A State of Play

British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It

Steven Fielding

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781849669801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. A State of Play explores how the British have imagined their politics, from the parliament worship of Anthony Trollope to the cynicism of The Thick of It. In an account that mixes historical with political analysis, Steven Fielding argues that fictional depictions of politics have played an important but insidious part in shaping how the British think about their democracy and have helped ventilate their many frustrations with Westminster. He shows that dramas and fictions have also performed a significant role in the battle of ideas, in a way undreamt of by those who draft party manifestos. The book examines the work of overtly political writers have treated the subject, discussing the novels of H.G. Wells, the comedy series Yes, Minister and the plays of David Hare. However, it also assesses how less obvious sources, such as the films of George Formby, the novels of Agatha Christie, the Just William stories and situation comedies like Steptoe and Son, have reflected on representative democracy. A State of Play is an invaluable, distinctive and engaging guide to a new way of thinking about Britain's political past and present.

1

Parliament Worship

The general election held on 14th December 1918, just weeks after the end of the First World War, was not quite the moment mass democracy arrived in Britain. Although 10.5 million Britons participated, if all adult men were now enfranchised, women under 30 were not, while some well-placed figures had up to three votes. Yet, the 1918 Representation of the People Act marked a huge advance on the position evident in August 1914, when the country went to war: then only forty per cent of men formed the electorate. During the nineteenth century the disenfranchised majority had nonetheless taken part in elections through often-rowdy public meetings. After the 1867 Second Reform Act tripled the electorate to over two million, however, the parties imposed an ever-firmer grip on popular political expression.¹ The last decades of the century consequently saw politicians move from the vulnerability of outdoor hustings open to all, to indoor meetings accessible only through the possession of a ticket. Moreover, once the 1884 Representation of the People Act increased the electorate to 5.5 million, face-to-face relations between representatives and people became ever more mediated, through the press, posters and other elements of what would come to be called ‘political communications’.

The most significant outcome of the widening of the franchise was the extension of party organization. From essentially Westminster cabals the Liberals and Conservatives built a local presence across the country, one pejoratively referred to as the ‘caucus’. After 1867, contemporaries frequently criticized ‘wire-pullers’ and ‘machines’, seeing the parties as perverting the free expression of the people’s voice, none more vociferously than Moisei Ostrogorski in his Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (1892). If some patriots thought the Russian academic went too far, the parties regarded their role like a certain Edwardian Liberal looked upon canvassing: that is as ‘a more or less systematic attempt to cajole, persuade, or convince the electors’.² As the future Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald suggested in 1909, even those new to Parliament believed that ‘democracy without party is like a crowd without purpose’.³ This was a democracy, then, in which the parties saw their role as giving the people a voice – whether they wanted one or not.⁴

While the electorate grew, politics largely remained in the hands of an elite, one in which landowners gradually gave ground to those drawn from business and the professions. The rise of the Labour party after 1900 challenged this position but, as MacDonald’s comments suggest, only insofar as its leaders sought a place at the same table. Radical critics who called for direct self-government, like those syndicalists who briefly enjoyed popularity within some Edwardian trade unions, only modestly dented the dominance of that outlook.⁵ It was perhaps inevitable that most in Westminster took a sanguine view of the place of party. In his preface to the 1902 edition of Ostrogorski’s critique, James Bryce – a prominent academic and Liberal – claimed the author exaggerated the malign power of the ‘caucus’. Britain, Bryce argued, was ‘almost wholly free from the more sordid elements which may enter into the interest men take in their party’ in other countries.⁶ As would be the case well after 1918, figures like Bryce believed the ‘Westminster model’ – a conception rooted in strong government, parliamentary sovereignty, reverence for tradition, and strong misgivings about direct popular participation – embodied Britain’s unique greatness and underpinned its imperial pre-eminence.⁷

But if some thought the parties were necessary to maintaining order, feelings remained ambiguous about their character, which politicians themselves occasionally exploited. While an insurgent Independent Labour party candidate standing in Southampton during the 1895 general election, the young MacDonald certainly indulged in anti-party rhetoric: he claimed that

when so much is uncertain, there could be raised no cry more fatal to our well-being, general progress, and good government than that which you hear in Southampton – party, party. Against that cry of my opponents I am bound to raise the answer – principle, principle.⁸

MacDonald would never lose his ironic antipathy to ‘party’, no more so than when he formed the 1931 National government. He was not alone.⁹

It was in this dynamic period that modern political fiction acquired many of its defining themes, subjects and forms. This chapter will consequently concentrate on those novels written as the nineteenth century electorate slowly expanded. Shakespeare’s plays which continued to be performed during this time raised generic issues about the exercise of power, but fictions written about contemporary politics necessarily had a more visceral impact on audiences.¹⁰ Such works initially lionized the efforts of their worthy parliamentary heroes, but by the turn of the century political fictions began to place a firmer emphasis on entertainment and criticism. The reading public had increased, thanks to the 1870 Elementary Education Act and the expansion of the lower middle class. Emerging socialists and suffragettes also produced works often severely antagonistic to the established order, albeit for much smaller audiences. More significantly for the future, the last years of the First World War saw the cinema join the novel and theatre as a means of fictionalizing politics with the production of biographical films depicting the lives of two of Britain’s Prime Ministers.

