wife is sexually excited by politics, but this visceral effect does not mean she appreciates its subtleties. She is, in any case, primarily concerned that her husband rise to the top so he can earn enough money to finance her lavish lifestyle. In other words, she is one more source of tension in an already high-pressure career.

Tory Women Strike Back

After Thatcher fell from power a number of Conservative women wrote parliamentary novels with an approach familiar to readers of romantic fictions made popular by Jilly Cooper. Edwina Currie was the leading exponent of this trend, one encouraged by the popularity of her A Parliamentary Affair (1994). Currie was elected to the Commons in 1983 and even before becoming an MP had developed a talent for attracting media attention. In 1986 she became a junior health minister until forced to resign two years later after making injudicious remarks about salmonella in eggs. A married woman, she conducted a secret affair with John Major, who was also married, as he rose up the ministerial ladder, beginning a literary career when it was clear her ambitions would remain thwarted during his premiership. Liverpool-born, Jewish and mixing authoritarian populism with social liberalism, she was not a classic Tory. Indeed, according to Currie’s friend and fellow MP Gyles Brandreth, writing a few months before the publication of her first novel, in the Commons Tea Room:

Whether due to her ‘mannish’ ways or not, Currie was certainly a despised figure among a variety of male colleagues, from wet to dry.

Currie’s motives for writing her first novel were initially simple: she hoped it would be a ‘meal ticket’. It seems however that writing became a kind of therapy, a ‘refuge from the awfulness and uncertainty of my political life’, where she could express her increasing distaste for the Commons. It also became a form of ‘revenge, for all the snide remarks, for all the arrogant macho assumptions of Westminster’.Footnote ⁴⁰ For A Parliamentary Affair had as its protagonist Elaine Stalker a newly elected and very Currie-like MP. While she claimed to have read Trollope to help her writing style, unlike the author of The Prime Minister (1876), Currie wanted to include as much sex as possible, confiding to her diary, ‘I want the book to sell, dammit’.Footnote ⁴¹ It was consequently dubbed a ‘bonkbuster’. Serialised in the Daily Mail, sell it definitely did, with as many as 250,000 copies bought within months of publication.Footnote ⁴²

On the back of this success, Currie wrote a sequel, A Woman’s Place (1996), published in the same year as Sara Keays’ The Black Book. Jo Delvere, Keays’ heroine also evoked her creator’s story insofar as she becomes secretary to an MP. Like Currie, Keays had thwarted ambitions, once harbouring hopes of becoming a Conservative MP. These were, however, smashed in 1983 when her twelve-year relationship with minister Cecil Parkinson became public, as did news that she was bearing his child. In the fallout, Parkinson, a close Thatcher favourite, resigned from the government, much to his leader’s distress. Many in the party blamed Keays for his downfall. An editorial in the Daily Telegraph headed, in a nod to one of Trollope’s Palliser novels, ‘Can You Forgive Him?’, even suggested that ‘a quiet abortion is greatly to be preferred to a scandal’.Footnote ⁴³ A year later came Alice Renton’s Maiden Speech and Vanessa Hannam’s Division Belle; in contrast to Currie and Keays, they were professional writers whose connection to politics came via marriages to Conservative MPs, in Renton’s case, the sometime novelist, Tim. Their protagonists were also MPs’ wives with, like their authors, careers to pursue.

With married heroines in their thirties or forties whose children still lived at home, these novels were aimed at similar kinds of readers, ones their authors assumed had little knowledge of Westminster. Keays, for example, felt obliged to explain what The Black Book was – a document that allegedly contains MPs’ various indiscretions so they can be, if needed, used to ensure their loyalty – which gave her novel its title. Presumably to help readers identify with their protagonists, the authors also made them express a lack of interest in or even hostility towards politics. Thus, Keays’ Delvere knows nothing, ‘except what a mess the Government seems to be making of everything’. When told that Parliament ‘belongs to all of us, doesn’t it, and we’ve got to look after it. It’s our Parliament. What happens here affects all of us and it’s up to all of us to see that it’s what we want it to be’, Delvere realises she had never thought of the institution in such terms, but ‘only as something imposed from above’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Even the MP Stalker only stands for Parliament after becoming the mother of a handicapped child, which encourages her to become interested in the politics of health.

If such works were not regarded as political documents, Currie claimed of her second effort: ‘Underneath the sex and the humour, the novel is intended to have a serious theme. It is designed to expose the decline of Parliament and the appalling treatment of women there.’ It was, she claimed, ‘my way of exposing what I consider are the faults and abuses of the system’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, the novels had much to say about the alien nature of a male-dominated Westminster, and the low status of women and the issues they were presumed to think important, like family and relationships, held there. As one of Keays’ characters states, there were so few women MPs because politics promotes ‘aggressive and adversarial behaviour, rather than sharing and compromise’.Footnote ⁴⁶

The novels depict their male Conservative politicians as the ultimate embodiments of masculine selfishness, to whom wives and children were to be subordinated. Renton has a Central Office figure hope her heroine will be a ‘good wife’, by which he means ‘one who’ll do all the expected duties’ and certainly not ‘some free-thinking career woman’.Footnote ⁴⁷ To be the wife of an MP, Renton makes it clear, is to return to a ‘pre-historic’ world and to give up her separate identity.Footnote ⁴⁸ Similarly, Hannam’s protagonist is described as ‘the sort of wife the Party did not need: a woman who spoke her mind’. She is, even so, forced to put her son’s welfare after that of her husband’s career. Yet when she does attend constituency functions, hidebound female party activists criticise her for appearing bare-legged.Footnote ⁴⁹

Those women who accept a subdorinate position are not presented in a positive light. Cabinet Minister Ted Bampton (Currie’s unflattering rendering of her old boss Ken Clarke) appears in A Woman’s Place. He is a sexist bully, married to Jean, an accommodating wife, whom he addresses thus:

As Hannam has the Chancellor of the Exchequer in an exclusively male Conservative Cabinet tell his supine wife, Thatcher might have once been Prime Minister, ‘but we’ve come to our senses since’.Footnote ⁵¹

