The Oliver Observations

[Executive Summary: Pretty bad]

One of my colleagues asked me last week if I had anything planned for the Easter weekend.

‘Well’ I replied ‘BBC Parliament are showing a re-run of the 1983 General Election on Monday, so that’s one day sorted.’

She laughed. But I wasn’t joking.

*
The recent habit of BBC Parliament has adopted of reshowing ‘classic’ election night programmes on bank holidays is I think a master stroke, guaranteeing them small but select audience of politics and history devotees who draw the curtains and devour them with delight.

I’ll certainly be watching the 9th, June 1983 election, thirty years ago this year. My only sadness is that other engagements may keep me from watching the full 10am-9pm programme, though of course I’ll keep checking in to see if Michael Foot becomes Prime Minister.

In honour of the occasion I’ve written a post only slightly shorter than Labour’s 1983 manifesto.

Some general elections were such pivotal events that they succeed in seeping into the collective folk memory and national consciousness.
Ken Loach’s new film, Spirit of ’45, about Labour’s great victory which swept in the transformative Attlee Government and ensured the foundation of a comprehensive Welfare State would be a leading example. (Though Steven Fielding, Professor of Political History at the University of Nottingham suggests in The Guardian the film could be more accurately titled Myth of ’45.)

To a lesser extent, the 1979 election which brought Margaret Thatcher to power, is still popularly (or unpopularly) remembered, perhaps as much for the atmosphere of crisis in the ‘Winter of Discontent’ preceding it, and broadcast images of rubbish piling up in the streets, than for the election campaign itself.

*
Other elections are primarily remembered only by those particularly involved and interested in politics – the sort of minority of people who can, without checking, reel off the years in which General Elections took place (1931, 1935, 1945, 1950, 1951, 1955, 1959, 1964, 1966, 1970, 1974 (twice), 1979, 1983, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2010…) as others remember World Cup winners. [Apparently people do this for reasons other than their alleged impact on election results, as in 1966 and 1970.]

These elections all have their own distinct ‘flavour’ and defining images, forming a shared currency amongst political obsessives and anoraks.
As the Labour politician (and of course Honorary Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield) Roy Hattersley noted ‘Election campaigns all have distinct characteristics. For Labour, 1983 was ludicrous, and 1987 desperate. At least 1979 was only dismal.’

The 1983 General Election has a particular place in Labour Party folklore as the party’s most traumatic defeat, and rock-bottom low point, in modern times. The political memoirs and bar room tales of Labour veterans often still seem to vie with each other to describe just how terrible the result was, and how agonisingly inept Labour’s campaign.

The Guardian’s Political Editor Michael White gives a good overview of the campaign here.

More comprehensively, the great documentary ‘Labour; The Wilderness Years’, broadcast in 1995 and covering the party’s then 16 years in opposition, is well worth watching for anyone interested in Labour History.

For those like myself, used to political events being ruthlessly stage managed (with differing degrees of success), the scenes of Labour’s campaign have to be seen to be believed.
Watching this section, you don’t so much question why Labour lost but wonder at how the party managed to win any seats at all.

Labour’s 1983 manifesto has also become the stuff of political legend, being a hugely lengthy compilation of all the party’s diverse and divided policies. As recounted in the above video, no real attempt was made to summarise the document, or make it reader-friendly. Rather, all the policy pronouncements were lumped together, so as to avoid bitter disputes about what to include and what to leave out.

As Roy Hattersley relates, those on the right-wing of the party, such as John Golding (political fixer extraordinaire who called his book about the period Hammer of the Left) knew they didn’t have the votes internally to pass more moderate policies, so decided not to even bother; The manifesto should be as uncompromisingly left-wing as possible, to give left-wingers like Tony Benn ‘enough rope to hang themselves’ so they could then be blamed for the inevitable massive electoral defeat.

Gerald Kaufmann, then Labour’s Shadow Environment Minister (and incidentally the one member of Michael Foot’s Shadow Cabinet still in the House of Commons today), famously called his party’s manifesto ‘the longest suicide-note in history’, a description which unhelpfully become common currency even during the campaign. (As Roy Hattersley remarked to be fair ‘it only seemed interminable’.)

Interviewed in The Wilderness Years Kaufmann was even more forthright;

‘The problem with the document was it was a stupid document. It contained a number of extremist things. It contained also utter nonsenses! During the course of the compilation we only narrowly staved off a proposal that we should have a socialist policy for puppy farms.’

The published version did include sections, on issues which were undoubtedly important but far from voters’ most pressing concerns, such as ‘The Laws of the Sea’.

