Fiction and British Politics conference December 11, 2010 British Academy, London

Why politicians write about politics

This session kicked off the conference and was chaired by Professor Philip Cowley

Phil Cowley: One thing we might want to discuss at some point during the day - and this may be my own prejudice - is that although I enjoy a lot of political fiction, I find that most of it is not very good and we might want to talk about that later. I am however delighted that the two speakers we have got today have both written some excellent political fiction and I am therefore pleased that we have them.

Joe Ashton, the Labour MP for Bassetlaw from 1968 through to 2001, has written a fantastic book called 'Grass Roots' (1977) and also a play 'Majority of One' (1988), which was based on his time in the government Whips Office under the Callaghan administration. He was telling me some fantastic stories about that just now.

Chris Mullin, in addition to writing what I think is some of the best diaries of the Blair era, has also written a number of excellent political novels including 'A Very British Coup' (1982) which many of you will know, and 'A Year Of The Fire Monkey’ (1991). I watched the adaptation of 'A Very British Coup', the television adaptation, when I was a teenager and I loved it. I thought it was fantastic, I videoed it and I forced, and that is not too strong a word, my then girlfriend to watch it, to try to interest her in politics. That relationship did not last much longer and I have blamed Chris Mullin for that every since.

So on that note I will pass on to the two of them. They are going to speak briefly to give you some introductory thoughts and then we are going to take questions and comments from the floor.

So, let's start with Joe, if you would like to kick off.

Joe Ashton: When Steve Fielding asked me if I would do this session on why MPs write political fiction I had a quick answer for him: we have to if we want to tell the truth without getting sued. The House of Commons is full of lawyers, all looking how to make quick money.

I probably started thinking about writing fiction in 1974 when I made the statement that there were ‘MP's for Hire’. I defending MPs - it was the time of the T Dan Smith corruption thing - from the charge that we were all on the take. It was on the Jimmy Young show and I said ‘you could count on the fingers on one hand the MPs who were on the take’. Immediately Fleet Street said 'Name the guilty five - we demand this’ and the roof fell in. I was hauled up before the beaks. They were going to throw me out. They set up this committee: the press weren't allowed in; the public weren't allowed in; there was nothing in writing. It was just going to be me against the Home Secretary and a few people like that. They were going to chuck me out of the place. They could do that, but this time I had a very good friend called Arthur Davidson. He used to be Maxwell's libel lawyer, he was also the MP for Accrington, and Maxwell never lost a libel case. He came to me and said, 'look we're going to put in a defiant defence'. He said ‘they want you to grovel, they expect you to grovel, we're going to tell them to “sod off'” -- then we're going to name the guilty five, which will give them panic stations then. They were coming up to the election and I'm not going to tell this story any longer, but they eventually said 'forget it'.

If you fight the establishment sometimes they will back off. One thing they hate is the publicity, but it taught me a lesson, that you should write everything as fiction in the future and put different names on. Even Chris Mullin didn't know until I told him that ‘Grassroots’ was about Dennis Skinner, who had next constituency to me, but I made it about steel workers, not pit closures and gave him a different name. I still don't know if he read it and didn't understand, but you have to do it like that. So it's not as easy, people say ‘why don't politicians tell the truth’? Well we do, but we are limited to what we can say in the press and what goes off in the Whips Office

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Fiction and British Politics conference December 11, 2010 British Academy, London

Why politicians write about politics

would make you hair stand on end. So the reason we can't come out straight with the truth is that they would have a libel writ on us in no time.

Chris Mullin: I will just say a few words on the origins of 'A Very British Coup' and then we can discuss the themes which arise from that if you are interested.

