Why Mick's as true blue as Maggie
EMINENT ELIZABETHANS BY PIERS BRENDON (Jonathan Cape £17.99)
Rock 'n' reactionary? Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall in 1981
Short biographies seem to have gone out of fashion, and as a result many a weary reader turns from the latest magnum opus on a famous figure, yearning for a book not a doorstop.
For example Andrew Motion’s tome on Philip Larkin is over 500 pages long, and much as I admire both writer and subject, the ‘laundry-lists’ of minutiae are just too much. That’s what makes Eminent Elizabethans entirely refreshing.
Thirty years ago, Piers Brendon penned vignettes of four notable people whom he thought could ‘unlock the Edwardian age’. Now he has applied his brisk, experienced pen to four figures he considers suitably representative of the age of Elizabeth II.
His model is Lytton Strachey’s witty and pithy Eminent Victorians. In style and spirit he’s a worthy successor. ‘Undue reverence’ he states, ‘is death to biography, which demands . . . the steely dissection of personality.’
Witty and pithy: Lytton Strachey, who wrote Eminent Victorians
Piers Brendon steers well clear of reverence, and while sometimes this may feel a tad unfair, it makes for a witty and invigorating read. You may argue with his choices, but how on earth to pick just four figures to encapsulate the spirit of our multi-faceted age?
Brendon has chosen Rupert Murdoch, Prince Charles, Margaret Thatcher and Mick Jagger. Of course there could have been others - but John Lennon (for example), would not have fitted his thesis.
The author believes that the international media mogul, the heir to the throne, the first female Prime Minister, and the lead singer of the Rolling Stones, though so different, played comparable roles within the new Elizabethan Age.
‘Each transcended national boundaries . . . Each aroused intense controversy . . . and each was ambivalent towards the great contemporary process of change, promoting it and opposing it, flirting with radicalism yet still embracing conservatism.’
This last point is the most intriguing and Piers Brendon stands it up very well, pointing out that each of his subjects ‘tilted against the old order to maintain the status quo.’ He paints four crisp, vivid portraits of fascinating individuals who wielded great power (in their very different ways) and who posed as reformers while proving themselves reactionaries at heart.
So Murdoch, the avowed populist and hater of the British establishment and privilege, is ‘a fervent neocon who served his own purposes by espousing capitalism red in tooth and claw’.
Brendon sees a similar contradiction at the heart of the Prince of Wales’s life, observing that he preached radical, unorthodox ideas on farming, medicine, and so on, but ‘in practise [he always uses the past tense to give historical distance] Charles was indissolubly wedded to tradition’ and ‘only favoured novelty when it embodied spiritual or holistic qualities calculated to sustain venerable institutions like the monarchy’.
800...
...The number of companies owned by Murdoch's empire at its peak in 2000
It may seem obvious that Margaret Thatcher would want to maintain the status quo, but Brendon’s analysis hinges on her claim to be a rebel leader bent on destroying old-fashioned ‘one-nation’ Toryism, and yet ending up as a near-despot who used the royal ‘we’.
Mick Jagger seems to be the author’s least favourite subject (by my reading at least) and for him Brendon saves his most biting acid: ‘As evidenced by his anachronistic ambition to become a gentlemen and his eventual acceptance of a knighthood, the essential Jagger was a grasping social climber, eager to join the Establishment, not to beat it.’
Brendon's quickfire dissection of the period from the Sixties onwards is not particularly original (end of deference, sexual revolution, New Labour etc) but presents the social background to the four case studies with deft piquancy.
His larger point is that the ambiguities embodied within his four make them representative of our culture. So for example, we embrace technology but cling to ‘quasi-archaic pageantry’; we entered the EU yet remain ‘Little Englanders;’ we favoured an egalitarian society yet have done nothing to meet the expectations of those Sixties radicals - an elected head of state, open government, a disestablished Church of England, and the ‘withering away’ of the public schools.
It’s all merrily contentious stuff - and Brendon wears his mask of criticism well, while secretly cherishing (I feel) an admiration, even affection, for at least three of his subjects.
Anti-war: Mick Jagger took part in the demonstrations at Grosvenor Square, London in 1968
And it’s very strange to read a book and see (with a shock) your own life passing before your eyes.
In chronological order - I hitch-hiked to see the Rolling Stones in 1964 and was ‘with’ Jagger at the anti-Vietnam demonstration (which he called a riot) in Grosvenor Square in 1968. Who knows, we might have held hands marching forward on the police line . . .
In 1971 I was one of the first journalists to profile Margaret Thatcher, after spending two days with her on the road, and to tip her as a future PM. As for Rupert Murdoch, I was a columnist on two of his newspapers.
Last (but most certainly not least) the Prince of Wales is the one out of the four whom I know best and most admire.
Thinking of Prince Charles in his 60s, still waiting, but increasingly outshone by his sons as he was once by his first wife; of Murdoch at Leveson, inarticulate, stumbling and unimpressive; of the Iron Lady sadly diminished by failing powers; of wrinkled Jagger still ready to prance if the money’s good enough - it’s hard to avoid melancholy.
What price dignity now? The millennium rolled over and we all became old before we knew it. So it must always be, for revolutionaries and conservatives alike - sentimental for the 'good ole days', but never accepting that they’ve gone.