As Tony Blair, first elected as a Labour MP in 1983, commented ‘I had no doubt at all it would lose us the election. I won my seat in spite of our programme, not because of it.’
*
Labour’s campaign itself was often as Roy Hattersley, then Shadow Home Secretary, put it ‘ludicrous’.

As Hattersley recalls in his memoirs Who Goes Home?;

“New ground was broken on almost every day of the campaign…The campaign committee raised doubts about Michael’s capacity to lead the Party by passing a resolution confirming its confidence in his leadership qualities – thus giving a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘shooting yourself in the Foot’.
Leader and Deputy Leader [Michael Foot and Denis Healey] confirmed allegations that they disagreed about defence policy by issuing a joint statement which set out their two conflicting positions.

…I was prepared for public disputes about doctrine. But the small inefficiencies were too much to bear. One day, when I spoke at a Transport House press conference about crime, the visual aids were left in the Labour Party’s Walworth Road headquarters. On the following morning, I chaired a press conference on education. The visual aids arrived, but all the lettering slid off the pictures just as the television cameras focused on the graphs of Tory failure.
I telephoned Michael and told him that there was no reason why our sign writing should be as incompetent as our policy formation.”

As The Wilderness Years shows, Michael Foot, then in his 70th year and looking frail and unwell [though he would in fact happily go on to live another 27 years], selflessly embarked on ‘An arduous and poorly organised speaking tour of the country’.

Labour Deputy Leader and Shadow Foreign Secretary, Denis Healey’s memoirs The Time of My Life make clear that the 1983 election certainly wasn’t:

‘Our election campaign was worse organised than any I have ever known…
Michael Foot and I were given ridiculously heavy programmes, and were foolish event to accept them without protest. For almost four weeks we would start the morning at seven, with a meeting of our Campaign Committee in London, followed by a press conference which relieved lazy journalists of the need to follow us around. Then we would leave London for a series of meetings and walkabouts all over the country from ten in the morning until ten at night, returning to London after midnight for a few hours’ sleep before the next day began.

Many of our meetings were a complete waste of time; on one housing estate in the Midlands I was made to visit three old people’s homes in succession, on the grounds that if I visited only one, jealously from the others would cost us votes…
Michael was almost literally thrown to the wolves; the television cameras showed him being torn limb from limb by a pack of hounds at a demonstration in favour of blood sports.

…We lost eight points, or a quarter of our support, during the campaign itself. A modern election is fought essentially on television. Only one voter out of a hundred ever attends an election meeting, and he or she is nearly always already committed to one party or the other. Michael Foot and I never had the slighted idea what was happening in the campaign which mattered, on television; we were speaking every night at public meetings of people whose minds were already made up. We did not monitor our opponents’ activists; they never missed the smallest details of ours. And they were able to orchestrate the bulk of the press to make on concerted attack on one particular theme each day.”

As Tim Bell, who worked on the Conservative’s advertising campaign recalls his abiding memory was being told to cancel all advertising for the last four days of the campaign, given the Tories were so far ahead there was no point wasting money.

John O’Farrell’s book Things Can Only Get Better has become a bit of holy text within the Labour Party, treasured for its hilarious accounts of the often sheer grimness of political activism. His description of disasters of the 1983 election is no exception;

“In 1983 the United States of America went to war against the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. This, however, was a far more equal battle than the British general election of the same year.
It was said that the Labour campaign started badly and then fell away, but this is being generous. It was the worst campaign in electoral history and it hurt to watch it.

There are various things that can lose a party votes in elections. You might have a leader that doesn’t look like prime ministerial material, you might have a manifesto that alienates many of the electorate, you might have a hostile media, you might appear hopelessly divided as a political party, or your campaign might be poorly organised and unfocused. Or like Labour in 1983 you might manage all of the above.”

The Labour Party did at least have one ‘secret weapon’ – the battle bus;

“This was an open topped double-decker bus, which toured marginal constituencies helping make them into Conservative strongholds. Its route was carefully planned to take it as many tree-lined avenues as possible so that overhanging branches could whiplash across the top of the bus knocking members of the Shadow Cabinet to the deck. The evening news would feature Margaret Thatcher being presented with flowers by rosy-cheeked school children, all waving Union jacks and cheering. Then it would cut to Labour’s campaign and we’d see Jill Foot getting back to her feet and picking a bird’s nest out of her hair with the tannoy booming ‘Vote Labour – for an end to NHS queues’, as the injured headed down to the nearest casualty department to make them even longer.”

The pictures of the battle bus in The Wilderness Years show John O’Farrell was barely exaggerating.

