Greater: Britain After The Storm by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis
Only three of the 57 Prime Ministers from Sir Robert Walpole to Rishi Sunak were professional authors: Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson.
But many holders of that office have possessed literary gifts of a high order. Lord Grenville, PM in 1806-07, in retirement published a playful volume of his translations from English, Greek and Italian into Latin verse, while Lord Derby, PM in 1852, 1858-9 and 1866-68, in 1864 published a translation of the Iliad which ran through six editions.
Gladstone could not be prevented from bursting into print about Homer and other matters, Lord Salisbury was in his youth an excellent polemical journalist, and Sir Anthony Eden in old age wrote a short and wonderful book, Another World 1897-1917.
The quality of written work, including work of an autobiographical nature, does give an indication of promise, or the lack of it. My Early Life: A Roving Commission, published by Winston Churchill in 1930, at the start of his long period in the wilderness, is a tremendously enjoyable book, in which the courage and eloquence he was to demonstrate in 1940 are clearly seen.
But the first requirement of a PM is that he or she can speak well in the Commons (more rarely the Lords), an attribute which requires the ability to think on one’s feet, gauge the mood of the House, and see how to carry at least one’s own side with one.
We have never had a really stupid PM, for the Commons can tell within a few seconds if a speaker is stupid.
Even Lord Goderich, PM in 1827-28, though temperamentally unsuited to the role – at moments of crisis he would burst into tears – proved capable enough as a minister both before and after his unhappy 130 days in Number 10.
George IV should never have appointed Goderich. Nor, more recently, should members of the Conservative Party have appointed Liz Truss, for she too was temperamentally unsuited to the role, being unable either to foresee the markets’ reaction against her economic plan, or to deal with it once it happened.
Were there, one wonders, clues to this failure which we should have detected in Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity, the tract written by five thrusting Conservative MPs, Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Chris Skidmore, and published in 2012?
It was hard to know what one could learn about Truss herself from this book, for it was not clear which pages had been written by which author, or what exactly, apart from “unembarrassed support for business, the profit motive and the individual drive of the wealth creator”, the quintet thought could be learned from the countries at which they glanced so fleetingly, including Canada, Brazil, China, Israel, Singapore and South Korea.
Boosterish optimism could not conceal a certain vacuity, which in turn made the tract almost impossible to review, for a piece which simply said it was a sloppy and superficial piece of work by five new MPs was hardly worth writing or publishing. Only their statement that “the British are among the worst idlers in the world” attracted much attention.
There was no analysis here to compare to the hard work and thinking done by Margaret Thatcher, Sir Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson, the Centre for Policy Studies and others in the period 1975-79 when she was Leader of the Opposition, resulting in such formidable statements of policy and intent as The Right Approach to the Economy, published in 1977.
All of which is a long-winded way of explaining why Greater: Britain After the Storm is only now being reviewed on ConHome, despite having been published as long ago as 2021, when the storm, or storms, referred to were the financial crisis of 2008, the Brexit referendum and the global pandemic.
Mordaunt could be the next leader of the Conservative Party. She has a way of imposing herself on the public eye, most notably by her magnificent demeanour when she carried the Sword of State at the Coronation.
Like Truss she has the ability to attract attention. Truss was profiled no fewer than three times on ConHome, in 2014, 2017 and 2020. Mordaunt happens to be the only other person who has been profiled three times here, in 2016, 2021 and 2023.
Greater: Britain After the Storm, written with Chris Lewis, a successful PR man and long-term ally of Mordaunt, attracted high praise before it was published. It has a foreword by Bill Gates and carries endorsements from:
Sir Elton John, Kim Leadbeater, Tony Blair, Richard Curtis, Dominic Sandbrook, Ruth Davidson, Lord Dobbs, Sir Ben Ainslie, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Iain Dale, Tobias Ellwood, Sir Anthony Seldon, Lord Robertson, Lord Hennessy, Sir Michael Barber, Edmund King, Professor Russell Foster, David Skelton, Professor Sir John Bell, Boris Johnson and Jacqueline de Rojas.
As so often when one comes across endorsements of this kind – “bloody good fun” (Dobbs), “a breath of fresh air” (Rifkind), “smart, thoughtful, passionate and funny” (Sandbrook), “loving, invigorating and delivered with characteristic wit” (Johnson), “required reading” (Dale), “uplifting and highly readable” (Blair), “really readable and funny” (Curtis) etc – one cannot help wondering how many of the endorsers, most of whom are busy people, found either the time or the inclination to read the 373 pages of text.