It was published in 1982 which was a different political era than this. At the time, Mr. Benn was ascendant within the Labour Party, CND was attracting crowds of about 300,000 to their demonstrations against Cruise Missiles, which if you remember, came from America. There was, amongst the establishment, serious concern with the alleged issue that the Conservative government might not be reelected. At that time, the Falklands War hadn't taken place and she (Mrs. Thatcher) was very low in the opinion polls, so it wasn't wholly unrealistic. I was coming home on the train from either the 1980 or 1981 Blackpool Conference with Stuart Holland, who was then a Labour MP, Tony Banks, who subsequently became a Labour MP and Peter Hain, who will be known to you as well. We were discussing what might happen, how the establishment would react if a left wing government were to be elected. In 1969 Cecil King the proprietor of the ‘Daily Mirror’, the main newspaper at that time, attempted to set up a government of businessmen headed by Lord Mountbatten and in the mid seventies, General Sir Walter Walker was trying to raise a private army to deal with what he confidently anticipated would be public disorder that would arise as a result of the election of the Labour Government in 1974. Sir Walter at the time was dismissed by some as a bit of a nutter, but he had been the Commander in Chief of NATO Northern Europe, and, of course as I said, Cruise missiles were on the way from Ronald Regan.

That was the background and Stuart Holland said, as it happened, he had just typed out by the swimming pool in Greece the previous summer the first four chapters of just such a novel. Peter Hain said he and a friend had circulated to a number of publishers an outline for such a novel. So I thought, well, I'd better get on and write it in that case, so that's how it came to pass.

When the hardback was published in 1982, I worked at ‘Tribune’, a left wing newspaper, and we had an advert in the back announcing the sale of the book. When the first cheque came in, it was from the American Embassy for £7.95, which was the going rate for a hardback in those days, so we duly sent it off and waited to see what would happen. The next thing that happened: came an invitation to lunch with the Minister at the Embassy, the Minister being actually the main diplomat at the Embassy after the Ambassador. So a day came when he sent his bullet-proof Cadillac to ‘Tribune’'s multi-storied headquarters in Grays Inn Road to collect me, and I thought well, there's going to be quite a lot of us there. When I got there it was just him, me, one of his colleagues and a Filipino butler. I said ‘what (I wasn't even the editor at ‘Tribune’) are you doing inviting a minnow like me?’ He said ‘I reckon you are among one of the top 1,000 opinion formers in the country’ so I said, ‘well I must be about number 999’. He said ‘the other 999 have been here too’. Of course they were interested in what would happen if somebody threatened the Cruise Missile bases.

Then a number of things happened in the 80's after the book had been published that had been foreshadowed in the book, and had in fact been rumoured at the time when I had written it. Someone called Cathy Massiter, who worked for MI5, revealed that they had a spy on the Council of CND. I think he was the Treasurer. Well, I had a spy on the Council of CND as well. Then, do you remember Brigadier Ronnie Stoneham was discovered in 1986 - I think, in Room 105 in Broadcasting House at the BBC stamping upturned Christmas trees on the personnel files of those whose careers were not to progress. In ‘ A Very British Coup' you will find that MI5 does take an interest in senior appointments at the BBC. And of course, Peter Wright’s ‘The Spycatcher’ came out. Peter Wright's allegation was I think, rather exaggerated, but there was undoubtedly a germ of truth in it- that he and a small group of MI5 officers had been trying to bring down the government in the mid 1970's. So that was all a useful build up to the television series that followed, in which if you remember, the Prime Minister was a Sheffield steel

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worker made to look as unlike Tony Benn as possible and played by the great actor, Ray McAnally. The film version was shown, I think, in more than 30 countries.

If you were to ask me what the ingredients of a successful political thriller are, I'd say firstly there has to be a germ of truth. There has to be a vaguely credible plot. Douglas Hurd wrote three very good political thrillers in the mid 1970's and all of them had the germ of truth in them. I think it was him and a man called Andrew Osmond. One was based on the possibility that the Chinese would take over Hong Kong by force. Another was based on an armed uprising by Scottish Nationalists. The third was about a right wing attempt to overthrow the Conservative government for being too soft in Rhodesia, i.e. Rhodesian settlers and their allies in the Tory party who thought that the Prime Minister (and it's the same Prime Minister in all three of the novels) was being too soft of majority rule. So all those were issues that were current at the time and he built upon those, very cleverly I thought. Michael Dobbs had enormous good luck when the television version of his novel coincided with the fall of Thatcher and much of that was foretold in the book. I think he was pushing his luck a bit when he had the Prime Minister push a political journalist off the top of the parapet in Westminster. We've all wanted to do that at one time or another - but to actually do it!