The politicians to whom the novels’ heroines are expected to suborn themselves are a very particular bunch. Division Belle’s James Askew is described as having a ‘controlled, ambitious heart’ and in possession of no feelings. He is a machine not a man. If these qualities are invaluable in his political career they are nearly the undoing of his marriage.Footnote ⁵² Similarly Roger Dickson – Stalker’s lover who ultimately becomes Prime Minister – is ‘cold-blooded’ and said to reserve most of his emotions for politics.Footnote ⁵³ As a character in Keays’ novel states of Westminster: ‘the place is full of odd-balls and misfits.… I’ve a theory that it’s often men with some kind of hangup who go into politics to make themselves feel important.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Not all MPs fit that bill, notably Arnold Hobbs, but he is in his late sixties and one of the ‘old school, the kind of MP who believes in public service’. Keays’ novel nostalgically believes that things were better in the past, with one character claiming of MPs that ‘they don’t have the same values as in the old days’ when they weren’t so pompous.Footnote ⁵⁵

This largely gendered critique of Westminster complemented an eclectic distaste for Conservative activists. According to Renton, they were obsessed with law and order, capital punishment and road bypasses; they were also racist and xenophobic. The chair of her heroine’s constituency party was, for good measure, a convicted drunk-driver who aspired to the post because it boosted his self-importance. Some authors put their own snobbishness on show, the better to denigrate the party’s rank and file. Hannam thus describes female Conservatives as thinking it fashionable to wear crimplene cocktail dresses in primary colours; her heroine’s husband’s constituency chair even eats meals watching television.Footnote ⁵⁶ Readers were clearly meant to view politics as distasteful on many levels, including the aesthetic.

Whatever their emphases, these novels systematically present politics as antithetical to domestic happiness and so female fulfilment. On watching the real Betty Boothroyd elected Speaker at the start of A Parliamentary Affair, Elaine Stalker wondered if – given Boothroyd was unmarried and childless – it was impossible to be an MP and, ‘like millions of other women’, also have a husband and children?Footnote ⁵⁷ In Stalker’s case the answer was ultimately in the negative. Having happily given up housework and morning sickness to pursue a political career, A Woman’s Place ends with Stalker marrying the acme of conventional masculinity, a reserve officer in the Guards and returning to a career outside politics where ‘success [is] not based on hypocrisy but on hard work and talent’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the Renton and Hannam novels domestic life that is torn asunder by politics only returns to tranquillity when their heroine’s husbands quit Westminster. Indeed, James Askew only saves his marriage by appreciating that marriage is a partnership, that his wife has her own life, and family is superior to political ambition.

If these novels express any hope for a different kind of politics it is not one embodied by women, suggesting that these Tory writers could not, at this point, imagine a time when their sisters might enjoy a more equal place at Westminster. For Currie, hope is personalised in young Fred who will marry Stalker’s daughter; while for Renton it takes the shape of the Green Party boyfriend of her protagonist’s daughter who thinks it might be worth his while becoming a Conservative. Yet, despite the severe limits of such Tory feminism, the wave of novels encouraged by the financial success of Currie’s first effort show how far the parliamentary novel was changing, albeit slowly. It is remarkable how many of the tropes associated with the genre in its late Victorian heyday were still being loyally reproduced well after 1945. But while even Jeffery Archer wanted readers to admire his monomaniacal male protagonists, the emphasis was changing thanks to different authors writing for different readers to the ones Disraeli and Trollope had in mind. By the 1990s the parliamentary novel had not died nor was it especially poorly, but it was being transformed.

I

12 August 1976 could be given as the date at which the traditional, defining, ethos of the obituary – de mortuis nil nisi bonum – breathed its last.Footnote ² That day, Lord Bradwell (1905–76), as Tom Driberg had only recently become, became the first person to be ‘outed’ in theirs, an obituary in, of all places, the Times, soi-disant journal of record. Its passing did not seem to discourage the obituarially minded from quoting the dictum, and invariably in Latin, in such reflections on necrological writing as there were. When Driberg’s heart gave up on a broiling morning in the back of a black cab en route from Paddington Station to his flat at the Barbican, the Times chose to be proactive, and spurn well-established codes of obituarial norm, precisely ten years before, as it is here christened, the ‘obituarial turn’: when pointed portrayal came to complement – and then threaten to overwhelm – mere record.

Even given the relatively rarefied realm in which they exist – the ‘serious’ newspapers – and the length of time over which they may have been written – political careers often lasting decades – political obituaries, as well as being of their subject, necessarily reflect their time. Matters of race and gender came to obtain, but historically, class predominated, not least as obituaries were written about, by, and for, the same ‘public’; The Times was, after all, the newspaper that ‘Top People’ took.Footnote ³ Indifference to the obituary for most of the century reflected broader social change: the questioning not only of those ‘born to rule’, but the very notion of such birthright; the mainspring for their resurrection towards its end was as much through prurience as egalitarianism. Change was marked in death. Just as the tone of piety and lamentation had changed, so had the vocabulary, and what it connoted.

As the temperature rose yet further, at that day’s editorial conference Louis Heren (1919–95), deputy editor of The Times, was shown a yellowing proof of Driberg’s notice that had been on the stocks for years. As was the norm, it was only a little more than a Who’s Who entry rendered in prose, so Heren and his editor, William Rees-Mogg (1928–2012), wrote a new proem.Footnote ⁴ Driberg had been preparing to fly to Italy and a writing vacation with his friend Gore Vidal (1925–2012), a ‘pansexualist’ ardent that Driberg’s much-flaunted memoirs, Ruling Passions, should be sensationalist. But there was no mention of Driberg’s sexuality in the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail obituaries; nor, for that matter, in that of the Guardian.Footnote ⁵ Henry Boyne (1910–97), the Telegraph’s political correspondent, who would have known not only that Driberg was gay, but that his life as a gay man was so central to his being, archly polished boilerplate obituarial euphemism. (‘His marriage at 46 came as a surprise to friends who had come to regard him as a confirmed bachelor.’)Footnote ⁶

Driberg’s Times obituary was as explicit as those of others remained opaque. Anthony Blunt (1907–83), another septuagenarian with a public profile whose sexuality was consequential, received a substantial obituary (‘most extraordinary of double lives’) almost devoid of personal information.Footnote ⁷ Blunt’s partner, John Gaskin (1919–88), was mentioned, though as a ‘friend’. Even the Guardian, foregrounding Andrew Boyle (1919–91), who had revealed Blunt’s spying four years earlier, neither mentioned nor intimated his treachery for all that it was germane to Boyle’s own specialism.Footnote ⁸ Bob Boothby (1900–86) departed on the very cusp of the turn: though it was widely known, the Telegraph chose not to mention that for years Boothby (‘belonged more to the 18th than the 20th century’) had, in the argot of the time, cuckolded Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) through his long-standing affair with Dorothy Macmillan (1900–66).Footnote ⁹ For the Times obituaries editor John Grigg (1924–2001), allusion sufficed (‘he had earlier done Macmillan a grave personal wrong’).Footnote ¹⁰