As in Britannia Unbound, which at least has the merit of being a mere 116 pages long, boosterish optimism is employed to conceal vacuity. Nothing is examined carefully: whenever any difficult point is reached, the authors skip to the next subject.
Nor do the “practical national missions” which are promised on the dustjacket of Greater ever materialise.
In the Prologue, the authors prepare us for the implausibilities which follow by assuring us that the American Ambassador in London, Robert “Woody” Johnson, gave a speech on the Fourth of July 2019 which was “just as powerful” as the Gettysburg Address.
“In democracies, the will of the people is the law of the land,” we are told on page eight. This is not quite right, but forms part of such a flood of dubious assertions, intermingled with correct observations, that the reader soon despairs of separating truth from falsehood.
Often the authors adopt a tone of jocose boastfulness, as on page 22 in a section headed “Boozing”, part of a long, muddled examination of the British national character:
“In America, there are 62,000 bars and 384,000 churches. It’s a ratio of more than six to one in favour of churches. In Britain, there are 47,000 pubs and 16,000 churches. It’s a ratio of almost three to one in favour of pubs. If that’s not a source of national pride, nothing is.”
These figures might have prepared us for some interesting reflections on the differences between America and Britain, and the importance of religion at least in the former country, but instead lead to nothing but a feeble joke.
Near the end of the book, on page 360, as the authors grope their way towards a conclusion, they unexpectedly cite some words by Saint Augustine:
“What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.”
But they at once assure us the quotation is “not necessarily about the Christian ethos”: it is about “the primacy of the heart”.
The authors are anxious to avoid Christianity, Islam, Judaism or any other religion, but have difficulty filling this gap, and are reduced to stating, after a short passage about Live Aid, “The whole of Britain has a big heart.”
In place of religion we get sentimental exhortation:
“To be born in Britain is still to win the lottery of life. We should recognise there are freedoms and privileges granted to us that are denied to so many. We should have self-respect, we should be proud of our people and our processes, but we should not be complacent.”
What fine exhortations, but they don’t offer any clue to what a government led by Mordaunt would actually do.
On page 107 the authors quote some wise remarks by Roger Scruton, only to continue immediately afterwards, in their usual cocksure manner, “The point he fails to grasp here is…”
There is next to nothing in the book about Shakespeare, or any other great writer, but frequent references to the television programmes shown in the authors’ youth, not all of which they now regard with approval. Of It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, written by David Croft and Jimmy Perry, they observe:
“This featured a full-house bingo card of what is now known as casual racism, homophobia, white privilege, colonialism, transphobia, bullying, misogyny and sexual harassment.”
There is more here about Dad’s Army (also by Croft and Perry) than about the real Army. Mordaunt must have something to tell us about the Royal Navy: she was brought up in and represents Portsmouth, served for nine years as a Royal Navy Reservist, is proud to be named after a famous warship of the Second World War, HMS Penelope, and in the dying months of Theresa May’s administration served as Defence Secretary.
But whatever lessons her naval service may have taught her are not imparted. The authors instead indulge their fondness for lists. At the top of page 17 they assert:
“The present is infinitely, unrecognisably, incomprehensibly better than the reality of the past. There’s no rationed, crap, greasy food. No pint of sludge, Ted. No Vesta Chow Mein. No Mateus Rosé. No Austin Princess. No penneth of chips. No early closing Wednesday. No job demarcation. No Spanish customs. No diabolical liberties. No pea-soupers. No bomb sites. No jumble sale. No rag-and-bone man. No slums. No TB. No emphysema. No ringworm. No polio…”
And so on for a page and a half. The authors are entitled to their dismal view of the nation’s recent past, but it does not strike one as a particularly conservative view.
There is a self-congratulatory feel to the catalogue, the authors proud to be able to look back and find so many horrible things, though quite what they have against jumble sales is not clear, the rag-and-bone man surely deserves to be acclaimed as a recycling pioneer, and Vesta Chow Mein tasted delicious if one took it into the backwoods, or what passed for the backwoods, and heated it up over a camp fire.
On page 198 the authors write:
“Some of the best ideas have a strange way of coming about. They come from conversations or when you are in the midst of doing something else or when you are given time to think. They most often happen when not trying. Or when you can stop. It’s almost impossible for politicians to do that. It might explain a lot.”
Mordaunt and Lewis have failed to give themselves any time to stop and think. They have instead devoted their considerable energies to establishing her as a formidable contender in the next leadership race. If this book is anything to go by, she would be a disaster.