But surely these accounts must be slightly over the top. Was the election really that bad for Labour?

Well, yes.

As the results show Labour actually gained 4 seats, the only problem was that they lost 55 more.
Combined with some seats disappearing in a boundary review, Labour actually ended up with 60 seats less than the 269 won at the previous election in 1979 – itself at the time seen as a low point.

Labour wasn’t helped by the fact in several of these seats, the sitting Labour MPs had left the party to join the break-away Social Democratic Party, founded primarily because the Labour Party was felt to have become too irredeemably left-wing. [Again, a completely different world for those of us who grew up in the Blair years.]
These MPs proceeded to defend their seats for the SDP, in almost all cases, succeeding only in splitting the opposition vote and leading to more conservative gains.

Labour actually came third, or worse, in 292 out of 650 constituencies – a pretty abysmal result for a party hoping to form a Government.

Indeed, one measure of how far from power Labour were, is that of the Michael Foot’s 1983 Shadow Cabinet only one member ever reached the actual Cabinet – Shadow Attorney General John Morris, who would, a mere fourteen years later, get to be the real Attorney General under Tony Blair.

Indeed, another seven members of the twenty-seven Shadow Cabinet were sadly dead by the time Labour finally returned to power.*

The one thing the Labour leadership could console themselves with in 1983 was that the result wasn’t even worse; the party at least managed to retain the status of Official Opposition and the hope of someday returning to power.

As Jack Straw, then a young Labour MP and junior Treasury spokesman, stated confidently ‘Had that election gone on another week we would have come third. There is no doubt about it. Our votes were dissolving like snow in the sunshine.’

Jack Straw’s own Blackburn seat was also one of the few bright, or at least slightly less gloomy, spots of the night – having been one Labour had expected to lose. Straw clung on, with a swing to Labour ‘thanks to the work of scores of people in the Blackburn Labour Party, and no thanks to those who’d drafted our manifesto, nor to those who’d defected to the SDP in the hope of destroying us.’
Straw cheerfully notes that during the campaign ‘We came to the conclusion that the most we could hope for was Labour’s survival’.

As well as Blackburn and other seats that Labour managed to hold by much more slender margins, the Party saw several new, young MPs elected for the first time.

Many of them were on the left of the Party, including a handful of Militant tendency supporters who would cause an added headache for the leadership over the coming years. As Tony Benn noted in his Diary amidst the devastation, including his own defeat in Bristol, “But there are a lot of good new Members now in – Tony Banks, Richard Caborn [These first two going on to eventually serve as Ministers in the Blair Government] Bob Clay, Frank Cook, Jeremy Corbyn, Terry Fields, Bill Michie, Dave Nellist, Bob Wareing.”

There were also other rising stars – including most prominently two future Prime Ministers; Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Future Liberal Democrat leaders Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy, then standing as a Liberal and a Social Democrat respectively, were also first elected in 1983. [Ashdown later boasting that his seizing the formerly safe Tory seat of Yeovil was the one moment of the night when Margaret Thatcher later confessed she worried things might not go to plan.]

With new Conservative MP Michael Howard later going on to serve as Tory leader 20 years later, the 1983 intake of MPs produced perhaps the highest number of future leaders at any election.**

Speaking of future leaders, in Labour party folklore, as The Wilderness Years shows, the 1983 election was also the making of another future leader, Neil Kinnock.

Effectively giving up on the national campaign, Kinnock ‘got myself behind a wheel of the car and went rampaging round the country’, including delivering his famously psalm-like eve of poll warning about life under Thatcher, which many believed turned his succeeding Michael Foot as leader from a likelihood into a certainty.

When I saw him speak recently, Neil Kinnock reminisced that ‘I was very lucky in that I had a constituency party made up of people with good sense. When I arrived there to campaign they said ‘We’ve got a 20,000 majority. What the hell are you doing here? Get out round the country and go and go and kill some Tories (..metaphorically speaking of course)’.

Martin Westlake, in his doorstopper of a biography of Neil Kinnock, has a section simply titled ‘Disaster’ on the 1983 election, but concludes that ‘amidst the wreckage Kinnock had a good war’.

Westlake describes how 1983 for Kinnock ‘quickly came to represent a baseline against which all future campaigns would be judged.’
On making his first speech as leader, Neil Kinnock, told the Labour Conference ‘Remember how each and every one of you felt on that dreadful morning of 10th June and think to yourselves ‘9th June 1983 – never, ever again will we experience that!”

Labour’s long, painful march back to power had begun. It would only two more such dreadful mornings, in 1987 and 1992, before the youngest Labour MP elected in 1983, Tony Blair, would enter Downing Street.

