The Professor Will See You Now: Luck
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
4 min read
Lessons in political science. This week: luck
There had long been doubts about the party leader, who was widely seen as a bit mediocre and uninspiring. Plenty of his party preferred one of his rivals, not in the Commons, who seemed to have more flair.
That leader was Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The king over the water was the former party leader and ex-prime minister, Lord Rosebery.
After one particularly fevered bit of leadership speculation in 1902, Campbell-Bannerman wrote to one of his colleagues that things seemed at last to have calmed down. “There has been a great excitement here, but it is dying down, and I think one cause of the fever abating is the discovery that the country is not so ready for new gods as was expected: at least people want to look the new god all round before they begin worshipping.”
The letter can be found in the papers of Norman Lamont, held by the National Library of Scotland. (No, not that Norman Lamont, but the one-time Liberal MP for Buteshire.) I found it, purely by chance, the other day, while searching for something else entirely – and given its current relevance, I couldn’t quite believe my luck.
Stumbling upon stuff like this is one of the joys of archival work, almost compensating for the hours spent turning pages for no benefit at all. The week before, in a different archive, I came across a letter from Winston Churchill, discussing whether to stand again in Oldham – and noting that labour representation was going to be a difficult issue in the future for the Liberal Party. Turns out Churchill was on to something.
This column isn’t really about archival work, though. I was put off it early in my career by a visit to an archive in Sevenoaks, to look at the diary of John Rodgers MP, a participant in the Tory leadership contest of 1975. After much wrangling to arrange access, and a considerable amount of travel, I arrived to discover that it was in fact an appointment diary; it was an awful lot of work to learn when he went to the cinema and the time of his dental appointment.
Yet other times you hit paydirt. The same project saw me interview William Shelton, who had been the Thatcher team’s Keeper of Names. Shortly into the meeting, he said, rather casually, “perhaps this would be helpful?”, and handed over a small cardboard file. In it were the original records that the Thatcher campaign team had kept in 1975, listing every Tory MP along with notes on how they had believed they were intending to vote. “Let me have it back when you’ve finished with it,” he said. My only goal in what was left of the interview was to exit as quickly as possible before he changed his mind – but not so quickly as to appear rude.
And one of my biggest breaks came in 2001, when Tony Blair reshuffled the government Whips’ Office, and moved Keith Hill, the MP for Streatham, to be deputy chief whip. (When a voter complained to him that Streatham had gone downhill, he is said to have replied: “Why else do you think you’ve got a Labour MP?”) Previous attempts to speak to the Whips’ Office had failed almost entirely. The chief whip for much of the first Blair term, Ann Taylor, had been very firmly of the No Good Will Come of This school of thought when it came to academic research, and approaches to her produced responses that, while perfectly polite in form, had in content amounted to being firmly told where to go.
In a former life, Hill had briefly been an academic – he would joke that he knew more about segmented pluralism than anyone else in the Commons – and at least understood what I was trying to do. He persuaded Taylor’s successor as chief whip, Hilary Armstrong, that I was (like the description of Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) ‘mostly harmless’, although it was clear from the way she looked at me that she was never 100 per cent convinced. Contact with the Labour whips then became easier, and after that – once it was clear one side was talking to me – contact with the Conservative whips opened up too.
So, this column is mostly about luck, without which none of us get very far. But both those last two are also examples of very much-appreciated kindness, which also goes a long way.
Further reading: John Wilson, CB: A life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1973). The letter can be found in the National Library of Scotland archive (Acc.10153)