The other thing is the point that Joe made a moment ago, that you can say things that can't be said in real life and so those I think are the main kind of ingredients. I think political thrillers have become more of interest in the 80's and perhaps the 90's as the Cold War has faded. The classics, and they were political in their way, are the great John Le Carre novels in the 60's, 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold' , 'Small Town In Germany' and so forth. But of course that era has passed and we have now moved to another one and I think that may be part of the reason why political novels have come more into fashion.

I'll just end on this note. After I was elected as a Member of Parliament in 1987, which was around the time the book of ‘A Very British Coup’ was made into a film, I was invited to lunch with Marmaduke Hussey, the Chairman of the BBC, myself and several other MPs. The purpose of the lunch was for him to bend our ears on the Broadcasting Act, which then was just a gleam in Mrs. Thatcher's eye. We had the entire top brass of the BBC around the lunch table. Half way through the lunch I said ‘Who works in Room 105 now that Brigadier Stoneham has retired’. All around the table you could hear the sound of knives and forks hitting the plates. Marmaduke, choking on his smoked salmon said 'I think this is one for you Patricia' to the lady down the other end of the table, I think she was a secretary at the BBC and she hummed and harred, she thought it was a Special Assistant to the Director General. I said, ‘Yes but what's his name? And what does he do? Although we had the top brass around the table, nobody could name this Special Assistant to the Director General so I said 'I tell you what, we're only two floors up, why don't I just nip down and knock on the door and ask?' 'I wouldn't do that they said, we'll write to you' and in due course and with a bit of prompting they did, and sure enough it was a Mr. Hodden and his previous employment seemed to be in the Ministry of Defence. So whilst they were at pains to assure me that his job description was very different from that of Brigadier Stoneham it sounded remarkably similar to me. I'll end on that note.

Phil Cowley: I'll come to Joe in a second, before throwing it open to the floor, you said that you (I don't know if this is a right- or left-wing nightmare), but you were with Stuart Holland, Tony Banks, Pete Hain on a train and part of your motivation seems to be to get one over on Start Holland and Peter Hain and write the book first. But I wonder what the other motive was, was this something you wanted to do for a long time?

Chris Mullin: No it wasn't at all my motive to get one over on the others. I mean it was a story bursting to be told. I think it had dawned on other people, even people of a different political persuasion, that there was a story to be told. Some years later, maybe 10 years later, I was giving a talk to a small literary society in Ipswich and a man came up to me afterwards, who some of you may remember from the 1970’s, Peter Hardiman Scott. He was the chief

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Fiction and British Politics conference December 11, 2010 British Academy, London

Why politicians write about politics

political correspondent at the BBC in a much more genteel era, it has to be said, the Nick Robinson of his day. He said, of course he in retirement wrote thrillers for a living, and he was a big household name, he had written such a book, exactly on the same theme, but regrettably mine came out a few months before he had his completed. When he showed his manuscript to the publisher, the publisher said 'You can't publish it'. I realised how lucky I was because had he pipped me at the post (I was very obscure at the time and he was a household name relatively speaking), it might never have seen the light of day. I only mention that to show that really the theme was on the minds of a lot of observers at the time, for better or worse.

Phil Cowley: Joe is there anything you would like to add before we take some questions.

Joe Ashton: Let me just say what the motivation was in my case -- money. We MPs were terribly badly paid, in the 70's and 60's. The money was lousy, we got a pay rise every 10 years, but you could get 10 quid if they asked you to go on television or radio. So we used to sit there thinking of good stories - let’s put a tax on foxhunting - well they have it on bingo why the bloody hell should the middle class get away with it? Wow, we'd get that on headlines and every broadcast. Believe it or not in 1973 I wrote one article for the News of the World for £750. Astonishing, our wages were a third of that and this was for one article. This was the money that was there, we paid our constituencies, we paid for a whole election campaign from German television. They said we've been given your name because you have a constituency which is coal and whippets and all this sort of stuff, and it’s the heart of England, and we will film it for three days. It finished up, we were giving money to the party.

