Memoirs

Chapter Six

Everyone Wants to Be Attorney General

I went up to Balliol in January 1946, just after the war. Balliol, a left-wing college, was then full of Labour triumphalism, following the General Election in the summer of 1945. The mood lasted about a year to the summer of 1946. It was quite unlike the political mood at any other time in my life. The Labour majority was a large one, people believed that this was a revolutionary event; they believed that the old ways of doing things had been thrown out. It was widely felt that the conservatism of the pre-war era had been not only morally repugnant, but also intellectually contemptible; it was a more complete ideological rejection than that of 1997. It was further held that figures like William Beveridge and J. Maynard Keynes had shown how it was possible to run society in a much more scientific and effective way. Conservatism was dead, and disreputable; the future lay with Attlee socialism, Keynesianism and the Beveridge Report. I did not agree.

Ideologically I was swimming against the tide in post-war Balliol. I took the view, best set out in Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom, that universal state controls, including substantial state ownership and very high taxation, involved a serious loss of liberty. I held the connected belief that liberty was the key to economic and social development and that, by restricting liberty, Britain was putting shackles on its future performance. Margaret Thatcher, an Oxford contemporary and acquaintance, was taking the same view at the same time and in the same environment, but in 1946 we were a small minority, either among students or in Britain as a whole.

Balliol itself possessed a set of values which was distinct from the other Oxford colleges. It was a strange mixture. There is an extremely attractive feeling that Balliol is a special place, that there is a friendship throughout Balliol which crosses the boundaries of opinion. On the other hand, there was a self-congratulatory side to some Balliol men, which must have seemed rather ridiculous to the outside world. Balliol was, indeed, attracting and producing the best undergraduates. It was regarded as the academic college and merited this reputation. The Norrington Table had not yet been brought into existence, but Balliol was getting, fairly effortlessly, a high quota of Firsts. The many brilliant undergraduates included George Steiner, the literary critic, Bernard Williams, the philosopher and future Provost of King’s, and, among distinguished lawyers, George Carman, Lord Hutton and Lord Mayhew.

Among my first actions after I arrived at Oxford was to join the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA). The Union was the key institution in my life at Oxford. When I arrived it was dominated by people who had come back from the war. Being only seventeen, I was a schoolboy among people who were ex-officers and had been in battle. It was quite difficult to get myself into, and succeed, in a society which was dominated by people with much greater experience. I countered this by being very active indeed, not only managing to get myself elected, after only my first term, to the Committee of the Conservative Association, but also, at the end of my second term, to the Library Committee at the Union. I was an eager beaver, running round, working on university politics and getting to know people.

Ever since I had been at Charterhouse, where I founded a Conservative Society, I had sought out senior politicians as part of a learning process; they were almost a continuation of my school teachers, and were often generous with their time. I wrote to Leslie Hore-Belisha after the Conservative defeat in 1945, when he had lost his seat. Before the war, he had been, briefly, the great modernizer of British politics. In the National Governments of the later 1930s he modernized the transport system, introducing driving tests, the Highway Code and pedestrian crossings, marked by lights which were known for many years as Belisha beacons. Next, he was appointed to, and modernized, the War Office. He retired some twenty of the senior officers of the army, appointed Lord Gort as a new broom, and prepared the British Army for war in 1939. Without Belisha’s reforms the army could scarcely have formed the British Expeditionary Force in 1939, or, indeed, had the resilience to escape from Dunkirk.

These reforms were a material achievement, for which he was not much thanked. The old guard almost always wins in the end. Anti-Jewish prejudice was used to destroy Hore-Belisha. Early in 1940, he went as Minister for War to review the defences in France. He observed, and reported to the Cabinet, that there was a gap at the end of the Maginot Line. The French complained. Neville Chamberlain, with relief, took the opportunity to dismiss Belisha. Those who called him ‘Horeb-Elisha’ and ‘the Jew Boy’ had won.