The four years until the anniversary when BBC Parliament will surely reshow the 1997 General Election programme seems a short time to wait in comparison.

____

*[Afraid, I did actually look this up – they were Brynmor John, John Silkin, John Smith, Norman Buchan, Guy Barnett, Eric Heffer, and Lord Ponsonby. A further two Shadow Cabinet Members, Alec Jones and Frank McElhone, had actually died before the 1983 General election.
In addition to John Morris, Gerald Kaufmann and the late Gwyneth Dunwoody were the only members of the 1983 Shadow Cabinet still in the Commons by the time of Labour’s 1997 victory.]

** [I haven’t looked this up, but thinking about it the 1945 Election must come close, with every Labour leader between 1955-83, Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and Michael Foot first being elected then.]

Written by oliverobserves

April 1, 2013 at 12:52 pm

Promoting Portillo and his painful puns

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I’m always been vaguely intrigued by the political journey of politician, turned ubiquitous TV talking head, Michael Portillo.

Back in the distant mid-90s past he was an uber-Thatcherite Cabinet Minister, in which capacity he appears in Gyles Brandreth’s entertaining and gossip-drenched political diaries as the coiffured-haired crown prince of the Tory Right.

Following his shock loss of his seat, which defined the 1997 election as entered the political election as the original ‘Portillo moment’, he re-emerged as a Conservative moderniser, before seeming to lose his appetite for politics, after the further humiliation of being denied the Conservative leadership by Iain Duncan-Smith (which has gotta hurt).
Apparently Portillo had become so disillusioned by the final round of the 2001 leadership election he didn’t even vote for himself. He was knocked out by a single vote.

I think, for devotees of political counterfactuals, it’s arguable that had he taken a role on the front-bench, and been willing to do some of the donkey work of opposition he could have made yet another come back. He would have been a good position to take over the leadership when Iain Duncan-Smith imploded in 2003, or indeed to have been the modernisers’ candidate rather than David Cameron in 2005. Instead he withdrew from front-line politics, becoming one more of those former future Prime Ministers, who somehow missed the political train.

I also enjoy his more prosaic journeys around Britain for the TV series Great British Railway Journeys which is a winning mix of genuinely fascinating information, and wonderfully awkward moments as Portillo attempts to engage fellow commuters in conversation.

There’s something very British and Betjemanesque about his ambling about provincial towns, usually sporting some shade of burgundy or lilac, cheerfully repeating his opening gambit ‘I’m travelling around using a nineteenth century guidebook!’ to politely baffled locals.

But the show wouldn’t be what it is without Portillo’s biting wit and dazzling way with words. I was reminded of all this, apropos of nothing, on seeing that Youtube oddities connoisseur, Jon Harvey, has compiled a tribute to his best (worst) puns, which fellow fans of the show might enjoy:

I particularly like how he carefully emphasises each joke, perhaps to signal he hasn’t lost his train of thought or become side-tracked.

It’s good to see he hasn’t run out of steam.

Written by oliverobserves

March 19, 2013 at 11:17 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with apropos of nothing, former future prime ministers, Great British Railway Journeys, Michael Portillo, puns, railway puns, terrible puns, train puns

Not his finest hour: Winston Churchill and a free press?

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To the dismay of some of my friends, I’m unashamedly an enormous admirer of Winston Churchill.

Unlike Britain in 1940, I know I don’t stand alone in this, and it’s hardly an original enthusiasm. You could easily fill a library with books glorifying ‘the Greatest Briton’ – only a dozen or so of them written by Churchill himself.

A major part of the man’s appeal is of course his stirring quotations and how, in the words of Edward Murrow [or Beverley Nichols depending on which attribution of the quotation made famous by President Kennedy we favour], ‘he mobilised the English language and sent it into battle’.
In short, I like a good Churchill quote as much as anyone.

However I did find The Sun newspaper’s use of a Churchill quotation on their front page today rather out of place.
The newspaper carried a picture of Churchill and the quotation;

“A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other men that free man prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny. Where men have the habit of liberty the Press will continue to be the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen.“

This neatly allowed them to use the headline ‘D-DAY’ referring to the showdown of MPs voting on alternative proposals for press regulation, which didn’t actually take place after the parties reached an agreement in the early hours of the morning, after The Sun went to press.
(At least like the original D-Day the battle was postponed due to unfavourable conditions.)

The quotation was then seized upon and repeated by David Cameron, wishing to portray himself as a Churchillian populist guardian of the free press, in the Commons.