Driberg’s Times obituary was the hyphen which joined the eras: though its indiscretion was without precedent, it was also about a matter of fact, and inasmuch as it was both true and not widely known (publicly of a public figure), constituted ‘news’. Newspapers were perforce concerned with news, and an obituary – as distinct from a death notice – was the opposite. Yet the public disclosure was both news and comment, the coexistence of which foreshadowed their blurring. Such matters were of more usual interest to that section of the press – in 1976 almost all of it – which did not routinely carry obituaries. They became of greater sensitivity, precisely ten years later. The ‘obituary aesthetic’ – euphemism in peccadillo, anonymity in authorship – meant that mentioning the cause of death of even the relatively young had long been eschewed, and the new, unknown, AIDS pandemic meant that many who perished – the relatively young especially – might wish to conceal the identity of their illness; some, partly in consequence, were outed in life.

The historic maleness of obituaries – both subjects and writers – was even more notable than their apparent heteronormativity. In that political obituaries concerned those who had occupied prominent public office in the living past, obituarial women were largely final-paragraph spouses – a sentence, even; a matrimonial clause – in the notice of their esteemed husband. Or were merely agents of reproduction, with those to whom they may have had issue often given greater prominence. In Lord Birkenhead’s substantial – for its time – obituary, his wife, Margaret (against whom he had earlier done grave personal wrong), exists in nine words, as many as his father-in-law.Footnote ¹¹ Hence, perhaps understandable, overcorrections. (Florence Horsbrugh [1889–1969], the first Conservative woman Cabinet minister, over-eulogised for her ‘many victories for feminism’.)Footnote ¹² Patriarchal norms persisted. Ninety years later, the Guardian, historically the most feminist newspaper, alone, decided to print an obituary of an infamous serial killer of women – the prolonged failure to apprehend whom caused embarrassment for successive governments – and was excoriated.Footnote ¹³

It was both the challenge and the reward that, despite the pressure of an often unexpected deadline, the obituary is expected to endure. One Labour MP elected in 1964, aged 35, died three years later. Harold Evans (1928–2020) thought that the Times ought to carry an obituary, and asked another Labour MP to write it. Though grieving at the loss of his friend, Roy Hattersley would be pleased he agreed.Footnote ¹⁴ In the future, ‘PhD students from mid-Western universities, biographers of politicians who lived longer and therefore did more, amateurs who are just interested in the past – will stumble across the name Christopher Rowland and, if I did my job half-adequately, realise that he might have played a greater part in British history.’Footnote ¹⁵ Other than Hattersley’s – anonymous – obituary, all other notices of Rowland’s death were more concerned with how unwelcome the consequent by-election would be for a beleaguered Harold Wilson (1916–95).

Political obituaries were a specific branch of obituarial genre, albeit one that once constituted the overwhelming majority of provision. The American culture of newspaper obituary – dozens at a time, an International Association of Obituarists, conferences – being democratic (or, indiscriminate) did not apply to political lives, the conventional subjects of whom were the antithesis of the voiceless. As is not uncommon with practitioners as distinct from observers, there was little self-reflection; Rowland’s was a commission. Even so prolific a political obituarist as Anthony Howard (1934–2010) or Tam Dalyell (1932–2017) barely mentioned them in their own writing, or in their writing on others. Obituaries of obituarists similarly tended to not take note. Reflections on so recherché a genre of political writing were rare, both before and after the turn.

II

Obituaries, in both quantity and quality, extent and form, have always been a particular interest for the British press, part of a broader national proclivity for biography, as Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) and Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) contrastingly demonstrated. Truistically, though newspaper journalism was a trade, obituaries came to be held to be an art. Rees-Mogg’s predecessor, Sir William Haley (1901–87), an expansionary, egalitarian, editor between 1952 and 1966, reflected that though ‘[e]pitaphs, eulogies, elegies, threnodies, panegyrics are now in disuse’, obituaries persisted.Footnote ¹⁷ They were, from the outset, imbued with values and assumptions of the day; the Gentleman’s Magazine, which first dealt in the currency from 1778, made such concerns titular. But the Times became the principal publisher, recording significant deaths ever since its birth in 1785. Elsewhere obituary coverage was inconsistent, at times but a list (‘Death has been busy during the past twelve months.’)Footnote ¹⁸ The Victorian appetite for life-writing meant that John Delane (1817–79) was the first editor to prepare authoritative accounts written when the subject was alive (his obituary of Victoria [1837–1901], at 60,000 words, remains the longest). Biography mattered to the people, obituaries mattered to the paper, and the Times mattered to that eminent monument of Victorian necrology, Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) (1885). But obituaries were still a matter for news pages; only in 1920 was there an obituaries editor, and a daily page came later still. One evening during her father-in-law’s wartime coalition – beset as the Prime Minister was, markedly, by the Times – Cynthia Asquith (1887–1960) found Geoffrey Dawson (1874–1944), its editor, ruminating about obituaries, and ‘how awful it was when he was taken by surprise and had to sit up all night at ghoulish writing’. Dawson went through them every few months, ‘but all the same, Jo Chamberlain’s the only case in which they were fully prepared’.Footnote ¹⁹

Haley was the most obituarially engaged editor to that point.Footnote ²⁰ Obituaries editors at the Times by the 1950s were well-established, well-known, indeed even famous, journalists. The first, Frederic Lowndes (1868–1940), Rupert Hart-Davis (1907–99) recalled, ‘was extremely deaf, and every day one of the sub-editors would fling open the door of his room and bellow: “Any OBITS today, Lowndes?”.Footnote ²¹ Unable to hear, but not to see, Lowndes spent days in the Athenaeum, scrutinising fellow members for intimations of mortality (Pall Mall and St James’s might be considered a cordon of obituarial antechambers). Colin Watson, appointed by Haley in 1956 with no prior experience or even special interest, survived as obituaries editor until 1982, tasked ‘in addition to preparing each night’s deaths, to a survey of perhaps 100 or more obituaries to see what was up to snuff and what wasn’t’, he recalled. ‘How fared HM? Was the PM up to date?’Footnote ²² When, owing to industrial disputes, the Times was not printed for most of 1979, there was no obituary column in British newspapers. Absence offered opportunity for the Telegraph, which already had a much larger circulation, but its editor, Bill Deedes (1913–2007), told Hugh Massingberd (1946–2007), whose suggestion it was, ‘Rather bad form, dear boy, to take advantage of the absence of “Another Newspaper”’.Footnote ²³ Moreover, its owners, the Berry family, were ‘not that keen on death’. So Telegraph obituaries remained news items, and shortish ones at that. Deedes averred: ‘stick strictly to what’s in the cuts – “In 1934, he was appointed Postmaster-General. In 1937, he was arrested for indecent exposure” – you know the formula?’.Footnote ²⁴

