CONVICTIONS AND PARADOXES

Press, 26 May 1979, Page 17

CONVICTIONS AND PARADOXES

Longford: A Biographical Portrait. By Mary Craig. Hodder and Stoughton. Illustrated. 220 pp. $13.65. (Reviewed by Donald Bain) In her biographical portrait of Francis Aungier Packenham, 7th Earl oi Longford, Mary Craig makes acknowledgement to some 80 people who helped her in research, information, preparation and editing of her book. “Most of all,” she adds, special thanks are due “to Lord Longford himself for his tolerance and absolute refusal to interfere.” If Frank Packenham were not “first and foremost a man of principle” he undoubtedly would have been less amenable to revealing biographical details, less accepting of the facts and opinions written about him and more inclined to take a blue pencil to many critical analyses which appear in the text. But clearly he is just what this picture shows him to be: an honest man of firm principle and courageous dedication arising from deep religious dedication; a man whose simple faith in his own convictions allows him to absorb the most candid assessment of his successes and failures. Perhaps, as Mary Craig’s book implies, he is quite out of place in today’s society — a paradoxical man in a paradoxical world; yet maybe not so out of place, but strangely personifying, in his own characteristics, our mixed-up modern social order. Britain is famous, or notorious, dependent on the point of view, as a nation of contradictions. Its aristocratic traditions have survived shattering political and social changes affecting personalities, institutions and national status. British influence for good in the world, based as it has been so much on the privilege of aristocracy, has presented a mighty problem of reconciliation with the hopes of subject peoples for independence. The problem has perplexed many historians, sociologists and statesmen. For Lord Longford the problem of the privileged and the under-privileged

has been a ghost haunting his consciousness all his life. He was born into class and wealth, a Tory if ever there was one, enjoying the extravagances of irrepressible youth and earning at Oxford the extremes of a first class honours degree and the opprobrium of a socialist contemporary for his “arrogance of the privileged.” Certainly Frank Packenham was a young man of eccentricity and contradictions ■ — at home, at Eton and at Oxford. He lectured for the W.E.A. in Oxford while a research worker for Neville Chamberlain’s Conservative Party. He proposed to his fiancee in a railway station waiting-room and was married in St Margaret’s, Westminster. Anglo-Irish, he was described by many Irishmen as one of the “horse-Protestants” until, under the spell of de Valera, he became a supporter of what he termed the “misunderstood Irish minority.” As a result he broke with the Tories and resigned his research job. He attended, out of curiosity but still as a Conservative, Oswald Mosley’s notorious 1936 political meeting at Oxford, got involved in the fracas, was beaten up, and as a direct reaction joined the Labour Party. “Short of a change of sex,” he later wrote, “my life could hardly have been altered more radically.” He joined the Army at the outbreak of World War II and was again a misfit, nervously and physically, was invalided out and went into the Home Guard. His political life began with a failure to be elected to the Commons and with Atlee’s creating him a life peer with a seat in the House of Lords, where he immediately felt at home and became Government spokesman on a variety of policy issues. What a complexity of traumatic experiences is pooled in Mrs Craig’s chapters — each of them an adventure on its own. From Conservatism to Socialism, from Protestantism to Catholicism, from bachelorhood to marriage, from defeat as a Labour

candidate for the House of Commons to leadership of the House of Lords; from fisticuffs at a Mosley meeting to Knight of the Garter; from bank chairman to friend of the toughest criminals; labelled as a snob among malefactors, but consistently a supporter of the oppressed. His has been a mixed-up personality and one cannot escape the conclusion which this most interesting biography reaches, that he has been a fish out of water throughout his life — as a rebellious member of an aristocratic family and class, as a Labour peer and politician doubtless used by his party as a buffer with the Conservatives, and as an enigma to himself. “I am the man who almost

succeeded but didn’t quite,” he said of himself, but Mary Craig, in analysing her subject, has* herself stopped short of conjecture about what he might have been. When Lord Longford resigned office in the Labour Cabinet he was only 62, still lively in intellect and obssessed with finding work where he could be of help to his fellowmen.

That he should turn to befriend youthful and adult delinquents with particular emphasis On young drifters, and to the castigation of pornography, seems to fit snugly into innermost recesses of his mind. That at the same time he should enter the field as a successful chairman of a publishing firm is in no way out of character with this extraordinarily complex figure. All in all, Mary Craig has produced here one of the most interesting books recently off the press. She has written of a man of aspirations and ambition, yet one also who has humbled himself almost to the point of being ludicrous in a passionate espousement of somewhat lost causes. Along the line of his record the reader becomes aware that here is man who has never quite known where his talents whould have taken him, but who could have been a brilliant academic don or a business leader had he chosen to eschew politics and puritanism.