The Parliamentary Novel

Writing in 1924, the literary historian Morris Edmund Speare claimed to be the first to identify the ‘Political Novel’ genre, born, as he fancifully put it, ‘in the prismatic mind of Benjamin Disraeli’.¹¹ Disraeli’s trilogy of Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and Tancred (1847) certainly played an influential role in shaping how novelists tackled politics. Disraeli did not, however, originate narratives that placed Parliament and parliamentarians at their heart: that honour lies with John Galt’s The Member (1832).¹² The young Charles Dickens was moreover one of the first to depict an election, in The Pickwick Papers (1837), written a few years after ending his stint as a parliamentary reporter. Nor would Disraeli be the most popular exponent of the genre.

Speare defined the Political Novel as a work of prose fiction in which

the main purpose of the writer is party propaganda, public reform, or exposition of the lives of the personages who maintain government, or of the forces which constitute government. In this exposition the drawing room is frequently used as a medium for presenting the inside life of politics … the most dramatic and the most productive characters are, by their very greatness, the more removed from the ordinary world of ordinary men and women. The home of the noble lord of the Ministry, the country estate of the Prime Minister, the Cabinet meetings in Downing Street, the lives of the ‘Elysians’ who live in ‘castles’ and have great leisure and great wealth and who often guide the State in diplomacy and in executive posts out upon the far corners of the earth, are as far removed from our ordinary ken as the complicated workings of party control, the news which brings tragedies and rejoicings to the groups in the political clubs, or the manipulation of the elaborate machinery of diplomacy, are from our ordinary intelligence.¹³

These were the stories of great men told to help those excluded from drawing rooms and castles to understand their real-life leaders’ dilemmas. Perhaps George Watson’s later term the ‘Parliamentary Novel’ is more accurate, given how the genre celebrated the centrality of the Palace of Westminster to the solution of the nation’s problems. Moreover, according to Watson, a key feature of such novels was their exploration of the ‘parliamentary idea’, glorying as they did in what could be achieved through politics, characterized as peaceful persuasion and deliberation conducted between men of good character, benign will and suitable background.¹⁴

Whosoever’s term is the most apposite, Speare and Watson make the genre sound dull, partly because they did not place equal emphasis on novelists’ imperative to entertain. That such novels were mostly about aristocrats was important to their appeal and authors did not stint in describing in detail the world of privilege. It would therefore be naïve to ignore the extent to which these fictions allowed humble readers to gain a vicarious insight into the lifestyles of the rich and famous who just so happened to also rule their lives. For there was glamour and celebrity in politics at this time, and the Political Novel tapped into a popular interest. The sober Liberal leader William Gladstone was an unlikely figure to arouse cultish support, but there was a provincial fascination with his ‘strange and marvelous’ figure; supporters even made pilgrimages to Gladstone’s home at Hawarden hoping to spot their hero cutting down trees.¹⁵ When the far-less-celebrated Lewis Harcourt, son of a Liberal Cabinet minister, visited Haslingden in Lancashire during 1904 with his wife, the daughter of an American banker, to confirm his selection as candidate, the event was described in the local press as if it were a royal visit. The Haslingden Guardian even feared the town would not prove worthy of Mrs. Harcourt, whose ‘gracious and affable demeanour won all hearts’. ‘We are afraid’, it continued, ‘that she would scarcely be favourably impressed with the dingy and ill-lighted streets of the town.’¹⁶

Often written by those with direct experience of politics, the Political Novel gave readers access to a lofty, desirable world, in a period in which journalists cast a respectful veil across the ‘inside life of politics’. Within his social circle Harcourt was, for example, renowned as a sexual predator in whose company no girl or boy was safe, but his activities remained a secret to the great unwashed.¹⁷ Thus, as an insight into the private lives of politicians, novels were seen as an important source of information. For while they rarely produced actual romans à clef, authors often indulged the desire for behind-the-scenes gossip by creating characters readers might view as versions of actual politicians. Certainly one reviewer referred to Anthony Trollope’s characters Daubeny and Gresham as Disraeli and Gladstone as if this were a matter of fact.¹⁸

Those who wrote about politics had to touch emotion as well as reason: indeed, in order to achieve the latter, the former had to be first accomplished. Disraeli for sure did both. His trilogy, which took pot shots at Robert Peel’s le...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Depicting Democracy
• 1  Parliament Worship
• 2  Disappointing Democracy
• 3  The People’s War and After
• 4  Imagining the Post-War Consensus
• 5  The Established Order Undermined
• 6  The Televised Crisis
• 7  Yes, Conspirator
• 8  Still No Job for a Lady
• 9  A Thick Ending
• Epilogue: What Would Plato Say?
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright