Peter Stothard, The Senecans: Four Men and Margaret Thatcher (New York: The Overlook Press, 2016), 240 pp., $29.95.

 

THERE ARE memoirs that pose as histories and histories that pose as memoirs. Peter Stothard’s The Senecans is a bit of both and a little of neither. Most of the adult memories he shares in it are inextricably intertwined with recent British political history, as are most of the characters he describes. On the other hand, the history is all seen through the personal sensibilities of the author, those of a very talented—and even more ambitious—son of the English lower middle classes who developed a love of the classics and a taste for journalism during his Oxford years. The Senecans is also a literary exercise of sorts, described by at least one critic as “stylish.” And so it is: stylish in the sense that its author seems, above all else, to be concerned with cultivating a neoclassical image or style for himself based on books he has read and figures from antiquity he feels akin to. In this sense, both he and his book are derivative, exercises in emulation rather than originality—just as much (though not all) of the work of Seneca, the Roman philosopher inspiring the title, was an imitation or synthesis of earlier Greco-Roman thinkers.

Stothard spends a great deal of time in The Senecans striking philosophical, world-weary poses after a career spent courting power and prestige. While this occasionally makes him come across as more than a little affected, it by no means detracts from the interesting nature of the events he has witnessed and many of his insights into them. It is also conclusive proof that, while you can take the journalist out of politics, you can never really take politics out of the journalist.

Witness the opening words of The Senecans:

Believe me. I was serious twelve years ago when I said that I was going to stop writing about politicians. . . . I made a promise to myself when I stopped being the Editor of The Times. I promised to go back to what I did before I was a journalist at all, back two thousand years to books and cities of books, to Naples, Alexandria and here [Cordoba], beside a Roman bridge over the slow, brown water, in Roman Spain. There seemed no reason that Margaret T, her heirs and successors, would ever trouble me again. Twenty-five years with them was enough.

I meant it too when I said I was never going to write one of those “memoirs of the print trade” that I have occasionally enjoyed.

Wrong on both counts, but Stothard has a classical alibi.

When I arrived yesterday . . . my aim was to finish a book which stars an ancient Roman, a writer who was born in Cordoba around the time when BC turned to AD. Lucius Annaeus Seneca was his name. . . .

So Seneca is much on my mind, his arguments, Stoic arguments as they are known, small questions about cold water, travel and alcohol as well as the big questions, how to survive in dangerous times, how to live a good life in even the worst of times. I found him first when I was young in the 1960s and secondly when Margaret Thatcher was in power almost 2,000 years after his death.

The stylistic trick Stothard now pulls off is the opposite of the familiar device of producing Sophocles or Shakespeare in modern costumes. The Senecans tells a tale of modern British politics clad in ancient Roman trappings, a story which

stars four courtiers of the Thatcher age. That is my aim, a portrait of lesser characters who can sometimes shed light on the greater. Their names are enough for now: David Hart, Ronald Millar, Woodrow Wyatt and Frank Johnson. All served Margaret Thatcher in different ways.

 

ALL FOUR of this rather motley crew of Thatcherites are now dead. For better or worse, this allows Stothard to write about them without fear of contradiction. Having known two of the four—Frank Johnson well and David Hart only casually—I found his treatment of both of them fair, if a little condescending, and his likenesses quite recognizable.

Throughout the 1970s and into the late 1980s I visited London at least twice a year, usually for two weeks at a time. As an aide to presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan during much of that period, and an occasional contributor to English publications like History Today and the Spectator, I naturally saw a lot of Tory journalists and politicians, beginning in the days of Ted Heath and throughout the longer, much more consequential era of Margaret Thatcher. In fact, I was there when the Iron Lady was voted into power in 1979. I vividly recall following the early results—posted in handwritten entries on a large blackboard—at the Reform Club. Once the initial returns had made it clear that Labour was out and the Tories were in, I left the club to drop in on a few victory celebrations. I distinctly remember a crisp, cold breeze blowing down Pall Mall, a chilly harbinger of change that certainly proved true: winds of change with a vengeance.

At that time I already knew Frank Johnson. He was one of several rising young journalists who would make their names at the Daily Telegraph before moving on to other things. John O’Sullivan was another of them, afterwards a speechwriter for Thatcher and the principal collaborator for her memoirs. But Frank was the one who most exuded naked ambition. Like myself, he was an autodidact. Unlike myself, he was born into a milieu keenly aware of, and not a little touchy about, its social origins—what would then have been called an English “working-class” family from a few hints he dropped. Frank was remarkably intelligent and had an equally voracious appetite for knowledge and status, generally with more attention given to ends than means. He once boasted to a mutual friend that he had intentionally encouraged the heavy drinking of a talented colleague to make him less competitive. There was an unappealing mixture of vanity and insecurity in his makeup, but he was also a first-rate writer—not just another Fleet Street hack—and great fun as a conversationalist. Frank’s political convictions were grounded on his sometimes idiosyncratic but always serious and thoughtful interpretation of history.

David Hart was an altogether different matter, what used to be described as a “rum character.” He was one of those marginal political enthusiasts who are constantly trying to draw attention to themselves by affecting an air of secrecy and mystery. A shady, big-spending money man who may also have been bankrupt, he was, at least by his own accounting, a one-man “independent” campaign operation for Mrs. Thatcher during her early and middle years in power. There was more than a touch of Gordon Liddy to David Hart, and one was wise to take anything he said cum grano salis. But his ostentatious life style, complete with a country seat in Suffolk and a lavish entertainment budget, allowed him to wine and dine many a more prominent Tory figure than himself, most of them apparently convinced that—Milton Friedman to the contrary—there really was such a thing as a free lunch . . . and free breakfast, dinner and weekends in the country. One of the more Alice in Wonderland episodes in The Senecans takes place in the kitschy “Garden of Eastern Peace” Hart added to his estate, “a circle of seats and Buddhist statues, all set at a sympathetic distance from where he landed his helicopter. This suited the prophetic and philosophical part of his nature which, he said, was too often misunderstood.”

That afternoon, two of his friends were in the Peace circle, Edward Teller, an elderly American known as “Father of the H-bomb” was arguing with Vladimir Bukovsky, a former guest of the Soviet Gulag, about the best way to deal with Mikhail Gorbachev. . . .

Teller talked about the “nationalist Russian adversary whose nature was manageable by tough, traditional diplomacy.” Bukovsky preferred “helpless leader of an alien inhuman state.” Teller wanted “Reagan to be Reagan.” Bukovsky wanted desertion from Soviet armies and the arming of their Islamic enemies. . . .

David too was enthusiastic for teaching Islamic Russians to use American missiles. That was the consensus of the Peace Garden. Only Teller seemed opposed. We could say he showed the greatest prophetic wisdom of the afternoon.

The third member of the Senecan quadriga was Woodrow Wyatt, whom I was fortunate enough not to know. The worst sort of tuft-hunting, time-serving conservative pundit, his happiest day was probably the one on which decades of touting and groveling were finally rewarded with a life peerage, an honor as hollow as his achievements, but one that allowed him to abbreviate his signature to “Wyatt,” as in Lord Wyatt. One suspects that he managed to wangle free stationery featuring his new, nonancestral crest. Stothard makes no real effort to conceal his low opinion of Wyatt, who serves as a comic reminder of everything one would rather not have in a political supporter.

By far the most appealing member of the quartet—and certainly the one with the purest, most disinterested devotion to Mrs. Thatcher—was Sir Ronald Millar, a socially secure product of Charterhouse and Cambridge who had made a well-deserved fortune as a successful actor, playwright and Hollywood screenwriter. An early admirer of the Iron Lady, Millar volunteered his services as a speechwriter and excelled at the job. One of Mrs. Thatcher’s best lines ever, uttered at a time when fainter, wetter Tory hearts were all for caving in, was “The lady’s not for turning.” The line was provided by Millar and, given his theatrical background, was an appropriate play on the title of a 1948 London stage triumph, Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning. Millar comes across at times as naive and a little vain, but never as anything less than a sincere, selfless admirer of Margaret Thatcher.

 

HOVERING ABOVE all four of them is the overarching shadow of Seneca, whom I first met—cinematically speaking—as a minor character in the 1951 big-screen adaptation of Quo Vadis. Unfortunately, Seneca only made a cameo appearance (played by Nicholas Hannen) and was totally upstaged by a then-youthful Peter Ustinov chewing the scenery as Emperor Nero. In due course this would be followed by references to the most celebrated Roman philosopher of his day in Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars and numerous fleeting encounters in the pages of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

Today Seneca would probably only be remembered as a minor footnote to the reigns of emperors Claudius, Caligula and Nero if his modified, popularized brand of Stoicism hadn’t appealed to many early and Renaissance Christian thinkers looking for noble ancient precedents for their own brand of church-based ethics. For them, Seneca was a perfect fit. At least on paper—parchment actually—he was an endless cornucopia of smug high-mindedness, with a Dale Carnegie gloss of handy career tips on how to make friends and influence people. Chip away his philosophic pose, and much of Seneca’s writing has more in common with Lord Chesterfield’s cynical eighteenth-century letters on how to succeed in business without really trying than with anything ethical, much less spiritual.

Perhaps a better comparison would be to Baltasar Gracián, the wily seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit whose Art of Worldly Wisdom is a veritable “how-to” book for those wishing to get ahead in this life rather than the next. Two of Gracian’s maxims are particularly apposite to the political life. The first is also a good description of the very conditional friendship, or situational kinship, that bound Stothard’s Senecans together:

Neither be all, nor give all to anyone: neither blood, nor friendship, nor the most pressing obligation, justifies it, for there is a big difference between the bestowal of your affection and the bestowal of yourself: the closest of ties must still admit of exceptions, and not on this account give offence to the laws of intimacy, for something should always be kept hidden even from a friend, and something concealed even from a father by his son: certain secrets are kept from the one and imparted to the other, and vice versa, wherefore it may be said that everything is revealed, or everything is concealed, depending on whom one is with.

Certainly, this was true of the Senecans, supposedly stout Thatcherites all, but except for Ronnie Millar, all constantly maneuvering and hedging their bets, sometimes against each other.

The other of Gracian’s maxims that springs to mind is one that gives a shrewd description of what it takes to be a leader of Margaret Thatcher’s undeniable magnitude, a magnitude which Stothard seems to diminish in hindsight or never fully understood while he was dazzled by it.

Know how to put fire into your subordinates. The need to act, upon occasion, has made giants of many, just as the danger of drowning has made swimmers; under such circumstances many have discovered a courage, and even a capacity, which would have remained buried in their faint-heartedness, if the emergency had not offered: in danger lies the opportunity for fame, wherefore a nobleman sees his honor threatened, has the energy of a thousand. Queen Isabella the Catholic knew, and knew well, this law, as she knew all the others, of laying responsibility upon her subjects, and it was to such public favor that the Great Captain [Christopher Columbus] owed his name, and many others their eternal glory; men are made great through such challenge.

 

PERHAPS THE most remarkable thing about Margaret Thatcher, besides her unlikely rise to power as Britain’s first female prime minister, was the fact that for most of her lengthy premiership she held together an impressive pool of talented, ambitious and not particularly scrupulous politicians who neither trusted nor liked each other, and got good work out of them. This was despite the fact that most of them didn’t really like her either. While Mrs. Thatcher probably wouldn’t appreciate being compared to Isabella the Catholic, each was an incredible female leader of men, adept at “laying responsibility upon her subjects.”

As for Seneca, those of us who find him a bit less compelling a figure than Stothard share some of the reservations expressed by the celebrated Roman historian Cassius Dio, born ninety years after Seneca’s death and much closer to his living memory than any modern scholars. To Dio,

[Seneca’s] conduct was seen to be dramatically opposed to the teachings of his philosophy. For while denouncing tyranny, he was making himself the tutor of a tyrant [Nero]; while inveighing against the associates of the powerful, he did not hold aloof from the palace itself; and though he had nothing good to say of flatterers, he himself had constantly fawned upon Messalina [Emperor Claudius’ sluttish consort] and the freedmen of Claudius, to such an extent, in fact, as actually to send them from the island of his exile a book containing their praises—a book that he afterwards suppressed out of shame.

Though finding fault with the rich, he himself acquired a fortune of 300,000 sesterces, and though he censured the extravagances of others, he had five hundred tables of citrus wood with legs of ivory, all identically alike, and he served banquets on them.

A pretty scathing condemnation, although David Hart probably would have found the image of those five hundred tables “of citrus wood with legs of ivory,” surrounded by thousands of groveling, gorging courtiers, rather tempting.

Hart and the others called themselves Senecans because they met from time to time, ostensibly to brush up on—or acquire—their Latin by drafting and then comparing their English translations of Seneca’s works. Their meeting place was a broken-down old pub, now shuttered, called The Old Rose on the Highway, a road appropriately dating back to the days of Roman Britain. More importantly, it was within walking distance of Stothard’s offices at the Wapping site of the fortress-like editorial and printing operation set up by Rupert Murdoch, who abandoned the Fleet Street that writers of my generation still fondly remember, in order to break the back of extortionate union printers and their allies, who were bleeding British newspapers to a slow death. Murdoch succeeded, but by the time Stothard was writing his book, the Wapping complex was itself going the way of Fleet Street after a considerably shorter life span. And, unlike Fleet Street, where many of the grand old buildings still remain long after they were sold by their press-baron owners, the Wapping complex is being demolished—and good riddance, too, from an architectural point of view—by the wrecker’s ball. The wreckage goes on even as Stothard weaves his tale of the Senecans, supposedly in a series of interviews with a young, left-wing woman historian (identified only as “Miss R”) with family connections—as it turns out—to Stothard’s own past.

 

ONE CAN’T help wondering just how accurate the author’s account of these interviews is. Too many of his answers read more like carefully crafted speeches in an old-fashioned comedy of manners, and an awful lot of time is wasted on melodramatically describing the physical demolition going on around him, even as he sifts through the shards of a now-dead political era.

Perhaps Stothard’s intent is deliberately novelistic in approach. At one point, while rummaging through the piles of books on his soon to be vacated office floor, he recommends not a memoir but a novel to Miss R as a guide for the perplexed trying to make sense of the Thatcher years. It is novelist Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which won the 2004 Booker Prize. For understanding the years of The Senecans, Stothard explains to Miss R, the best fiction “is often better than the best journalism.”

The Line of Beauty begins after the Falklands victory when the “pale gilt image of the triumphant PM” is everywhere. Her recapture of Port Stanley merits an annual public holiday and a reconsideration of how we feel now about Lord Nelson’s long dominance of the skyline.

A Reaganite lobbyist promotes Star Wars technology as David Hart used to do. The rich get rich and “the poor get . . . the Conservatives.” . . .

There is a subtle textual and sexual variance. The gay hero, an outsider at the court of “the Lady,” catches a dance with her that causes rage among those whose claim is greater but whose opportunism is less. It is one of the finest novels of our time for imitating its world.

There are moments when, halfway through some of the almost too finely crafted monologues and exchanges in The Senecans, one feels as if one is reading just such a novel. In the end, it is all a little too perfectly planned, fitted and polished to make for a convincing memoir. But it is also clever, insightful and highly entertaining reading once you recognize it for what it is.

There is also something a little touching and sustaining in the picture of Stothard and his four fellow Senecans, busy, ambitious men of the world all, gathered around a wobbly table sipping drinks—in Frank Johnson’s case a soft drink; he never trusted himself much with alcohol—and trying to extract a bit of wisdom and reason from the ancient past in the midst of their daily scramble on or around the greasy pole of contemporary politics. In my years in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan White Houses, and in my extensive and sometimes enjoyable socializing with American journalists and assorted political types over many decades, I’ve met many interesting, informed, articulate individuals—not to mention even more uninteresting, uninformed, inarticulate individuals—but I can’t think of any of them who would have been able to hold up their end of a conversation about Seneca at the Old Rose Pub.

Nevertheless, even though I enjoyed almost everything about The Senecans, if I were asked for the title of one book that could convey the impact of Mrs. Thatcher on her time—and clearly depict the behind-the-scenes parliamentary intrigues directed against her even in her salad days—it would have to be a much more conventional nonfiction work by a man who probably understood and appreciated Mrs. Thatcher far better than any of the Senecans, with the possible exception of Ronnie Millar. That book is Mrs. Thatcher’s Minister: The Private Diaries of Alan Clark. The son of Lord Kenneth Clark of Civilization fame, the late Alan Clark was a brilliant, not particularly self-disciplined Tory politician who loved life but also served his country and his prime minister well. His largeness of spirit, bonhomie and erudition—not to mention his appetite for the good life at table and in bed—shine through along with his basic decency as a public man. More than anything written by any of the Senecans, Alan Clark’s diary will be a source of illumination for future historians. It will also be a delight to the intelligent general reader, as entertaining and instructive as the Duke of Saint-Simon’s malicious sketches of life at Versailles, or Lord Hervey’s waspish memoirs of the ridiculous court and parliamentary goings-on under the irascible, German-accented King George II and his considerably more clever but tragicomic consort, Queen Caroline. Clark simply wrote with an ease and grace that was natural to him rather than acquired through study. He ended his published diary with the February 1991 entry describing his swearing in—by the Queen—as a member of the Privy Council, an empty but ornamental honor rewarding a long and modestly successful parliamentary and ministerial career. Clark’s closing words convey an ability to laugh at himself that none of the Senecans seem to have possessed:

The last phase [of the ceremonial gathering] was somewhat drawn out. Not for the first time I wondered about the Queen. Is she really rather dull and stupid? Or is she thinking “How do people as dull and stupid as this ever get to be Ministers?” Or is, for her, the whole thing so stale and deja vu after forty years that she’d really rather be going round the stables at Highclere, patting racehorses on the nose? I suppose it might feel different if she had real power. And yet she does have the power. It’s all there in the Constitution, all she has to do is renounce the Civil List for her ill-favored siblings, pay taxes on her private wealth, and get on with it.

I drove back to the House [of Commons], and had a boring, overcooked lunch in the Members’ dining room.

By contrast, although it occurs ten pages before Stothard’s closing soliloquy, it is the clever, astringent Miss R who gets in the real last word in The Senecans. At the end of their final interview, she rounds on her condescending host and declares:

You have spent most of your life just looking, not doing. Lucky for you, I think, now that I know a bit more about where you’ve been. I’ve learned a lot from the Senecans but I don’t want a new breed of them. Do you?

Whether or not one wants to see the breed continue, it’s hard to imagine it escaping extinction for much longer. If I manage to outlive it, I for one will miss it.

Aram Bakshian Jr. served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan and has written extensively on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts for American and overseas publications.

Image: The Death of Seneca, Manuel Domínguez Sánchez. Wikimedia Commons/Public domain