Wavid
9th Jul 2004, 11:49
Relatively interesting article from The Guardian today:
Modern politicians don't read. Tony Blair may claim Ivanhoe as his favourite book, but he is clearly a John Grisham man. His bibliophilic reputation is unlikely ever to recover from the tale of him meeting Ian McEwan at a party and telling him he had several of his works hanging on the walls of Number 10. Margaret Thatcher said she liked to "re-read" Frederick Forsyth novels on holiday. William Hague had a weedy fondness for The Wind in the Willows. John Major predictably liked Trollope. Oh, for the days of Gladstone's classical scholarship and Disraeli's novelistic nous.
But suddenly there is hope. Gordon Brown, Britain's prime minister-in-waiting, this week delivered a lecture which suggests that he will soon need a larger red box - to accommodate all the texts he is apparently devouring. The list of citations in his British Council lecture on national identity was formidable - Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837; Adam Nicholson's God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible; Norman Davies's The Isles: A History; Andrew Marr's The Day Britain Died; Bernard Crick's biography of George Orwell. He may have got the title of Marr's book wrong and given rather sketchy details of the others, but if this were a university essay it would surely merit an alpha.
Brown evidently reads every commentator - ancient (Henry Grattan, Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold) and modern (David Goodhart, Herman Ouseley, Neil Ascherson, Tom Nairn, David Cannadine, Simon Heffer, Ferdinand Mount, Melanie Phillips, Jonathan Sacks). He even quotes Montesquieu - and you have to do more than read Prospect for that. There should surely be an award for moulding the views of this unlikely collection (Tom, meet Melanie ...) into a coherent argument, even if the nub of it does appear to be that Britain's past is glorious and its future (under Labour) will be even more glorious.
So how does he do it? This is a man with a newish wife, a small child, a passion for football and a feud to conduct, not to mention the world's fourth largest economy to run. He even writes books - a biography of radical Labour MP James Maxton and a series of essays on his other heroes, due to be published next year. Blair's dodgy guitar-playing just can't compete.
It is tempting to wonder whether Brown got some help with his richly sourced musings from a nerdy special adviser. It is after all not unknown for politicians to "sign off" the work of their underlings, and the prose has that by-the-yard New Labour feel to it ("In a growingly more insecure world, people feel a need to be rooted and they draw strength from shared purpose"). But the Treasury insists that every syllable is the chancellor's. "Gordon reads widely and has read every book and article referred to," says a spokesman. "He always spends his weekends and his holidays reading. He's been thinking about this issue for years and has been hard at work on the lecture for weeks. He has discussed it with colleagues and consulted some of the people he cites."
More dispassionate observers bear out Brown's bookishness. "If Gordon hadn't been a politician, he would have been a writer," says one close friend. Paul Routledge, who wrote a biography of Brown, described his bachelor flat as a shambolic library with a sofa in it, and marriage doesn't appear to have changed his habits. One Brown-watcher who has visited his home in Scotland says the bins in the drive were overflowing with the discarded cardboard wrappers used by book delivery companies, many of them with US postmarks.
"Gordon's a voracious reader," says one journalist who knows him well. "I haven't been in his bedroom, but I know someone who has and there are large piles of books on his and Sarah's bedside tables. It's not all heavy stuff either: he really does read big books like Norman Davies's The Isles and Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles, but he loves Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus books too." "When he goes on holiday, he always takes suitcases full of books," says another associate. "Then he buys a whole load more when he's away. He speed-reads them."
Brown adores bookshops. In 1997, a fly-on-the-wall documentary showed him vacuuming the shelves of an airport bookshop (who is checking the Treasury bills?), and when in Washington he spends a good deal of time at the Georgetown branch of Barnes & Noble. At one IMF meeting, he slipped out to spend an hour at the store and became immersed in a book tracing the links between the Bundesbank and the Nazis in the 1930s. Looking up, he was surprised to find the current head of the Bundesbank peering querulously over his shoulder.
Michael White, the Guardian's political editor, recalls a discussion he had with Brown a few years ago during which Linda Colley's book cropped up. White said he had never read it. Brown said he had two copies and would send him one. White assumed that was the last he would hear of it, but a few days later the book arrived with a Treasury compliments slip tucked inside. "Brown reads proper books," says White. "He is a man of parts and was intellectually precocious - he went to university at 17 and was a national figure in Scotland by the age of 19. He is also a shy and private man, in many ways more at ease with books than with people."
As recently as the 1960s, Britain had bookish politicians - Harold Wilson had been a don at Oxford and his "ministry of all the talents" (Jenkins, Crosland, Crossman, Benn) had a whiff of the senior common room about it. It was Thatcher and Norman Tebbit who outlawed intellectuals (along with beards) and Blair's unthinking espousal of Cool Britannia compounded the trend. Now, perhaps, bookishness is on the way back. Beards, however, may have to wait a little longer.
I can't say I have ever thought of it before, but it does fill me with horror that the leaders of our country are so ill-informed literature wise.
