Schizophrenia was crucial to Margaret Thatcher's political genius. At moments she could seem suffocatingly conventional, as if she were the perpetual president of a Tory suburban ladies' committee. Yet she was also in the grip of an endless dissatisfaction. As Lord McAlpine says, her lament was that "Every day (as PM) you are faced with a number of options, none of which is truly acceptable to you." In order to widen these options, she would behave like Christ in search of disciples, summoning the most unlikely candidates in the hope that they could help her to transform British politics. None was unlikelier than the author of these memoirs.
Alistair McAlpine has some qualities. He is a generous host and an amusing companion. He has a magpie's interest in the arts. His love of eccentricity and colour occasionally led him to connoisseurship, as in his patronage of Sydney Nolan. But he had no interest in building a serious collection; his current obsessions are "ties, marble beads and political badges." Nor does he evince any interest in great art. He does, however, describe a distressing number of occasions on which objets d'art in his care were damaged, smashed or burnt. This is his abiding contribution to the art world in which he has spent much of his life.
Much of this book is a meander through galleries and wine tastings; it reads like an ill-edited review section in a weekend newspaper. But despite the flat prose and the illiteracies it must have undergone considerable sub-editing, as anyone who has read McAlpine's journalistic copy in its original form will testify. Without the politics, this book would have been unpublishable. That said, it is the politics that make it truly worthless.
Until 1975, McAlpine had shown little interest in politics. He was a friend of Marcia Falkender; when she heard that he was going to work for the Tories, she told him that if she and Harold Wilson had known that he was looking for a job, they would have offered him one. Thatcher seems to have taken little notice of his views; she merely told him to get rid of his Mercedes and to take his hands out of his pockets. His job was, of course, to put his hands in other people's pockets. She sent him to central office to raise money.
It is hard to judge how successful he was in doing that. For much of the time, the money did pour in; then again, for most of the late 1970s and 1980s it was as difficult to persuade businessmen to fund the Tory party as it was to sell cold beer in the outback. Most of the party chairmen with whom McAlpine worked did not share his own exalted assessment of his role. Underneath the geniality there was an insatiable ego. If it was not constantly massaged, there would be trouble. He always insisted on maintaining his own links to Thatcher; he frequently used them to add to the stress between 10 Downing Street and Tory HQ.
McAlpine fell out with Lord Thorneycroft, his original patron. He never tried to co-operate with John Gummer; his relations with Norman Tebbit, Peter Brooke and Kenneth Baker all went through bad patches. The only chairman with whom there were no major strains was Cecil Parkinson, but his chairmanship was one of the smoothest passages in recent Tory history.
By the late 1980s, there was no more smoothness; it was hard to raise money. By 1990, Thatcher was in serious difficulty. So our author displayed the loyalty on which he prides himself towards the heroine he extols, and who ennobled him-by abandoning her. Chris Patten became Tory party chairman. He quickly gave his verdict on the McAlpine treasureship: "If Alistair was such a wonderful fundraiser, why have I inherited a deficit of ?10m?"
McAlpine has no grasp of political detail; whether he is describing events or personalities, his narrative is a blend of inaccuracy and caricature. The timing of the book's publication will certainly damage the Tory party, as if it was one of the Roman vases whose disintegration he records so insouciantly. He may discover that political parties are not as fragile as antique silver.
His bitterness has a motive. In 1990, his family businesses had heavy borrowings. Then came the recession, with higher interest rates and lower sales. He claims to have warned Thatcher in September 1990 of the dangers of recession; she replied, apparently, that she had joined the ERM in order to secure lower interest rates.
He recounts conversations with Norman Lamont, in which Lamont comes across as impatient and dismissive. No doubt he was, and with good reason. Throughout the early years of the recession, McAlpine was urging the government to cut interest rates and to acquiesce in inflation. The consequence of that would have been to confiscate small investors' savings, while his own liabilities were diminished, via inflation.
John Major would have regarded such a policy as utterly immoral. So would Margaret Thatcher. In distancing himself from Major, McAlpine is also exploding his own pretensions to be a Thatcherite.
A propos of immorality, our author admits that he became estranged from his father, as he was subsequently to be estranged from his elder daughters. He has three grandchildren, whom he has not only never met; he was not even informed of their arrival. When those closest to him come up with that assessment of his worth, why should anyone else disagree?
Once a jolly bagman
Alistair McAlpine
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1997, ?20
