Peter Clarke

‘The question what Keynes would be advocating today is, of course, a nonsense question.’ So Lord Kahn warned us in a brilliant lecture in 1974, invoking Keynes’s propensity – ‘apart from the fact that he would be 91 years old’ – to develop new answers for new questions, rather than to make a fetish of consistency. The impact of Keynes’s thought has nonetheless suffered many attempts to encapsulate it within a cut-and-dried formula. In the 1950s and 1960s it was usually the redeemer theory, whereby Keynes was held to have supplied us with a box of tricks uniquely guaranteed to ensure permanent prosperity. When the long post-war boom, of which he was allegedly the ‘onlie begetter’, was succeeded in the 1970s by the disconcerting phenomenon of stagflation, the devil theory caught on, whereby Keynes was in turn arraigned as the architect of our misfortunes. A further variant was to say God is Dead, suggesting that the Keynesian revolution was a comprehensively over-inflated promise of general salvation from what turned out to be the peculiar and transient difficulties of one offshore island at an awkward corner in its history.

The SDP is just now at a critical juncture in its career. But then it has been at one critical juncture or another virtually throughout its brief existence. As much as the Labour Party, it has lived for two years in a state of endemic crisis, but whereas crisis has reinforced Labour’s chronic debility, so far the SDP has been able to thrive upon it. Roy Jenkins talked of an experimental aircraft in adumbrating the idea of a centre party in the early summer of 1980: a ‘dangerously caricaturable analogy’, as he admits in a retrospective comment in The Rebirth of Britain. He said then that it ‘might well finish up a few fields from the end of the runway’. At the time he was looked at askance by many social democrats within the Labour Party (people like me, as I readily admit) for supposing that there would be so much as a runway. Within a year, however, we had all strapped our safety belts, magnificently unprepared for life after take-off. Actually, it was called a ‘launch’ by then, and we realised that we were in for a heady but stomach-churning diet of mixed metaphors for some time to come.

It is notorious that all societies manifest some sense of their history as part of their own collective self-consciousness. The past is drawn upon selectively, compounding nationhood, cultural heritage, class identity or historical destiny in the creation of a necessary myth. The myth may be necessary in order to fortify the ambitions of the restless, to gratify the complacency of the satisfied or to console the amour-propre of the dispossessed. The functions of the past, in this sense, are governed by the needs of the present. Much general interest in history arises in this way, explicitly or implicitly, and historians would be less widely read if they did not cater for it. Yet their own professional concerns, so they disdainfully affirm, are otherwise.

By the time the sun is up on Friday 10 June we shall all be a lot wiser – and sadder too, quite likely. Either we shall have found out that the Iron Lady is impregnable or she herself will have been found out. Margaret Thatcher is the favourite politician of those who like an exciting life. Her maxim in politics – she has claimed it as Thatche’s Law – is that the unexpected always happens. Certainly something always happens when she is around, and it is often something nasty. Yet she seldom takes the blame when things turn out badly. It is not just that she has been lucky in escaping the natural consequences of her own misjudgments: her impregnability rests upon a sort of ideological second-strike capacity which has enabled her to find vindication in discomfiture.–

Time was when Clio had a seamless garment: but that was before the division of labour set in. Prefixless history is now condescendingly thought of as ‘straight’ history and her clothes have been stolen and shared out by her offspring, with continual squabbles over who wears the trousers. Intellectual history was tardy in asserting its separate identity and still has trouble in getting recognised – what is it, after all, but the history of intellectuals, by intellectuals, for intellectuals? One merit of That Noble Science of Politics is that it yields an answer to this question. Its subtitle proclaims it a study in intellectual history, and its authorship exemplifies the unity and coherence of the art.–