I've been campaigning recently, I write a magazine for the retired members association, we have about 350 members, including people like Tony Blair, John Majors, Boris from the Town Hall and people like this, ex- ministers, we've got 40 odd ex-ministers, and we’ve got 85 Lords. They chose me as their chairman because they know that I will tell the truth and I will tell it in an entertaining way. So this is a background to politics, it's never been seen and I've told you about the Whips Office, which is the real hive of what happens. Some of you recently may have seen ‘Life on Mars’, that television programme where they go back to the 1970's, it was a smash hit, it was the world of Sweeney and Minder, well that is how the Whips Office was then, exactly. It's like there were the picket lines and you get in there and ‘you f***ing vote or I'll throw you over the f***ing banister’ and they did do it; or’ I’ll ring your old wife tonight and tell her that we haven't seen you since Monday, so if you've been with that girlfriend of yours she's going to get to know by six o'clock this evening so you'd better get in there and vote’. So you would vote. It was ruthless and twisted, you won't see that in the papers the day after, but everybody in Parliament knows about it and knows its secrets and the stories. That was one reason why I wrote my play, ‘Majority of One’ to get it out there.

Phil Cowley: OK, let's take questions, in batches. Let's start with Steve.

Steven Fielding: Both your novels, they are set in Sheffield, or the protagonists are from Sheffield or a steel city, they are both working class and they are both idealists in their different ways and they are both defeated. The socialist Prime Minister in ‘A Very British Coup’ basically backs off and the establishment wins and, Joe, the character in your novel goes in and tries to stop the closing down of the steel mills and he kind of realises that it's not going to happen. There are all sorts of machinations in the Commons, and in the end he storms out and abandons politics. Why? I mean both of you are politically active, you are MPs, why did you both end on the defeat of things that you really believe in?

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Fiction and British Politics conference December 11, 2010 British Academy, London

Why politicians write about politics

Nick Randall These are two questions really for Chris, and it's about the adaptation of 'A Very British Coup'. You are I think, on record as saying you are very pleased with the adaptation and that seems to be quite an unusual thing for a novelist whose work is then televised or made into a film. I just wondered how you would account for that. Were you just lucky, or was there some kind of broader process at work that?

The second question is about the reception. You mentioned that there were 30 counties where the TV adaptation was shown and I saw, I think it was Freddie Inglis write something about its reception in the United States. He said Alistair Cooke gave a preface to its showing on American TV to kind of render it safe. So I was interested to know what the kind of feedback was that you got from American viewers of 'A Very British Coup'.

Phil Cowley: Joe - do you want to start?

Joe Ashton: They asked about losers. Losers are often much more interesting. And nobody likes a goody goody. David Cameron he's got a lot of money, went to Eton, got everything going for him; whereas someone like Gordon Brown, going blind and he looks as though he's going to lose and he's got a family, then there's a sympathy going for Brown now, there really is. Politicians feel this sympathy for the loser and write about what people can empathise with.

Chris Mullin: I think it's the history of left wing politics, glorious defeats which we celebrate from time to time as though they were victories. The miners’ strike, I suppose was the greatest one of recent times but there have many others. I thought it was more realistic that if you were up against the United States you are liable to lose. If you remember in 1973 in Chile the electorate turned in the wrong result and the rest is history. If you remember, the allegation was that in the early 1980s the threat to our way of life came from left wing extremists, that was the allegation which you encountered every day in the newspaper. Indeed newspapers habitually divided up the Labour party between extremists and moderates. Now my purpose was to demonstrate that the real threat to democracy and our way of life actually came from the other side of the spectrum and I believe if you look back over the last fifty or sixty years of British politics you can demonstrate that quite easily. So that was my purpose. I agree with Joe's point that glorious defeat is more interesting to write about than great victories where everybody gets it right.

