This is a long quote and deserves a post all of it’s own.
Sir Hartley Shawcross, after the Labour victory [1945], had announced: ‘We are the masters at the moment.’ But who were the ‘we’ in this sentence?
The most eloquent answer to this question in art is found in Anthony Powell’s comic masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, the first volume of which, A Question of Upbringing, was published in 1951. The story begins in the year 1911 at an unnamed boarding school, obviously Eton, as the hero, Nick Jenkins, ambles idly through the winter mist to have tea with his chums. As he makes his way back to the house he passes a very different sort of boy – it is Widmerpool, who forces himself to have a run each afternoon. Widmerpool appears to be no more than a figure of fun in the school section of the book, but even in this early glimpse of him, the narrator and his readers become aware that he is a figure who lives by the will, in some mysterious sense more in tune with his times than the languid, bohemian Nick, who wishes to live by the imagination.
Powell was a close friend of Malcolm Muggeridge at this date, and the two men would often walk round Regent’s Park together discussing the fundamental clash on which the emergent novel was to feed, namely the war between the will and the imagination. Power mania had been an obsession of Muggeridge’s since his Marxist days: what draws men and women to power, how they become addicted to it, how it takes over from other appetites. One of Muggeridge’s beliefs was that power addicts were often dyspeptic, and he rather cruelly attributed Stafford Cripps’s dyspepsia to power addiction. When Widmerpool grows up, he too is a dyspeptic. There is a memorably funny Sunday lunch when Widmerpool gives the narrator a meal in his club, washing down cold tongue with a glass of water. By the time the narrative has reached the postwar period, it is no surprise to find that Widmerpool, a fellow-traveller with the Communists, who has rather dubious associations in Eastern Europe, is an MP in the Labour interest. He has achieved what he wanted from the very beginning, on that run through the winter mists in the Thames Valley: the free exercise of power. Widmerpool is a manager, a wheeler-dealer. He judges people by how they have got on; he has no sense of England’s past, no feeling for people (at quite a late stage of the sequence, he forgets the narrator’s Christian name). Much of Powell’s somewhat peppery Toryism goes into the creation, no doubt, but the novel contains a really acute perception of what had happened to England during the war. It had not been taken over by Bolsheviks or by the working class. Widmerpool is an efficient, ruthless staff officer, a paper pusher. He could easily have said, after the 1945 election: ‘We are the masters.’ He would have meant that the managerial class, previously all but non-existent, had taken over. The growth of bureaucracy in Britain in the postwar years, the filling up of political, Civil Service and professional posts with colourless, pushing people controlling others for the sake of control, was to be a feature of life from then onwards. Widmerpool was a man of his time, and a man of the future.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]
Well, no change there then!
As so often in his two books, The Victorians and After the Victorians, AN Wilson gets his rapier right to the heart of the matter. Although both books are chunky paperbacks (both weigh in at some 500 pages) they are well worth reading – and eminently readable. AN Wilson gives a rather more perceptive, and admittedly slightly jaundiced, view of the history of Britain between the 1830s and 1950s than one finds in the standard texts. He delves under the political and economic covers, especially around the underlying reasons for both world wars and (at least for me) puts a completely new spin on modern British history.