I think Leslie Hore-Belisha saw himself as a second Disraeli. He was a brilliant speaker, a very modern publicist and a Minister capable of radical reorganization of his department. I cannot remember just how I first met him, but when I was at Oxford I attached myself with enthusiasm to his unfortunately waning star. I canvassed for him in Coventry South, a seat he failed to win back for the Conservatives in 1950. I exchanged lunches with him, going to his Lutyens house behind Buckingham Palace; we corresponded when I was in the RAF. He, too, had been President of the Oxford Union when he was at Oxford. By the 1950s he had very few disciples, and I think he was pleased to have a supporter. I learned a good deal from him.

I must have started the correspondence about the same time as I won the Brackenbury Scholarship, and presumably made some expression of my own political ambitions. At any rate, I remember one striking sentence in his reply which reflected both his own adolescent ambitions and what he saw as mine. ‘At the age of sixteen,’ he wrote, ‘everyone wants to be Attorney General.’ I remember a few other of his remarks. He told me that the perfect length for a speech in the House of Commons was no more than eight minutes; after that one would lose the attention of the House. His old seat had been Devonport, which in 1945 was won by Labour. He decided to move to the marginal seat of Coventry South, and commented of Devonport, ‘if they don’t want me, they shan’t have me’.

My political ambitions were already well formed. I believed I would become a political lawyer. I planned to read for the bar (I actually joined Gray’s Inn in 1948 or 1949), and to stand for Parliament. My imagination was fixed on a career as a Member of Parliament. I have always enjoyed politics, political company, debate, argument, even committee meetings. To me it is a stimulating and natural environment.

Shirley Williams once described me, in a flattering phrase, as ‘a young sage’ at Oxford, someone whom people would seek out for advice on matters relating to their own careers. Robin Day was the guru of younger Oxford politicians, advising them when to stand and for what office, but I studied the game of Oxford careerism with almost as much fascination as he did. I used to lunch with Robin Day at the Committee table in the Oxford Union. Later in life we lunched together at the Garrick Club. When Robin died I made a calculation that I had lunched with him more often than with anyone else outside my family. We always talked politics.

I got off to an early start in seeking political office at Oxford, as did our son Jacob in the late 1980s. He became President of OUCA and Librarian, though not President, at the Oxford Union. At the end of my first term I was elected to the Committee of OUCA. One of the senior members of the Committee was Margaret Thatcher and in the summer term she stood for the office of President. There were eleven members of the Committee with the right to elect the President. I voted for Margaret Roberts, as she then was, and she was elected by – as I remember it – seven votes to four.

She invited me to be the Meetings Secretary for the following term and I accepted with some glee. It would have meant greeting the outside speakers, who ranged between retired Cabinet Ministers and the rising young stars of the party, such as Reggie Maudling. I also looked forward to working for Margaret, who seemed in the immediate future to be the leading figure in Oxford Conservative politics and whom I liked.

This agreeable prospect was taken away from me when Sandy Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, who was made a Labour peer in 1947, decided to give my place in the college to a demo-bilized ex-serviceman. This meant that I only had two terms at Balliol in 1946, and I had to do my own National Service in the middle of my time at Oxford, which I resented. It was indeed contrary to the commitment the college had made when I came up. I was not able to take up my post as Meetings Secretary and had to go round to Somerville College to apologize to Margaret for my inability to accept her offer. In retrospect, I naturally regret not having worked more closely with her. When I returned to Oxford, two years later, she was in the hierarchy of ex-Presidents. By the time I became President of OUCA myself she had gone down from the university. Nevertheless, we retained a friendly acquaintance, which always gave me access after she became Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister. I was not a member of the inner team of friends and advisers, but I think I was regarded, if rather remotely, as ‘one of us’. We never imagined at that time that Margaret was to become the first woman Prime Minister, though we knew how disciplined she was and how determined to achieve her objectives.

