R.W. Johnson

No one this time last year would have predicted a victory for the Left in France, yet it is in a sense far easier to explain Jospin’s triumph than Blair’s. President Chirac, elected in 1995 on a promise that he would reduce unemployment, had actually done the opposite; and, faced with the need of his deeply unpopular prime minister, Alain Juppé, to squeeze the economy yet further to meet the Maastricht criteria, called a snap election simply because he feared things would get tougher by the time Parliament’s mandate ran out in 1998. He was eager, too, to take advantage of the fact that the Socialist Party was still in a mess after the devastating unravelling of the Mitterrand Presidency and its own catastrophic defeat in the 1993 election, which left the Party with 56 seats in a chamber of 577 Deputies.

On the face of it, Quintin Hogg ought to be a great historic figure. He comes into the history books as the victorious pro-Munich candidate at the famous Oxford by-election of 1938, is Under-Secretary for Air in Churchill’s Government by 1945, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of Suez, the head of various other ministries, Tory Party Chairman and, for a record 12 years, Lord Chancellor, formally the country’s highest office. (The Lord Chancellor has often earned more than the prime minister and outranks him on all official occasions.) He had every advantage: a wealthy background, a Lord Chancellor as a father, a good brain, Eton and Christ Church – the classic pedigree of the Tory grandee – and easy social connections wherever it mattered. (When Hogg’s right-wing polemic, The Dilemma of Democracy, was published, in which he spoke of Labour’s victory of 1974 as proof that democracy was breaking down, the Queen wrote him a long handwritten letter to tell him of the ‘intense interest and enjoyment’ his book had occasioned: she was, she said, sure that it would help ‘many slightly muddled, BBC-battered people to see things more clearly’.) The title of Geoffrey Lewis’s biography could have been ‘Quintin Hogg’, ‘Quintin Hailsham’ or just ‘Hailsham’. No one, after all, would dream of writing a biography of, say, Harold Wilson and calling it ‘Lord Wilson’ because deep down we know that was all a hollow sham. But Lewis clearly feels that Hogg is, well, lordly.’‘

By the time Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 the nuanced position he took on the Algerian revolution had caused a scandal in orthodox progressive circles. Camus kept as quiet as he could because he feared terrorist reprisals against his mother, who was still living in Algiers. At the Nobel ceremony, however, he was harangued by an FLN enthusiast and forced into making a statement. ‘I must condemn a terrorism that works blindly in the streets of Algiers and one day might strike at my mother and my family,’ he said. ‘I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.’ This produced a further explosion. ‘I was totally sure,’ remarked Hubert Beuve-Méry, the editor of Le Monde, ‘that Camus would say some fucking fool thing.’ Sartre and Beauvoir’s response was very similar – they had long ceased to be on speaking terms with Camus because of his ‘reactionary’ tendencies.’’

Johannesburg, one can never forget, is a mining town. There are physical reminders – great pyramids of spoil from the mines litter the landscape – but more entrenched is the psychology of the mining town. People usually come to Johannesburg because there is money to be made here and they often go as soon as they have made it. The crassness of the place is, roughly speaking, Texan – South African golfers playing the American pro circuit tend to live in Houston, another skyscraper city in the middle of nowhere. But Johannesburg is changing at a remarkable rate: more and more obviously it is becoming Africa’s capital as traders flood in from Zaire, Nigeria and all points between. The result is high-quality African masks and curios on sale in the streets, Nigerian drug barons running a whole suburb, Francophone accents everywhere and an extraordinary dynamism.’

It’s a dependable party game: who was the MP who sat from 1950 to 1987, emerged as a strong and early opponent of hanging and supported homosexual law reform; was fiercely anti-Nato, anti-American and opposed to Britain possessing nuclear weapons; pioneered the Clean Air Act, vociferously opposed subsidies to farmers, attacked the monopoly of the big drug firms as suppliers to the NHS and was the first person to take the anti-smoking cause to the Cabinet; became a vehement critic of Empire and hugely embarrassed a Tory government by a passionate condemnation of British treatment of Africans confined in the Hola Camp in Kenya? (The MP in question was so infuriated by the racist excuse that different standards applied in Africa that he/she actually cried with vexation at the end of the speech.) As Minister of Health the same politician earned an extremely progressive reputation by attacking the mental hospitals as oppressive Victorian institutions which ought to be closed to allow more humane care within the community – and by taking the Tube or walking home after working late so as not to make the ministerial driver wait up late. This MP was a radical critic of Tory incomes policy, was the first in any party to argue for a minimum income for the old and the unemployed, argued for the nationalisation of the universities and completely free education for all students, and refused both the offer of a life peerage and, when it was proposed to him, the editorship of Private Eye. In retirement he/she wrote a learned but scandalous book on the Gospels which tried to prove that the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Sermon on the Mount were all historical fictions.’