There was an inverted solipsism to the authorial anonymity which prevailed. The traditional belief was that an unsigned obituary was more likely to be read without preconception, and also written with that freedom: an account of the subject’s life, and not of their relations with the author. It was also deemed to confer an authority befitting an obituary of record. ‘The tradition that Times obituaries are anonymous is sound and not to be transgressed’, Grigg stipulated, indeed, it ‘was essential to their character’. ‘The authorship of particular pieces, in whole or part, should not, therefore, be betrayed, even long after the event.’ Unsigned notices ‘can communicate a sense of magisterial objectivity while still embodying a distinctive editorial voice’.Footnote ²⁵ Greater historical veracity there may have been in someone being ‘accountable’, but authority was accorded by being the word of the paper: form was, almost, content. Given the timescale of composition, many became ‘elaborate composites’, regularly updated, by more than several authors.Footnote ²⁶ Anonymity was the authorial convention in the British press generally until the practice of by-lines came from the American; ‘The Thunderer’ was the last to acquiesce, reluctant to relinquish ‘that almost mystical concept’, the idea, as Louis Heren put it, ‘of The Times as a corporate body’.Footnote ²⁷ So anonymity for obituaries was retained, and authorship embargoed for a century.Footnote ²⁸ One who traversed Westminster and Fleet Street more than most, Woodrow Wyatt (1918–97) – a stranger to confidences – confessed, ‘I have never met anyone who disclosed himself even confidentially as a Times obituarist’.Footnote ²⁹

At Printing House Square, the Times’s obituaries department had a separate room – ‘the morgue’ – to protect confidentiality of the files. The ‘names of some people whose work for the feature was frequent and of exceptional value’ Grigg would permit, ‘provided there is no specific attribution’.Footnote ³⁰ For politicians and journalists, the principal obituarists were, from the right, Peter Utley (1921–88), formerly of the Telegraph; from the left, John Beavan (1910–94) historically of the Guardian, and, to his left, Margaret Cole (1893–1980), an academic. For historians’ obituaries, the Times used Roger Fulford (1902–83) and the storied A. J. P. Taylor (1906–90); for service personnel, Basil Liddell Hart (1895–1970) and Cyril Falls (1888–1971) (land), and Stephen Roskill (1903–82) (sea). Grigg recalled beneficially that Times obituarists ‘worked with an indifference to financial reward matched only by contributors to the Dictionary of National Biography’.Footnote ³¹ One pound and one shilling per 100 words. Many writers refused payment. Only the letters page cost less to produce. Monetising, and further consecrating, Times associate editor Godfrey Smith (1926–2017), in a four-year paroxysm under Rees-Mogg, published over 2,500 pages of large-format hardcover books of old obituaries, almost as a rival DNB, decades before more commercially minded, themed, volumes proliferated.Footnote ³²

Watson was intent on simplifying the language of the articles for readers, while upholding accuracy and – pagination permitting – completeness, for historians and biographers. He established ‘forward planning’: ‘who could best write a memoir of so-and-so which could join the others on the files, ready for use when the day came’, as Iverach McDonald (1908–2006), a Times Director, had it; ‘or, if the unexpected happened, he knew whom to ring at short notice’.Footnote ³³ But it was not enough to have obits written, they needed regularly to be revised without exceeding whatever space was thought appropriate. Tip-offs were no less helpful on the obituaries than on the sports desk. A Peer’s butler phoned. ‘His Lordship does not expect to survive the night.’ His Lordship’s obituary appeared the next morning.Footnote ³⁴

Content reflected changes. With advances in printing, photographic illustrations of the dead became more prominent, but whether of the prime of life or nearer publication date had to be decided: the longer the life, the more inexhaustible the images. Before e-publishing, error was not only easier, but harder to efface. Such was the expected success of the Boxer rebellion in Peking in 1900 that Sir Robert Hart was granted an obituary on the grounds that ‘we have unfortunately no reason to think that he has been spared’.Footnote ³⁵ It was much longer than that printed when he did meet his end, eleven years later, in Berkshire.Footnote ³⁶ Labour MP John Stonehouse (1925–88), dead too briefly to have been obituarised in 1974, had to wait fourteen years, when the fraudster’s condition was permanent. On 7 October 1993 Ivor Bulmer-Thomas (1905–93), inter alia Labour, Independent, and Conservative MP for the same constituency in the same year (and obituarist for the Times), had only just posted a letter to the Telegraph when he suffered a fatal heart attack. The letter was published the next day in the same edition as his obituary. Which was illustrated by a photograph of Sir Ivor Broadbent Thomas (1890–1955).Footnote ³⁷ In a marmalade-dropper, thick-cut, on 2 December 1920 the former Conservative MP Lord Desborough read about his death, ‘which occurred very suddenly in Birmingham last night’. Lord Bessborough, the former secretary to the Commons Speaker, had, in fact, expired; ‘the mistake arose owing to a confusion of similar sounding names on the telephone’, the newspaper subsequently explained.Footnote ³⁸

Rather than ‘immediate comment’ – what the subject was, rather than what they did – and chronological convention, published sources were used; and even the yet-to-be deceased. The New York Times carried formal obituaries only from 1965, and Alden Whitman (1913–90), its chief obituarist, was also the first to interview his subjects, including Anthony Eden (1897–1977). Eden initially declined (‘I have never given a private interview’), but assented on being told when it would be published.Footnote ³⁹ Hugo Vickers thought the highest praise of a Times obituary was that it ‘sniffs of an inside job’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Still-rarefied obituaries were ‘savoured by connoisseurs who read between the lines of the traditional orotund language as though solving the cryptic crossword’.Footnote ⁴¹ In obituarial code, of Cambridge dons ‘he died at Northampton’ was a euphemism for having ‘crossed the Styx’ at Fulbourn mental hospital. Political journalists’ obituaries of political journalists were saturated with euphemism.Footnote ⁴² She was ‘vivacious’; he an ‘unreliable after-dinner speaker’. And beware the ‘tireless raconteur’.