And at least amner can say he shares something with William Hague now :wink:
Modern politicians don't read. Tony Blair may claim Ivanhoe as his favourite book, but he is clearly a John Grisham man. His bibliophilic reputation is unlikely ever to recover from the tale of him meeting Ian McEwan at a party and telling him he had several of his works hanging on the walls of Number 10. Margaret Thatcher said she liked to "re-read" Frederick Forsyth novels on holiday. William Hague had a weedy fondness for The Wind in the Willows. John Major predictably liked Trollope. Oh, for the days of Gladstone's classical scholarship and Disraeli's novelistic nous.
But suddenly there is hope. Gordon Brown, Britain's prime minister-in-waiting, this week delivered a lecture which suggests that he will soon need a larger red box - to accommodate all the texts he is apparently devouring. The list of citations in his British Council lecture on national identity was formidable - Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837; Adam Nicholson's God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible; Norman Davies's The Isles: A History; Andrew Marr's The Day Britain Died; Bernard Crick's biography of George Orwell. He may have got the title of Marr's book wrong and given rather sketchy details of the others, but if this were a university essay it would surely merit an alpha.
Brown evidently reads every commentator - ancient (Henry Grattan, Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold) and modern (David Goodhart, Herman Ouseley, Neil Ascherson, Tom Nairn, David Cannadine, Simon Heffer, Ferdinand Mount, Melanie Phillips, Jonathan Sacks). He even quotes Montesquieu - and you have to do more than read Prospect for that. There should surely be an award for moulding the views of this unlikely collection (Tom, meet Melanie ...) into a coherent argument, even if the nub of it does appear to be that Britain's past is glorious and its future (under Labour) will be even more glorious.
So how does he do it? This is a man with a newish wife, a small child, a passion for football and a feud to conduct, not to mention the world's fourth largest economy to run. He even writes books - a biography of radical Labour MP James Maxton and a series of essays on his other heroes, due to be published next year. Blair's dodgy guitar-playing just can't compete.
It is tempting to wonder whether Brown got some help with his richly sourced musings from a nerdy special adviser. It is after all not unknown for politicians to "sign off" the work of their underlings, and the prose has that by-the-yard New Labour feel to it ("In a growingly more insecure world, people feel a need to be rooted and they draw strength from shared purpose"). But the Treasury insists that every syllable is the chancellor's. "Gordon reads widely and has read every book and article referred to," says a spokesman. "He always spends his weekends and his holidays reading. He's been thinking about this issue for years and has been hard at work on the lecture for weeks. He has discussed it with colleagues and consulted some of the people he cites."
More dispassionate observers bear out Brown's bookishness. "If Gordon hadn't been a politician, he would have been a writer," says one close friend. Paul Routledge, who wrote a biography of Brown, described his bachelor flat as a shambolic library with a sofa in it, and marriage doesn't appear to have changed his habits. One Brown-watcher who has visited his home in Scotland says the bins in the drive were overflowing with the discarded cardboard wrappers used by book delivery companies, many of them with US postmarks.
"Gordon's a voracious reader," says one journalist who knows him well. "I haven't been in his bedroom, but I know someone who has and there are large piles of books on his and Sarah's bedside tables. It's not all heavy stuff either: he really does read big books like Norman Davies's The Isles and Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles, but he loves Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus books too." "When he goes on holiday, he always takes suitcases full of books," says another associate. "Then he buys a whole load more when he's away. He speed-reads them."
Brown adores bookshops. In 1997, a fly-on-the-wall documentary showed him vacuuming the shelves of an airport bookshop (who is checking the Treasury bills?), and when in Washington he spends a good deal of time at the Georgetown branch of Barnes & Noble. At one IMF meeting, he slipped out to spend an hour at the store and became immersed in a book tracing the links between the Bundesbank and the Nazis in the 1930s. Looking up, he was surprised to find the current head of the Bundesbank peering querulously over his shoulder.
Michael White, the Guardian's political editor, recalls a discussion he had with Brown a few years ago during which Linda Colley's book cropped up. White said he had never read it. Brown said he had two copies and would send him one. White assumed that was the last he would hear of it, but a few days later the book arrived with a Treasury compliments slip tucked inside. "Brown reads proper books," says White. "He is a man of parts and was intellectually precocious - he went to university at 17 and was a national figure in Scotland by the age of 19. He is also a shy and private man, in many ways more at ease with books than with people."
As recently as the 1960s, Britain had bookish politicians - Harold Wilson had been a don at Oxford and his "ministry of all the talents" (Jenkins, Crosland, Crossman, Benn) had a whiff of the senior common room about it. It was Thatcher and Norman Tebbit who outlawed intellectuals (along with beards) and Blair's unthinking espousal of Cool Britannia compounded the trend. Now, perhaps, bookishness is on the way back. Beards, however, may have to wait a little longer.
I can't say I have ever thought of it before, but it does fill me with horror that the leaders of our country are so ill-informed literature wise.
And at least amner can say he shares something with William Hague now :wink: