IN SEARCH OF MICHAEL HOWARD
by Michael CrickSimon and Schuster £20 pp528
The prospect of a posthumous biography by the inter-war historian, Philip Guedalla, was said to "bring a new horror to death". The prospect of Michael Crick in the offing must bring the horror forward into life. Like his comrade in arms, Tom Bower, he is counsel for the prosecution, a biographical rottweiler. Toss him a bone and he chews it to the marrow.
After demolishing Arthur Scargill, Jeffrey Archer and Alex Ferguson, Crick must have thought Michael Howard rich for the picking. Final member of the 1960s Cambridge mafia to climb the greasy pole, Howard offered all the classic targets for the old Private Eye school of journalism. His social origins were humble, his manner slick, his ambition huge and, joy of joys, he had dodgy foreign-sounding relatives flitting like shadows across his path. Stir in Ann Widdecombe's "something of the night about him" and it was the gift of a victim. Pity about the nice, glamorous wife.
Pity, too, about Howard. I sense that Crick set out to do a hatchet job and found a really quite nice person constantly getting in the way. The chapters about Howard's (in his youth, Hecht's) past could be written about any Jewish immigrant family. They leave the reader wondering where it is all leading. So Howard's father's family lied about their father's arrival in Britain. So his father was an economic migrant, not a political refugee. These were the 1930s. It hardly makes Howard's position on immigration two-faced. Nor does Crick succeed in his effort at guilt by association to various undesirable cousins, one linked to Tiny Rowland. Howard's only fault seems an over-eagerness to seem whiter than white. Crick's obsession with these matters comes close to xenophobia.
We are left with Howard the politician, and thus a man of public interest. On the surface there should be a good yarn to tell. Howard shared with his forerunners, William Hague, Margaret Thatcher and Edward Heath, the booster rocket to a political career that Oxbridge offered those from modest backgrounds. His father was a Llanelli draper and Howard was Welsh born and bred. At Cambridge, he found his feet as a member of the most remarkable political mafia of modern times. More than a dozen undergraduates within one generation moved into national Tory politics, dominating the party for two decades in the 1980s and 1990s. Following in the steps of Geoffrey Howe, they included Kenneth Clarke, Leon Brittan, John Gummer, Norman Lamont, Michael Howard and Norman Fowler. Even as rivals they remained friends, exchanging portfolios and causes célèbres over the years.
The mafia was successful for two reasons: it was able and it was right-wing when the rest of Britain's university output was from the left. Its career path then neatly coincided with the long Tory ascendancy under Thatcher and John Major. Irrespective of whether they were suited to politics, these men saw the Cambridge University Conservative Association as a meal ticket to parliament. They became the stormtroopers of Thatcherism. To James Callaghan they "supped honey as they went, always moving on before their misdeeds found them out". Their friendly feuding and contempt for pluralist institutions such as the civil service or local government were undergraduate habits they never quite shed. They repaid their party's patronage by helping to collapse it into factionalism and decline.
Crick gives us sadly little of this context. He recounts Howard's dogged rise to power. He observes a young man emerging from progressive Toryism and a fondness for left-wing girlfriends to find his manner and background denying him a seat. While friends raced past him, Howard had to await a constituency until 1983. Once back inside the magic circle, his rise was steady. He was a minister within two years, loyally introducing Thatcher's poll tax. By 1990 he was in the cabinet, as employment then environment secretary. He then moved to the Home Office and the halls of darkness.
Crick is an investigative journalist, an excellent one, but not a natural biographer. At the Home Office what has been a tedious tale of political folk finds its edge. Drawing on interviews with Howard's former colleagues, Crick tells of temper tantrums, belligerence to underlings, panic attacks brought on by editorials and a painful sensitivity to image. Every decision was "media-driven". One official recalled that "the best preparation for new Labour was working for Michael Howard".
The grimmest hour was the inept sacking of the prisons chief, Derek Lewis, and the malicious revenge taken on Howard by the prisons minister, Ann Widdecombe. Crick is here in his element, broadening out to investigate Howard's U-turns on Europe, capital punishment, local government and immigration. He notes the absence of any written record of what his subject actually believes. Howard's sole ideology appears to be control.
For all this knockabout, Crick never quite puts Howard beyond the political pale (as Bower did Gordon Brown). He does not stand him up as Widdecombe's paragon of nastiness. Indeed the paradox of the book is that Howard emerges — rightly so — as a perfectly nice man and with a sense of humour, who could even hand out signed copies of Dracula to his campaign staff. In truth, Howard is less of a "loner" and more clubbable than Crick suggests. Ambition, very much the theme of the book, is hardly exceptional in politics.
When Major resigned, Howard was left humiliatingly last in the leadership ballot. He cast about for a new career, but when he failed to find one he stuck to his last. He loyally served Hague and Iain Duncan Smith when his old chums were fleeing to the hills. After Duncan Smith's fall, it was a more seasoned, battle-hardened Howard who became leader unopposed. His vices were suddenly strengths. The tortoise had outrun the hares. Tail-end Charlie got to fly the stricken plane.
Howard was the only member of the Cambridge set to reach the top of the party. He alone stayed the course. The story ends, of course, without an ending. Will our hero vanish in a puff of smoke next month? If he does not disgrace himself, will he continue to marvel at his good luck and hang on for the ultimate prize? Having come so far, Crick implies, it would be out of character for Howard not to try again.
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