The ‘object of biography is to fortify self-confidence’, H. H. Asquith (1852–1928), ‘the last of the Romans’, was said to have pronounced, monumentally; ‘object of obituary notices is to increase caution’.Footnote ⁴³ Not that the subject would know though. The key was immediacy. ‘An obituary can impress itself more on the mind than later memorials’, Haley maintained. ‘Its subconscious influence can be great.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Context was easier the more significant the figure. Praise could be authenticated by countervailing criticism, or questions posed. (‘When the importance of that social revolution and the smoothness with which it was effected are set beside the surface qualities of the man who presided over it there emerges the paradox that lurks in all assessments.’)Footnote ⁴⁵ A formal print obituary elevated, and controversial ones benefitted from, contextual reporting. Possessed of broad historical sweep and telling detail, the model political obituary practised storytelling and accuracy, and desired balance and subtlety of judgement. Haley may have advocated ‘judicial detachment’, but, almost in premonition of the turn, also said he did not want the Times to be ‘too damned courtierly’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Obituaries became better written, reflecting ‘the convergence of other, wider trends in journalism, notably an increase in competition at the “quality” end of the market’; indeed, they aspired to be the finest writing in a newspaper. Yet, imbued with the mortuary as they were, it was inevitable that obituaries of obituaries would eventually be mooted. ‘Obituary writing is a dying art’, was one view in 1971, befitting that nascent declinist decade.Footnote ⁴⁷

Then, on or about September 1986 obituarial character changed.

III

The ‘Obituary Revolution’ was the hyperbolic designation for ten months that shook the road. But it was not as if, unlike the rest of Fleet Street, obituaries had resisted change. ‘The obituary arrangements at The Times are haphazard and unsatisfactory’, Rupert Hart-Davis complained, pre-empting one revolution of the turn by thirty years. ‘The smallest civil servant’, he reproached the editor, ‘has at least a half-column about him in standing type in the office, but writers and artists are not provided for until they are eighty’. Chastened, ‘Haley promised to wake the department up’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, ‘on becoming editor I ruled that neither titles, nor rank, nor heredity, nor mere wealth should any longer be qualifications for an obituary notice in The Times, but only achievement’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The illusion that the post of obituaries’ editor was ‘held by the Recording Angel was, therefore, to a surprising degree, maintained’.Footnote ⁵¹ But there remained no serious obituarial competition to the Times, in ‘subfusc prose style’ its daily page still ‘favoured a relatively narrow selection of subjects’, still mainly politicians.Footnote ⁵² Much derived from the historic concentration of newspapers, their proprietors and journalists, uniquely, perhaps, to a single thoroughfare – a most concrete example of form informing content – and it was no coincidence that the obituarial coincided precisely with a locational revolution. At the beginning of 1986 News International journalists and printers decamped with manifest – if secret – destiny all of two miles from the western edge of the City to the East End. Violent though its consequences at times were, Rupert Murdoch’s Times was the dignified face of digitisation and the convulsions of de-unionisation. But refugees soon appeared, heading west. A third of the Independent’s launch journalists came from Wapping.Footnote ⁵³

The Telegraph still published only intermittent, often brief, obituaries, largely the recounting of doings; its obituary page, as such, began on 2 September 1986, when Hugh Massingberd convinced Deedes’s successor to guarantee two columns daily. ‘God knows we need someone’, Max Hastings told him. ‘We can’t hope to compete with the Times, of course, but it’s worth a try.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Inspired by John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, between 1669 and 1696, between 1986 and 1994 Massingberd went on to redefine the genre.Footnote ⁵⁵ ‘I determined to dedicate myself to chronicling what people were really like through informal anecdote, description and character sketch.’Footnote ⁵⁶ It transformed ‘the Obituary column’, as Hastings put it, thereby also affirming the wisdom of his decision, ‘from a musty backwater of the paper into the most brilliant feature of its kind in the business’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Obituaries being an expression of ‘the higher journalism’, it followed that the new, idealistic, Independent felt that it constituted, as it did in other areas, something of a tabula rasa. For one thing, there were no pre-existing obituaries. From its birth on 7 October 1986, the Independent foregrounded obituaries, on a whole page, up to four a day, the day after death was announced, signed, written not as a journalistic exercise but by experts, with reference to published sources and interviews with those who knew the deceased. ‘We sought to change the rules by signing obituaries, to give them a new dimension, and genuine authority’, obituaries editor James Fergusson reflected.Footnote ⁵⁸ He looked back to the DNB and the Gentleman’s Magazine as the Independent sought to ‘write a new agenda. Transparency would confer ‘historic worth and veracity’.Footnote ⁵⁹ They were also boldly illustrated, and so was created, as one of the paper’s three founders, Stephen Glover, put it, thereby also affirming the wisdom of his decision, ‘one of the most distinguished and original parts of the newspaper’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Though only marginally younger than the Times, the Guardian had an obituary page only as old as The Independent. Initially in its G2 features and entertainment listings tabloid, its daily, newly authored, expanded, obituaries, not unlike those of the Telegraph (if for somewhat different reasons), made less of Westminster-centric political obituaries per se and sought to be representative of public life more broadly. (The prevailing gender imbalance became perhaps the more notable at a time when the country had for the first time a female head both of state and government.) In response, the Times, too, expanded. There had long been post-obituary ‘appreciations’; they evolved into ‘Lives Remembered’, with feedback solicited and corrections offered. Reflecting more demotic times, the genre became one connected with readers. The Economist did not carry an obituary for 150 years until Bill Emmott became convinced of the need for history and humanity in its anonymously austere pages, and so 1,000 perky words appeared weekly, at the back.Footnote ⁶¹ But with coverage spread over pages, overkill threatened the impact of the obituaries page: excess was a measure of decline. There was the encroachment of entertainment, both in tone – even by 1984 Gavin Stamp sniffed ‘a degree of sensationalism’ – and subject – for John Grigg that the length of the obituary for Richard Burton (1925–84) conspicuously exceeded that for Arthur Koestler (1905–83), was not merely ‘grotesque and insulting’, or even a ‘scandal’, but ‘a betrayal’.Footnote ⁶²