In 1946–8, I served two years in the RAF. The first winter was that of the 1947 fuel crisis. For most of those who lived through it, 1947 was one of the most unpleasant years of their lives. It started with an exceptionally cold winter in which supplies of coal ran out. These were fuelless days, electric fires burned only a dull red, and crowds suddenly discovered the fascination of tropical plants at Kew Gardens and tropical birds at various zoos around the country.

The fuel crisis broke the reputation of the Attlee Government for administrative competence. For years afterwards the Conservative Party speaker’s handbook carried a much-loved quotation from Emmanuel Shinwell: ‘There will be no fuel crisis, I am the Minister for Fuel and Power and I ought to know.’

I spent that winter as a National Service clerk in a Nissen hut at Flying Training Command Headquarters in Reading, Berkshire. We burned anything we could lay our hands on, except the snooker table, in an effort to keep the hut warm; we failed.

In the spring of 1948, I was sent on a course to Wellesbourne Mountford in Warwickshire to be turned into an acting sergeant in the RAF Education Corps. That I enjoyed.

Wellesbourne Mountford is situated close to Stratford-upon-Avon where I went to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; and I managed to stay with my cousins who then lived in the beautiful village of Clifford Chambers. Their house was said to have a rather sad association with Shakespeare. In 1616 he went there for a drinking party, returned home flushed with mulled wine, caught a chill which turned to pneumonia, and died. I do not know whether the story is true.

We had a splendidly crazy wing commander who was in charge of the course. He was concerned that we should have brightly polished boots, something I was still no good at. He told us a long and rambling story about a Canadian Mountie who was sent into the wilderness to capture an outlaw. It took him three years to find his man and three years to bring him back. Nevertheless, when he returned with his prisoner, he walked into his station with his Mountie uniform impeccably pressed and his boots shining like the sun.

As the education sergeant when I returned to the Reading headquarters I was not exactly fully employed. Consequently, I arranged to have tutorials on seventeenth-century history at Reading University, for which my tutor was paid three guineas a time.

I tried, and failed, to teach an illiterate WAAF recruit to read. I taught young officers general knowledge for their officer’s promotion exam. I remember telling them, with all the authority of a nineteen-year-old, that they would acquire an excellent grasp of current affairs if they read The Times every morning over breakfast.

I drafted a general knowledge quiz to find out what, if anything, they did know. That project had to be dropped when I put the quiz in front of my education officer, who was a squadron leader. One of my multiple-part questions required the candidate to sort biblical characters into the Old and New Testaments. Unfortunately, the squadron leader had not read his Bible. He thought Moses was a figure in the New Testament, and scolded me for setting a quiz which he regarded as unreasonably difficult.

In the sergeants’ mess we drank our beer and the occasional whisky and soda. I was the only teenager in a group of middle-aged men. They saw my life as quite divorced from their concerns, but we wished each other well.

The following year, I left the RAF and returned to Oxford University. As a sergeant I fear that I had failed to impress my Commanding Officer. He wrote a reference in my leaving book: ‘Sergeant Rees-Mogg is capable of performing routine tasks under close supervision.’ I only wish that were true.

It was the autumn of 1948 when I returned to Oxford. I was now twenty. I had had the advantage of two years in the RAF, which had transformed me from a callow recruit to a sergeant in Education. I had kept in touch with Oxford life through my friendship with Clive Wigram, who was himself elected as President of the Union. In the spring of 1948, I came up to Oxford for the last time wearing my RAF uniform with its largely unpolished boots. Clive and I went to watch some college races on the river. We met two delightful girls, both of whom were acquaintances of Clive. The dark-haired one was Val Mitchison, daughter of Naomi Mitchison, the novelist, later to become Val Arnold-Foster; the blonde was Shirley Williams, the daughter of another novelist, Vera Brittain. I remember thinking what a delightful place Oxford was, if one could stroll the towpath and meet such delightful young women. I did not realize that Val and Shirley had already become stars of Oxford society.

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