I thought they did a brilliant job with the adaptation, I was very lucky. Actually we could have had a more ambiguous outcome if we had stuck with the version the film people produced. Because if you remember, one of the criticisms made of my novel, was that Harry Perkins gave up too easily when the establishment moved in on him. In the film, he appears to go along with the deal proposed to him by the security services, and says he'll do this live broadcast and announce his retirement on health grounds or something, then once the cameras are switched on, he starts to read out a totally different script, a defiant one. Now I think the only mistake the film people made was that they should have ended on that, whereas it then drivelled on and came to the same pessimistic conclusion to the novel.

As far as feedback from the United States, I had forgotten that Alistair Cooke did the preamble for the American version. What we discovered was that it was rejected by all publishers in the United States who couldn't conceive that there was a market for such a book. But the film was such an enormous success in the US and got enormous publicity, that I then started to get letters from American citizens asking why the book was banned in America. So yes, I rather wish it had been on sale in America as rather a lot of copies would have shifted, but it wasn't so there we go. The film seemed to go down rather well. It was shown, on the only channel it could be

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Fiction and British Politics conference December 11, 2010 British Academy, London

Why politicians write about politics

shown, on Public Broadcasting, PBS as it was called, but it did seem to do very well and the East and the West coast press led their supplements with it

Phil Cowley: Any more questions?

Shannon Granville: I'm an independent scholar who actually lives in Washington DC right now and most of my research in recent years has been on political memoirs and diaries. I can't remember who said it but someone said that some of the greatest works of political fiction are politician’s memoirs. I am curious to know whether you think that the increase in politicians’ writing political fiction has come about as a result of politicians from Richard Crossman and others publishing their memoirs and diaries? Someone said that Harold Wilson commented to the Cabinet, when the Crossman diaries were being published that 'whatever you do when you're going to publish a diary, don't die first because we need to have time to respond'. So I was wondering if you had any comments on politician’s memoirs and diaries and their relationship with political fiction.

Matthew Bailey: A quick question picking up on the point about ending on defeat, and obviously that phrase of Enoch Powell's - 'all political careers end in failure'. I wonder though whether you had thought, particularly talking about ‘A Very British Coup’, if either of you had thought about revisiting your characters?

Chris Mullin: Political memoirs, the ones that work are the ones which don't spend too much time trying to justify everything a person in authority did and about which there is an element of self deprecation. As you know I have just written a volume of diaries which seems to be doing alright, it's on its third reprint at the moment. It's title is 'The View From The Foothills' because the ones that go across best are those written from lower down the political spectrum. It would seem if you look at the successful diaries, Chips Channon never rose to Tory MP in the 1930's, 40's, never rose above being a Parliamentary Private Secretary. His secret, of course was that he had married a Guinness, and he entertained on an awesome scale. The King comes to dinner. During the abdication crisis in the 1930's you can't get better sources than this. Churchill comes to dinner, Attlee comes to dinner, everybody comes to dinner. During the Second World War Field Marshall Lord Wavell, back from the North African front, comes and stays for three months. He had the best sources available, even though he was a very obscure figure in the political terms.

I have just read, what I think is the best of all: the diaries of Harold Nicholson who again a Tory MP in the 30's and he had been a diplomat before that. They are brilliant and again the secret is the same as Chips Channon. He did have a very junior job for a year or so, and got sacked from it by Churchill, but he knew everybody, everybody. Politics was very different in those days, the top people were all toffs, and everybody they knew was a toff. Even though there was a war on, they dined in all the West End clubs.