The ending of the Cold War coincided with something of an obituarial arms race. Ominously, the genre took the form of what the visiting American writer Marilyn Johnson dubbed ‘the four horsemen of the apocalypse’: Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent.Footnote ⁶³ The first, trying perhaps a little too hard to lead, could overstep. Anthony Howard’s ‘stiffs’ page’ (1993–99), included his own execratory obituary of Brian Masters (1932–98), Bishop of Edmonton (‘One of the last relics of Graham Leonard’s ten-year rule over the London diocese’), whom he reproached (‘stiff and rigid views’) for his opposition to women priests, and length of homily (‘the best that could be said for his sermons was they tended to be short’). Complaints ensued.Footnote ⁶⁴ Fred Mulley (1918–95), when Defence Secretary, famously fell fast asleep at a public event whilst sat alongside Elizabeth II (1926–2022). The Times presented the scene as his obituarial illustration. Objections from readers exacted a fulsome apology to Lady Mulley from the paper, as, no doubt, had the transmission of displeasure from the Palace.Footnote ⁶⁵

Indebted more to Strachey than to Stephen, seen from across the Atlantic British obituaries were now ‘gossipy, contentious and cutthroat’; for Elaine Showalter American obituary writing remained a matter of news ‘rather than an aspect of belles lettres’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The British were also belles pages: ‘works of art’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Given how America can appear to British eyes generally to be in a bigger font, so the pagination of its newspapers which could accommodate (encourage) prolixity. But where Fleet Street’s physical density had almost been manifested in its writing, digitisation and de-unionisation made for change that was as much physical as cultural: increased pagination. The first material turn was soon eclipsed by the second. The internet – no medium could be better suited to the age of mass politics – was the transformational continuation, to which the obituary ‘adapted itself seamlessly’; sprouting, for one editor, ‘evergreen content’.Footnote ⁶⁸ All told, the British obituary, rather than a prosaic résumé the timeliness of which was all-important, had become ‘an opinionated gem of a biography, informed by all kinds of history, high and low, including gossip’ (such indeed as had for some impugned the merits of a certain sort of high-political scholarship).Footnote ⁶⁹ Anecdote peppered sketches (‘On one occasion …’); notwithstanding conventions, colour encouraged each obituary to differ (‘On another occasion …’).

‘I believe the dead have rights’, Tam Dalyell had written in an introduction to his memoir – in feel an extended obituary – of his friend Richard Crossman (1907–74) ‘and one of these rights is, where possible, the right of fair treatment by posterity and certainly by their friends’.Footnote ⁷⁰ (Grigg was not to know quite how much longer Koestler’s obituary might have been had the writer lived another ten years, or predeceased Jill Craigie (1911–99).)Footnote ⁷¹ After the turn, it needed to be said, and, online, could be: obituaries were forever revisable. Idiosyncratically and independently, they mutated. More subtle yet less euphemistic, most obituarial innovation related to genres other than the political; political obituaries looked stale by comparison, and became less common (abetted by their, living, relation, the ‘profile’; a portrait).Footnote ⁷² The Telegraph saw itself as having established a ‘new style of honest obituary’.Footnote ⁷³ Yet innovation perpetuated the opacity of authorial anonymity. Thus the Independent (which for the same reasons had eschewed parliamentary lobby journalism), intent on challenging the Times (‘whose primacy, looking back, we perhaps overestimated’)Footnote ⁷⁴ as the newspaper of obituarial record. Six years after its launch, Murdoch did his best, waging a cross-subsidised price war to ensure that one day the Times would publish an obituary of the Independent. Eventually, it did.Footnote ⁷⁵

IV

There was the obituary as revision. Edward Pearce (1939–2018) on Peter Shore (1924-–2001) provoked protests (‘grotesque caricature … vindictive and petty’, ‘carping and mean-spirited … borderline racist’).Footnote ⁷⁷ By contrast, Anthony Bevins, in an obituarial commentary – an ob-ed, as it were – of Eric Heffer (1922–91) recoiled against the effusions Heffer’s death had elicited.Footnote ⁷⁸ ‘Middle-class Labour leaders are recaptured by the Establishment’, Tony Benn (1925–2014) lamented; ‘Attlee is “forgiven” for being a socialist and the past is forgotten’.Footnote ⁷⁹ But propinquity carried with it its own risks. After Iain Macleod (1913–70) suffered a fatal heart attack one month into his Chancellorship of the Exchequer, Rees-Mogg thought the Times obituary too critical, and had another written. But for so strong a personality, it privileged reverence (‘statesman of spirit and conviction’) over perceptiveness (not so the Guardian: ‘Acid tongue, kind heart’).Footnote ⁸⁰

There was the obituary as coeval. The death of Roy Jenkins was for Benn ‘a reminder that you’re at the end of the road, and if you survive, your main function is to do obituaries of people you know’.Footnote ⁸¹ Having worked as a journalist at the Manchester Guardian in the 1950s, Lena Jeger (1915–2007) continued to write political obituaries as an MP and peer; the trades unionist Jim Middleton (1878–1962), whose journalism was part of his activism, carried on obituarising trades unionists long after he retired. Given that it seemed to the former Conservative MP Sir Edward Clarke (1841–1931) ‘that an obituary notice of a man should be written by himself’, he sent his own to the Times.Footnote ⁸² Sir Gerald Nabarro (1913–73) – a stranger to reticence – sent his to the Telegraph.Footnote ⁸³ (At the very least) one ex-MP was personally munificent towards anyone he suspected of having the slightest influence over obituaries of ex-MPs at the Times.Footnote ⁸⁴

There was the obituary as critique. Cold War ideologies provided an opportunity for more sharply critical obituaries than was then the norm. The communist trades unionist Jack Dash (1907–89) both ‘fought for decent wages’ and managed ‘to destroy a whole industry’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Of Hugh Gaitskell (1906–63) and John Smith (1938–94) – the only party leaders to require obituaries – most of the conservative newspapers were laudatory as each had kept the left at bay. (It was ever thus, as seen from that left. ‘The papers today are jampacked with obituaries and tributes to Tony Crosland [1918–77]’; Benn despaired at ‘an emotional spasm.’)Footnote ⁸⁶ John Strachey (1901–63) wrote an obituary of Gaitskell – ‘The unreaped harvest’ – as political point settling.Footnote ⁸⁷ As much applied to Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) (‘regret was not inspired by the proverbial “de mortuis”’).Footnote ⁸⁸

There was the obituary as continuation. Rees-Mogg’s Rab Butler (1902–82) was sanitised by the paper mentioning neither mollification in 1938 nor defeatism in 1940, merely the subject’s ‘[a]ssociation with the controversial appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain’, and his ‘surprisingly’ delayed departure from the Foreign Office in 1941.Footnote ⁸⁹ Elsewhere, he ‘played a prominent part’, this ‘Man of Munich’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Butler’s role in education policy however was measuredly appraised, as was that of Bridget Plowden (1910–2000), though for Edward Boyle (1923–81) the controversies of comprehensivisation were elided.Footnote ⁹¹ Macleod, additionally, received a ‘leader’ and tributes, as, thirty years earlier, did Sir John Gilmour, Minister of Shipping (‘the first casualty of the war in the ranks of the Government’).Footnote ⁹² As too did John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) (arguably the last casualty of the war in the ranks of government).Footnote ⁹³

There was the obituary as recitation. For John Profumo (1915–2006), the Telegraph and Times recounted his eponymous scandal of scandals in dedicated detail.Footnote ⁹⁴ ‘If an obituarist dwells on these events’, Dalyell added to that by Dennis Kavanagh in the Independent, ‘it must be because it is they, not his otherwise estimable life of 48 years before, and 43 years after, 1963’ that made Profumo ‘a person of lasting public fascination’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Anthony Eden’s indulgence of Alden Whitman may also have been from feeling – at least to the Countess of Avon (1920–2021) – that the Suez Canal was less likely to flow through an American obituarial drawing, room though there was.

There was the obituary as narrative. ‘“De mortuis nihil nisi bunkum” is a comment sometimes made on politicians’ obituaries’, the Telegraph reminded readers. ‘Once dead, the most disastrous politician is so often found to have had remarkable saving graces.’ Apart from Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), that is (for whom A. J. P. Taylor’s literal littoral – ‘died at sea’ – was almost the last word).Footnote ⁹⁶ The Telegraph used the occasion of a new public memorial to pronounce that ‘Time has been unfair.’ MacDonald ‘was a man in an impossible situation’, as a socialist trying to govern a capitalist country. ‘Ineffective compromises and bitter internal conflicts become inevitable. Mr Wilson, like Mr MacDonald, is now wrestling against the facts of life.’Footnote ⁹⁷ The following week Mr Wilson lost Mr Rowland’s by-election.

There was the obituary as augury. Imperialist orthodoxy in notices in the Times around 1900 provided a self-congratulatory thread teleologically tugged decades later (‘he found it a land of danger and left it a land of hope’).Footnote ⁹⁸ The appeal for obituary pages in celebrating imperial lives were conceivably to offer succour of an idealised past against an ignominious present. Moreover, where the press had once been a culture reflective of micro-geopolitics – in London EC4 – the fin de siècle fracturing of the United Kingdom – from London SW1 – into different parliaments may have segregated readerships, and obituaries increasingly became (sub) national lives. Donald Dewar (1937–2000), connecting the two, was in almost every notice ‘father of the nation’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Paternity was not contested with his reputationally sullied duellist Alex Salmond (1954–2024) who was in almost as many notices ‘towering but divisive’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

There was the obituary as satire – the facetious turn. (Smith may well be dead, but would ‘still beat Major’.)Footnote ¹⁰¹ With the passing of the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1968 Private Eye mocked-up a Times obituary for the Labour Party.Footnote ¹⁰² Later that year, trying perhaps a little too hard to stay on-trend, Punch ran an awkward series of ‘coming obituaries’ for public figures in peril.Footnote ¹⁰³ Indeed, the most common usage of ‘political obituary’ came to become as a real-time shorthand for a career in difficulty, at risk of premature termination. There came, in less forgiving times (‘[He] enjoyed more power than almost any other British politician of his era. The only problem was he did so in a country other than his own’), the snide turn.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

There was the obituary as memoir, such as Kingsley Martin (‘I had a tremendous row with him’) on William Beveridge.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ There were the near-self-obituaries of (inevitably) newspapermen. The Telegraph’s notice of its erstwhile owner Lord Hartwell (1911–2001) blamed on him ‘the true state of the Telegraph’s affairs’, that the present owner Conrad Black had set himself selflessly to save when he bought the title in 1985.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ At the Sunday Express John Junor (1919–97; ‘room for debate about [his] success as an editor’)Footnote ¹⁰⁷ recoiled when the Telegraph published what he regarded as a ‘vitriolic and cruel obituary’ of the wife of Lord Stevens, proprietor of Express newspapers.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Applying the ornamental turn, Woodrow Wyatt defended her honour (‘not often that attractive women make so great a success out of life’).Footnote ¹⁰⁹

There was the obituary as manifesto. A political career cut short by death was by definition also an opportunity. Roy Jenkins, bereft, having just heard of Gaitskell’s death, was phoned by the Daily Express for a tribute, the journalist expressing disapproving surprise when the deceased’s disciple felt unable. ‘Harold Wilson, who is in New York, was able to give us a very moving one without difficulty’ Jenkins was informed. ‘“Yes,” I said bitterly, “but you have to remember that he was very fond of Gaitskell,” and rang off.’ Weapons-grade sarcasm betrayed a revulsion that a man he ‘deeply distrusted’ might succeed as leader a man ‘I loved and revered’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Gaitskell’s deputy, George Brown (1914–85) was able not only to give a very moving tribute without difficulty (‘a giant among men’)Footnote ¹¹¹ but also to resume his own publicity tour (‘I think I know the man well enough to know he would want me to.’Footnote ¹¹² Dalyell received an urgent phone call from Fergusson. ‘Would you do an obituary for John Smith for tomorrow’s paper?’ ‘Five hundred words top-up?’ Dalyell asked, assuming, not least as it regarded a party leader who had already suffered a serious heart attack, there was a draft on file. ‘No, the cupboard is bare. Three thousand.’Footnote ¹¹³ Legend was that Gordon Brown spent too long writing his obituary of his mentor – who a year earlier he might have expected to succeed – whilst Tony Blair was off on his own publicity tour.

