Alan Watkins

Frank Johnson, the finest and funniest parliamentary sketch-writer of his generation died, too young, in late 2006. His widow, Virginia Fraser, has now compiled and edited a selection of his writings. It is mostly about domestic politics as seen from his seat in the press gallery of the House of Commons, interspersed with expeditions to by-elections and general elections. There are also pieces on his early life in Shoreditch, his lifelong enthusiasms — opera, ballet, warfare, diplomacy — and at the end of his life, his newly acquired house near Montpellier. In a work of this kind it is a temptation to review the man and not the book. I shall not resist it altogether. However, it is worth trying to recapture something of Frank’s style by means of quotation.

Bernard Donoughue has produced several valuable books, one of them a biography of Herbert Morrison (written with George Jones) and another an account of No. 10 under the Labour governments of the 1970s, which contains the often quoted, though rarely acknowledged, observation of James Callaghan just before the 1970 election, to the effect that there was a tide in politics which prime ministers were powerless to resist. Lord Donoughue’s Downing Street diaries came later. The first volume, on his days as a ‘special adviser’ to Harold Wilson, was dominated not so much by Wilson as by Marcia Williams, Lady Falkender. Indeed, ‘Marcia’s Tantrums’ would have served as a catchier subtitle than ‘With Harold Wilson in No. 10’.

One of the chief characteristics of New Labour, Blairism or the Project — they amount to the same phenomenon — is that many of the cheer-leaders began their careers not just on the far left of the Labour Party but so far to the left as to be outside the party completely. Peter Mandelson and John Reid belonged to the latter group; Charles Clarke, Patricia Hewitt and Jack Straw to the former. They then went on to serve Neil Kinnock with varying degrees of devotion. By and large, they had an unhappy time under John Smith, who tended to prefer old-fashioned Croslandite revisionists. But they return- ed to prosper under Tony Blair, whose most forceful critics were themselves in- clined to be old revisionists such as Roy Hattersley.

It was 1971, at the Dudley Hotel, Hove, late at night during a Tory conference, and Sir (as he then wasn't) Max Hastings and I were discussing editorship. He was then working for the BBC. Specifically, we were talking about the editorship of the New Statesman. There was discontent there about the tenure of R. H. S. Crossman. It was felt he could not last much longer (he was to depart next year). Max thought Anthony Howard would be an excellent successor, as, indeed, he turned out to be. For himself, he was uninterested in such baubles. 'What I really like doing,' he said - I remember his words exactly - 'is sleeping under an Israeli tank, looking up at the stars.' This did not seem to me to be the ideal way to spend the night but I refrained from saying so, as it must have been obvious.