[Incidentally, although I can find the quotation frequently on the internet, I can’t find a source or citation other than that Churchill said or wrote them, as The Sun says, in 1949. I had thought they might be from a Commons speech responding to the 1940s version of the Leveson Inquiry, the Royal Commission on the press which reported in 1949, but Hansard brings up nothing.
Perhaps it’s a quotation from Their Finest Hour the Second Volume of his history of the Second World War published that year?]

While I can understand why The Sun would want to feature Churchill as an archetypal defender of freedom, and then cast around for a suitable quotation to go with it, he’s an almost comically unsuitable bearer of their anti-press regulation message.
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, to my mind, had many virtues, but being a staunch defender of a free press is not one of them.

I’m sure others have pointed this out throughout the day, but it’s worth a quick churning though some Churchilliana to show just want a misleading picture of his record The Sun’s front page paints.

Between January 1941 and September 1942 Churchill’s wartime Coalition Government banned the communist newspaper The Daily Worker (the forerunner of The Morning Star), and throughout the war all newspapers were subjected to Government censorship being prevented from covering news, including the bombing of schools or anti-war marches, thought likely to damage morale.

The suppression of The Daily Worker could not have come as a huge surprise given their staunch opposition to the war effort, rather dubiously ditching their previous anti-fascism in favour of attacking an ‘Imperialist War’, following the line from Moscow after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Even the then Manchester Guardian agreed with the ban, noting in an editorial how The Daily Worker had given ‘extreme provocation’ and concluding that the paper ‘did not believe either in the war or in democracy; its only aim was to confuse and weaken. We can well spare it.’

Churchill remained convinced of the need to censor the press in war time. During the 1956 Suez Crisis, a year after his eventual retirement as Prime Minister, he wrote his successor Anthony Eden a note, in which he identified the key problem that;

“We have a long delay when our intentions are known. The newspapers and foreign correspondents are free to publish what they choose. A censorship should be imposed.”

[This despite both himself and his son Randolph having made their careers as foreign correspondents.
‘Note, Private’ quoted in Martin Gilbert Winston S. Churchill, Volume VIII: Never Despair, 1945-65, London: Heinemann, 1988, pp.1203-4.]
**

Much less easy to defend are the events of June-July 1953, when a seventy-eight year old Churchill, mid-way through his second term as Prime Minister, was incapacitated by a stroke.

The public were not informed that the Prime Minister was desperately ill, or more seriously that their Government was essentially directed for weeks by Churchill’s staff and his son-in-law Christopher Soames.

As Churchill’s loyal Private Secretary, and dazzling diarist, Jock Colville recalled in his classic Diary account The Fringes of Power;

“I could not obey Churchill’s injunction to tell nobody. The truth would undoubtedly leak to the press unless I took immediate defensive action. So I wrote urgently and in manuscript to three particular friends of Churchill, Lords Camrose [owner of the Allied Newspapers Group], Beaverbrook [owner of The Daily Express & Evening Standard amongst other papers] and Bracken [publisher of The Financial Times & The Economist amongst others. Also thought to be a model for George Orwell's Big Brother], and sent the letters to London by dispatch rider. All three immediately came to Chartwell and paced the lawn in earnest conversation. They achieved the all but incredible, and in peace-time possibly unique, success of gagging Fleet Street, something they would have done for nobody but Churchill.
Not a word of the Prime Minister’s stroke was published.”

Colville goes on to describe how ‘for the best part of a month’ ‘my colleagues and I had to handle requests for decisions from Ministers and Government departments entirely ignorant of the Prime Minister’s incapacity’…As Parliamentary Private Secretary, Christopher [Soames] was in a curious position…he was not in principles supposed to see Cabinet Papers or secret documents…However, in the unusual circumstances prevailing, it seemed to me that, whatever the rules might be, Christopher should be given access to many papers he was not supposed to see, including Cabinet papers.
Before the end of July the Prime Minister was sufficiently restored to take an intelligent interest in affairs of state and express his own decisive views. Christopher and I then returned to the fringes of power, having for a time been drawn perilously close to the centre.
For the next two years the distance between the fringes and the centre was far shorter than it had once been.”

[See Jock Colville, The Fringes of Power, Downing Street Diaries, Volume II: 1941-55, London: Spectre, 1987, pp.329-30.]

As Churchill’s biographer, the inexhaustible Sir Martin Gilbert, breezily comments how Churchill was helped by “the discretion and skill of three men, his Principal Private Secretaries, Jock Colville and David Pitblado, and his son-in-law Christopher Soames. It was Soames, the only Member of Parliament of the three, who, quite unobtrusively, took a hundred decisions in Churchill’s name, without once breaching the trust which such a heavy responsibility involved”.

[Gilbert, Never Despair, p.859.]

To paraphrase a constitutionally outraged Toby Ziegler, for a month that year there was a coup d’état in this country.

But luckily due to Churchill’s personal friendships with (literal) press barons it was never reported.
**

In short The Sun should save their gratuitous Churchill references for when they want to praise David Cameron’s vetoing of European Union treaties. I’m sure the man who advocated a United States of Europe would approve.

It’s fair to say Winston Churchill’s attitude towards a free press was at best inconsistent and not his finest hour.

Written by oliverobserves

March 18, 2013 at 10:39 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with Christopher Soames, Churchill 1953 stroke, Churchill Suez Crisis, David Cameron Winston Churchill, Jock Colville, Sir Martin Gilbert, Sir Winston Churchill, The Daily Worker, The Sun, The Sun Winston Churchill, Toby Zieglar, Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill free press, Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill

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‘Shadows begone! Richard’s himself again!’ – some thoughts on Richard III

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I wrote must of this piece on Monday, 4th February when Richard’s bones were found, but have only just got round to finishing it and posting it – always the first with the breaking news.
(The title is an inaccurate but fitting quote from Shakespeare’s Richard III as used by Walter Scott for one of the epigrams in Ivanhoe.)
**

This morning I played my own small part in the media circus surrounding the rediscovery of the body of King Richard III by archaeologists at the University of Leicester.

While Channel 4 may present popular archaeology shows fronted by Tony Robinson, BBC Radio Sheffield relies on his near namesake – Sheffield institution and general polymath Rony Robinson.
I was interviewed on his radio show, giving my reaction to Richard’s re-emergence, along with osteologist Linzi Harvey from the University of Sheffield’s Archaeology Department offering her expertise in bones and John Mann, MP for Bassetlaw, offering a wonderfully passionate/shameless case for why Richard’s skeleton should be reinterred at Worksop Priory in his constituency.

We offered some thoughts on the discovery, sandwiched between such appropriate music choices as Dem Bones.
(I was only surprised they didn’t have a topical reworking of The Funny Bones theme ‘In a dark, dark town, there was a dark, dark carpark…’)

If you’re interested the recording is up here (at least for the time being)
The discovery is discussed throughout the show, and I’m on at 21.40 and again at 1.49.40.
[Rony’s show is easy enough to do given as one colleague said ‘He laughs uproariously at anything!’

I tried in my rather brief appraisals of Richard’s record to strike a balance between the ridiculously evil devil incarnate portrayed by Tudor propagandists, and the sentimental, saintly figure depicted by some of his defenders.
I’m not sure how much I succeeded – coming down a bit too much on Richard’s side, presenting him as a lovable ne’er-do-well; ‘Of course he had a few of his enemies murdered, but which of us hasn’t done that.’ etc
But I genuinely meant it when I claimed that ‘This is the greatest day for the Plantagenet cause since the Battle of Tewksbury’.

News of the archaeologists declaring ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that the skeleton is Richard’s instantly went international, and the last Plantagenet King of England was soon the subject of chatter and jokes at water coolers and watering holes across the world.
To me all this publicity is great for the debate around Richard, and for increasing awareness of Medieval History. I think historians have to be honest and admit this find will do more to ignite interest in the prototype Game of Thrones saga of The Wars of the Roses than a thousand academic books and journal articles could.
Such a discovery is also great for the discipline of archaeology showcasing the depth of the field (or indeed car park), and for Leicester itself, putting both the City and the University onto the world’s front pages.

I doubt the University of Leicester’s Archaeologists will have much difficulty demonstrating their ‘research impact’ in next year’s REF.
As prince of the Higher Education wonks, Mark Leach, put it ‘Breaking: Public value of education discovered under a car park in Leicester’.
Knowing how academia often contains as much jostling for tradition as any Medieval court, I did find myself momentarily thinking ‘If you were working on other research at the University of Leicester just how fed up with Richard III would you be now…’

Most of all, however, this week where Richardian references were everywhere has made me ponder the continued public interest in Richard III, and why this might be.

Of course I’ve no more idea than anyone else why public interest, which can be as fickle as the false, fleeting, perjured Clarence, has maintained a fascination with the ill-fated monarch over the centuries but I’d hazard a guess at a few possible factors:

The very fact that he was doomed and ill-fated is intriguing. There’s a sentimental romance and glamour that clings to a lost cause, whether it’s Jacobites pining for Bonnie Prince Charlie, Yorkists for Richard ~~or Republicans for Mitt Romney~~.