There was the obituary as agency. Macmillan’s death, at the peak of Thatcherism, was thus viewed through that prism. Illustrated incongruously by a photograph of Thatcher, trying perhaps a little too hard – as Elizabeth II herself regularly experienced – to genuflect, at his feet, the tone of the Telegraph obituary was anything but reverent (‘animated long after it had ceased to be relevant with the generous urge to defeat the scourge of unemployment … helped to weaken the defences against the more imminent threat of inflation’).Footnote ¹¹⁴ Wilson expired during the juvenescence of Blair’s own leadership of the Labour Party, and was epitaphically so cast.Footnote ¹¹⁵ V. S. Pritchett’s George Orwell was the ‘wintry conscience of a generation’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

There was the obituary as moment. Before Wilson became Prime Minister, Peter Hill commissioned a journalist to prepare a New Statesman obituary. ‘You can’t say that about him when he’s dead’, Hill told the author. ‘Well, it’s all true’, Gerald Kaufman (1930–2017) replied, ‘and I can’t say it when he’s alive’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Kaufman shortly thereafter joined Wilson’s press team. Of Wilson’s Times obituary, three years later a young man went to the Private Eye office on Greek Street and showed Richard Ingrams a galley proof (‘Revised and updated Oct. 1966’). Ingrams paid £10, and it led the next issue of the magazine. ‘It is always difficult when a man is in high office and still comparatively young to allot him a length’, the chief of the Times obituary department had pondered. ‘At the moment I am inclined to think that we need 5000 words.’ They included:

Ingrams subsequently discovered that the proofs had been stolen, by a young acquaintance, from the residence of Tom Driberg.Footnote ¹¹⁹

And there was the obituary as anachronism. An effective Royal Prerogative of Mercy temporarily pardoned the newspaper political obituary, on paper, and with expansive souvenir supplements at that. The lavishly illustrated editions were less profitable than when they had been planned, given the explosion in the cost of newsprint (and the age of the subject), but still sold out, despite extra printing, as the second Elizabethan age finally passed.Footnote ¹²⁰

V

There were political obituaries before, and there were political obituaries after, the obituarial turn. But their place in long-form political journalism, and, in another genre, life-writing – the end point as a starting point for biographical political writing more generally – had changed. The effects of obituaries in the real-world political process as a whole, before and after that change, was reflective. The shift – wrought as it was by the Thatcher revolution – was one both of form – more paper, then no paper – and also of content (diversity, as also evinced in 2004’s ODNB when compared to 1885’s DNB; Massingberd was to obituary what Strachey was to biography) but also of tone. Political obituaries necessarily self-select those who die full of years, and thereby necessarily convey change over time. While it is not so neglected a genre that it is not pregnant with cliché (the last word on obituaries, the art of the obituary, the living and the dead; concerned with life not death, death as merely the peg for publication) but with political lives, death leaves legacies, and invites successors. Overtly humanistic, qualitative, necessarily partial, often impressionistic, even anecdotal, obituaries can reflect a life, or at least a political career, more accurately more succinctly than in other genres; individual agency is prominent, and subject to the attentions of journalists and other politicians. Their appeal is their idiosyncrasy, subjectivity; that they exist more by example than precept. As may here have been proven, this can make scholarly treatment – and not slippage into the merely diverting or the antiquarian – challenging. Unlike other subjects, political figures have also been assessed in life, with less likelihood of obituaries being radically outdated by subsequent revelations. Allusion would not have shielded Bob Boothby and Dorothy Macmillan for very long, and certainly not after Boothby and Harold Macmillan both died. In 1986.

Political obituaries rest at the crossroad of journalism, politics, and historicism. They provide passage to writers who were of more than one, or wished to be of another. In that, they bridge the gap between journalists, politicians, historians, and the public. That the obituarial public is not a mass one in part may explain the overlooked disregard of them. But political history and biography ignore them – the more curiously still given how important obituaries are as a source, and even a subject – as do newspaper histories. As life-writing, even more so than with biography, there is an imposed neatness of narrative throughout the collective process: from obituaries editor to obituarist to sub-editors and then editor. Much of their appeal – the personal; the art, the craft, of them – is as the appeal of political journalism (a slightly bigger genre of political writing): colour and personality; Cromwellian warts; the shift from piety to entertainment; an obituary for lives not worth a biography; stringency lost to colour; the ephemeral confronting the permanent. The latter was true in another respect: the exodus of newspapers from Fleet Street that began at the beginning of 1986 was complete within thirty years.

To the passing of piety, and patriarchy, there is also that of the press. The obituarial spring was sprung by an unholy alliance of the old – newsprint – and the new: the internet. The transformation in political publishing is particularly pertinent to political obituaries. The authority of print dwindled. Fewer and fewer readers read a physical newspaper, the obituary’s natural habitat; the clipping, the cutting, unalterable but for discolouration, that lives forever even when its perspective is mutable. No genre of political writing is more prone to be discredited or outdated, as no other purports to be the last word; the obituary appears once – its subject, after all, is over – and unlike biography was not open for re-evaluation. And for all that there seemed a sense of permanence – that that first draft of history would always be with us – without physicality the life span of what was adjudged at the time is short. The online iteration endlessly can be modified, for myriad reasons, but a changeable historical record is also an unreliable historical record. (How anachronistic page numbers in citations came to look; how absurd the laboured physical distribution of days-old ‘news’; and that it was paid for!) It was brief, that fin de siècle, when aesthetics augmented the experience, before the deadening sequence, as on a darkling plain, of price wars, tabloidisation, and digitisation. Before the obituary of print.

There has always been obituarial change – reinforcing the apparent contradiction that a paper of news could also expressly be about the past – and the latest, for once, really was also the most significant. The normalisation, and then the fullest expression, of the obituary coincided with the end of the newspaper, while the popularisation of its tone and contents coincided with a broader decline – or at least a broadening – of high politics in public discourse. The Independent, rather than the Telegraph, was the more auspicious for the political obituary (and indeed for newspapers, in being the first to cease to exist in print). But that promise, familiar to many political careers, was equally familiarly to be lost. The new centrality of the once marginal militated against orthodox political obituaries, the subjects of which remain the faces of the nation’s (and nations’) past. The obituarial turn bypassed political obituaries, except in that, by definition, being generally neither fun nor diverse, they simply became fewer. There was a pattern, one seen more widely in the public realm. Levity, entertainment, ‘likes’, parliamentary sketches rather than parliamentary reporting, comedians on panel programmes: a long, withdrawing roar, heard by the melancholic, as out of touch as the old marmoreal political elite of a pre-devolution national polity. Obituarial lives, as unreliable in their undoubted distinction as some were, may come to be regarded as a peculiarly British genre of writing politics.