Joe Ashton: We've had the Tony Benn diaries, I was his PPS for years and I used to catch him writing and scribbling away. Last Tuesday, I'm not name dropping, but it's one of these things, I was at No 10 Downing Street, talking to the Prime Minister’s wife, chatting. We were talking about this and I said, every time I came here with Tony Benn, he was always on about of how Oswald Mosely would sit there and ‘I would sit on his knee and we'd watch the trooping of the colour and I was a little boy and I'd write it down’ and all this sort of stuff. She then said to me, well when was the first time you came to Downing Street and I said ‘well it was a Sunday afternoon and we had walked about three miles through London carrying this bloody big petition and we got a rackety old bus from Sheffield and all that. We marched up to 10 Downing Street and knocked on the door, and a bloke opened it in his shirt sleeves, no tie, he just looked like he had got out of bed and shouted 'Bugger Off'’.

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Fiction and British Politics conference December 11, 2010 British Academy, London

Why politicians write about politics

Chris Mullin: I have wondered whether to do a sequel or not, a lot of people have asked me over the years and I guess there would be a market for it. Difficult, as the great actor, Ray McAnally, died shortly after the film went out, so I think you'd have to start with the funeral. I hope there's nobody here who has ideas, as I still have the copyright on this. You would have to start with his funeral I guess, Harry Perkins funeral, and take it from there and yes I might have a bash at it, but I'm not completely confident that I can do it, sequels are often not as good as the original. If I don't think I can do it, then I will stop.

Phil Cowley: Any more questions from the floor? I've got one. To what extent do you have to try to explain or adapt the Commons procedures, the reality of politics, in order to make it accessible, and whether that becomes a problem because, out there, there is not a huge understanding of how Westminster works. There's lots of preconceptions and prejudices, but actually not very much understanding and so do you just strip all that out to make the story flow or because you're writing about something that you're involved in and presumably know a lot about, do you want to try to explain to people how politics functions.

Chris Mullin: Well I think if you are too didactic, you do risk turning everyone off. You're not writing an academic book, hopefully. Some people do feel obliged to get everything down. I notice that some American authors write thick books and feel obliged to get everything in. I feel a light touch is what is required, I do think you should make it as accurate as possible, but I like to think that I am telling it, especially in the diaries for example, how any other person who had strolled in off the street would see it if they were there. How somebody there would see it. If somebody there says to me, I was there and it was totally different from what you just said, I would be a bit disappointed about that. So when for example I recount a meeting, I don't just recount what everyone was saying, what pictures were on the wall, what side comments were made, what tension there was. That's what you have to try and capture to make it interesting, otherwise I think it just becomes another academic paper and you won't have a wide circulation.

Phil Cowley: I've got time for one last question.

Liz Fraser: What I think is interesting is that people could be sitting in the Law Society talking about lawyers writing books and the representation of law in fiction and people could be sitting in the Turf Club talking about the representation of horse racing in fiction. Is there something different when we talk about politicians writing political fiction and the representation of politics in fiction or is it just like that? I mean is it just like the art world or any other setting?

Chris Mullin: Is politics different than writing about law or whatever? Well politics is really a lie, it's what you want to make of it. Most of us live in the middle of our constituencies. Although we're alleged to be more out of touch these days than any previous generation we are actually rather more in touch than any previous generation of politicians. And we share by and large, the same rainfall, the same sunshine, but then depending on what job you do when you get down to the Westminster end, you get behind the scenes into a little world, that most ordinary folk don't get to visit. You can get into places that ordinary folk can’t, and if somebody can write well enough they can take you there as though you were there

I was on a very obscure committee called the Parliamentary Committee, which nobody in the outside world would have heard of. It's the executive of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and every Wednesday for four years, including during the run up to Iraq, 9/11 and the Iraq War and the Afghan War, myself and six other back

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Fiction and British Politics conference December 11, 2010 British Academy, London

Why politicians write about politics

benchers sat opposite the Prime Minister, after the Prime Minister’s Questions and discussed the issues of the day in some detail. The other members of the Committee were the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chief Whip and so forth. So you felt you had a little insight that actually, even most MPs didn't have. So if you can convey some of that in a way that is interesting then you stand a chance of smuggling a message to the outside world.

Phil Cowley: That was really interesting and excellent way to start the conference: thanks to Joe and Chris.

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