There’s an undying debate around Richard’s record and character – was be a villain and a tyrant or a virtuous man and just King unfairly maligned?
People always even joining such a debate and picking partisan sides, rather like the arguments over whether Saul in Homeland or Snape in Harry Potter (pre-the Seventh Book) are good guys or bad guys – stretched over half a millennium.

The debate comes complete with the classic murder mystery – including the conundrum of whether there was even a crime – of The Princes in the Tower. Were they murdered? By whom? If not where did they end up?
The truth is of course lost in the mists of time, thicker that the fog at the Battle of Barnet, but this hasn’t stopped generations enjoying trying, and failing, to solve this mystery of history for centuries.
Depictions of the princes as wide-eyed, golden-haired innocents, straight out of a Millais painting have only added to the comic book villainy of traditional interpretations of Richard.

This depiction of Richard as a cartoonishly evil figure has also ironically helped ensure his memory lives on. As King John, or the executive Producer of the millionth ‘Great Dictators’ documentary for the History Channel, will tell you – there’s much more marketing potential in a villain than a dull saint.

Whichever side of the debate you’re convinced by, Richard is a colourful character, and probably one of few English Monarch’s instantly recognisable to than yeoman in the street. The larger than life, controversial Richard III and Henry VIII still charge their way through popular culture and bestride the history curriculum like a Holbein portrait, whist the well-governing bureaucrat Henry VII between them vanishes in comparison.

The facts (if such they be) of his life appeal to the Ladybird Books school of History, while many people vaguely remember the strong images of his story, taught at school or picked up through cultural osmosis – the poor little princes locked in the tower, their Uncle, tormented by the phantoms of his victims, screaming in his sleep on the eve of Bosworth, Richard personally killing the ‘poor old man’ Henry VI while he kneels in prayer, and overseeing Clarence’s drowning in a butt of Malmsey wine, before meeting his dramatic end crying ‘A horse! A horse! My Kingdom for a horse!’ within striking distance of killing Henry Tudor and winning the war. (As the rainbow itself tells us the colourful Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain.)

The crown of course rolls into a gorse bus where it is picked up, given to Henry Tudor, who immediately marries Richard’s niece, and unites the nation in a stroke of design genius by delighting both feuding houses in the War of the Roses with the Tudor Rose Logo.
(I suppose had he used different PR consultants he could have united Richard’s white boar and the Tudor’s Welsh dragon as a flying pig…)

If nothing else Richard would maintain a place in pub quizzes as the last English King to die in battle, and indeed the first since Harold Godwinson at Hastings in 1066. If we believe the Tudor chroniclers’ tales of his murdering Henry VI and the boy Edward V, he would also, I think, be the only King to kill two of his predecessors – though I’m open to being contradicted.

The manner of the discovery is bound to be the latest chapter in this memorable tale of Richard, and ‘the King in the car park’ does make an excellent addition to the story.

Richard’s royal status inevitably also plays a part in fuelling interest. Catherine Fletcher, from the University of Sheffield’s History Department, strikes a note of caution amidst the enthusiasm, detecting an element of historical hierarchy and snobbery in the interest around the discovery, featuring as it does ‘celebrity and royalty’.
She does have a good point – if the skeleton had turned out to be a 15th century equivalent of the unknown soldier, interesting as this would have been, it would have been lucky to get much publicity beyond a ‘News in Brief’ paragraph in the BBC History Magazine.

As in so many of our national identity, Shakespeare was a major influence in shaping our picture of Richard, and the villainous version, guaranteed to please his Tudor patrons, depicted in The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, is probably the biggest reason of all Richard remains so well remembered.
Famous actors across the centuries from David Garrick to Laurence Olivier portraying Richard and refining the stereotype have also been largely responsible for his imprint on popular culture.

This stereotype has also proved self-sustaining, with such performances, particularly Larry Olivier’s, being constantly parodied, memorably by the two Peters – Sellars and Cook; Peter Sellar’s performing a wonderfully sinister cover of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night in the manner of Olivier’s Richard III, and Peter Cook providing some brilliant cod-Shakespeare in Beyond the Fringe (Performed here with Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, and Terry Jones as a worthy stand-in for Dudley Moore at the first of Amnesty International’s Secret Policeman’s Balls in 1976), and of course years later in the first episode of Blackadder.

Richard’s rediscovery with its saturation media coverage inevitably produced some good jokes (and some terrible groan-inducing ones)
I particularly liked the twitter account @HMRichardIII (which had about 500 followers when I checked on Sunday before the findings were announced and now has over 8000) where our late lamented King provided commentary such as:

Looking forward to a good catch up with my nephews. Oh….wait.

The two Princes may or may not be buried underneath the Swindon branch of Lidl. That’s all I have to say on the matter.

500 years in a wooden coffin. Talk about splinters of discontent.

Burying people in multi-storey car parks. That’s wrong on so many levels.

I wonder if Chris Huhne could get his wife to pay my parking fines for me.

My jokes are like my legs – lame.

Whatever the reason, Richard III is clearly embedded even deeper into our national consciousness than he was under a Leicester car park.

And whether through a mawkish love of celebrity and spectacle or a noble desire to comprehend the past, I did feel a bit of a thrill seeing images of him, knowing this is the first time he’s been seen in nearly 528 years.

As a lover of historical what-ifs I’ve also found myself idly wandering this week just how different England and the world would be if Richard had won the Battle of Bosworth and remained King?
The answer is of course nobody has a clue but its intriguing to speculate…

There would have been no Tudor dynasty and no King Henry VII or King Henry VIII. In fact there would have literally been no Henry VIII as his parents would never have married. Though given the rumours in the last year of his life that Richard planed to marry Elizabeth of York it’s quite possible a future King of England, sharing half Henry VIII’s genes could have come to the throne around the same time.

Without Henry VIII of course there would have been no single, dramatic break from the Church of Rome, and it’s quite possible England would still be a Catholic country today, subjects perhaps offering a prayer during mass for the royal Saint Richard of York.
There would almost certainly be no established ‘Church of England’ whatever the national faith.

Broadly speaking, most histories will tell you that Henry Tudor brought relative stability to England, uniting the warring Houses of Lancaster and York, providing children and a clear line of succession which had been sorely lacking, and growing the treasury through years of shrewd management and scooping up taxes with Morton’s fork.

We could assume that if Richard’s reign had continued this stability would have been missing and the Wars of the Roses might have continued.
Though it is at least arguable that stability and peace might have been attained a different way.
Richard might have united managed to unite the country, either through clever politics and strategic marriages, or by shear force having won the battle, killed Henry Tudor, and supressed the House of Lancaster.

If Richard had won in 1485 the House of York would have held the throne continuously since 1461 (apart from Henry VI’s sad and sorry second reign for five months in the winter of 1470-71), and with every year the likelihood of a Lancastrian revival could have faded.
Richard might also have reigned King a long time, being only 32 when he died at Bosworth. (His Father also died a violent death, like his father before him, but his mother lived to be 80 so it’s not fanciful to imagine a triumphant Richard ruling well into the 16th century, by which time the civil war would be long forgotten.)

Had he triumphed at Bosworth it’s fair to assume one of Richard’s first priorities would have been to remarry, (after his wife’s death the year before) possibly to Princess Joan of Portugal, and produce a ‘son of York’ to succeed him.

We might also assume the Treasury would have recovered under Richard, if a period of peace could have been provided, given many of Henry’s policies were built on initiatives begun under Richard. He had also presided over the Council of the North before becoming King, which can be seen as overseeing early attempts at regeneration or prototype-Keynesian economics, aimed at boosting the North’s economy which had never quite recovered from the devastation wrought by the Harrying of the North after the Norman Conquest.
If Richard had remained King might the North-South divide now be reversed and the country’s economic hub be – perhaps – York under the shadow of the even larger Minister Richard intended to fund?

Another fascinating point to consider is whether a hypothetical post-1485 King Richard would have listened to a Genoese gentlemen who visited England in 1488.
Christopher Columbus, during his long quest to finance his crazy sounding scheme to discover a new world, or at least sail to Asia, dispatched his brother Bartholomew to the English Court seeking patronage. Bartholomew was received by Henry VII and the King was intrigued by his plans but eventually they didn’t pass his risk assessment and he refused to put up the cash.
The Columbus Brothers eventually received capital from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and the rest is history…

Had England had a King less fiscally prudent than Henry, say with a history of taking brave gambles and sanctioning investment in large projects, South America could well have been claimed for England generations before the Pilgrim Fathers and others colonised the North.

To sound a bit like a Ladybird Book, for once it’s no exaggeration to say the course of History as well as the King changed with the slash of a sword (or it now seems the blow of a battle-axe) on the 22nd August 1485.
**

Written by oliverobserves

February 9, 2013 at 10:37 pm

The Oliver Observations

NUS Misérables

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Not his finest hour: Winston Churchill and a free press?

Rony’s Cronies and Sheffield’s Royal Statues

Local Press Gems: Lance Armstrong’s performance enhancing shrugs

‘Shadows begone! Richard’s himself again!’ – some thoughts on Richard III

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