A Different Kind of Weather: a memoir by William Waldegrave – review

All political careers end in failure. But few political memoirs are bold enough to begin with it.

It is hard to decide whether William Waldegrave’s decision to open this book by describing the moment he first glumly realised “how peripheral I was … never again to be on an upswing” is a sign of humility or of unshakeable confidence. But either way, it is unusual and disarming, setting the tone for what might otherwise have seemed an almost insufferably gilded life story. I didn’t expect to be charmed by this book, and yet I was.

This is one of the most honest descriptions I’ve read of how it feels to be born to rule; of how precisely things worked, even in an era supposedly becoming more egalitarian, for a tiny golden circle in which everyone seemingly knew everyone. And although its author hasn’t been in parliament for almost two decades, it feels oddly relevant to our own era of anxiously class-based politics and rage against elites. As the author drily observes of the conversation between his father (himself a former minister under Harold Macmillan) and a fellow peer that secured the young Waldegrave his first job in politics, this was “the kind of old-boy networking of which, of course, the modern world knows nothing”. Ouch.

Born the “spare to the heir” of the Earl of Waldegrave, the young William grew up on the family estate with the faintly feudal, paternalistic customs of the time: estate workers trooping up to the big house at Christmas for presents; his mother founding a free mother-and-baby clinic for villagers long before the NHS was created. And while he makes much of being the youngest of seven children, driven to be heard in adult life mainly because he could barely get a word in edgeways at home, it would be pushing it to describe his life as a struggle. There never really seems much question of whether he will rise to greatness; only of what form that greatness should take.

As a 15-year-old at Eton, instructed to write down his ambitions, he lists being foreign secretary followed by prime minister before retiring to produce the definitive translation of Thucydides. None of this would come to pass and yet one can see why he was so confident and how much that confidence must have helped him. At every step on the road to power, young Waldegrave is subtly made to feel welcome, reassured of his rightful place at the centre of things.

The family name is plastered over everything from the village pub sign to, more coincidentally, the train that takes him away to prep school. Later, visiting Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street as a junior minister, he is pleased to find the portrait hanging behind her is of his ancestor, Sir Robert Walpole. (When told this, Thatcher apparently retorted that her predecessor looked better “since he has been cleaned”. She wasn’t that keen on Waldegrave, a born wet, yet interestingly her memoirs make clear she promoted him on merit.)

After Eton and Oxford, he is ushered smoothly to the heart of the establishment by a network of powerful friends and relations. There is an astonishing passage in which our hero – in need of a job, having lost his post as private secretary to Edward Heath when Heath resigned – refuses a friend’s “generous offer of the political editorship of the Spectator” (despite not having previously been a journalist) and similar offers from the City (on the grounds that money isn’t really a problem) before another patron eases him into a job with the largest private sector company in Britain.

Yet the author comes across as far more likable than this makes him sound. That is partly because he is an engaging raconteur: while the book may be sketchy on detail and baffling in chronology as the political narrative hops around through time, it has some glorious anecdotes. But it’s also because of the way he examines his failures, as if deciding to defuse the prevailing mood of anger against politicians by being first to criticise himself.

Waldegrave is perhaps best remembered as the foreign office minister almost brought down over the arms-to‑Iraq scandal (the trial of a British firm for allegedly busting sanctions on arming Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which collapsed amid revelations that the government had quietly advised it on sales to Iraq). He defends himself fiercely on that one, painting the then trade and defence minister Alan Clark as the real villain – a verdict with which Labour’s grand inquisitor on the affair, Robin Cook, seemingly agreed. But he does so only to point out that, if he was guilty of any resigning offence, it was surely devising the poll tax. (The chapter on this is jauntily entitled “The Poll Tax: all my own work”)

And quite early in his career, watching Thatcher during the Falklands war, he comes to the conclusion that for all his ambitions, he simply doesn’t have what she does, that “I was not quite well-enough equipped for the task. There was something missing”. It begins to occur to him that he may not reach the top or if he does “it would be luck and not by merit”. Even when journalists start writing him up as a rising star, in the 80s, he privately concludes they are wrong. There is an odd echo here of Chris Mullin’s A View from the Foothills, those masterly diaries of a nobody, in which Mullin meticulously documents his irrelevance and wonders whether he’s really cut out for all this.

Yet as Waldegrave candidly admits, at the time he very much felt like somebody. Travelling down Whitehall in a ministerial car after narrowly surviving a potentially career-ending Commons vote, “I thought, ‘How can these people, walking on the pavement, live? How can they find anything of interest, since they do not what I do? Their lives must be shadowy, dull, have nothing compared to this insider life of ministeries, secrets, parliaments, flags, interpreters, crises, fear, fame (of a sort); being somebody.’” This was foolish arrogance, as the mature Waldegrave points out; by then his career was on the slide. But one wonders how many ministers have secretly felt the same and will recognise what he calls the madness, the addictive thrill of being “here in this cockpit, at the centre of this maelstrom” where everything that matters happens.

And that is perhaps the great virtue of writing from this unfashionable distance; of embarking on a memoir not weeks after resigning but decades after, looking back with a certain detachment. Elements of his childhood now look faintly absurd to him, or at least not as they once seemed (what, he wonders, did the villagers really think about having to call a tiny boy Mr William?). On the big themes – press ethics, whether it is sometimes necessary to lie, the limitations of government – the conclusions he draws are relatively timeless and perhaps more honest than serving MPs could afford. Most politics, he argues in one particularly sharp passage, is no more than a “struggle to make things a little better, or to stop them becoming a little worse”. Anyone grandly promising to control things they know full well to be beyond their reach does more harm than good.

And yet, you wonder, in more meritocratic times, would it really have been Waldegrave in that seat, that job, that cabinet? If so, what would he have gained or lost by having to fight a little harder for it? And most uncomfortably of all: how much, in politics or certain other professions, do things work this way still? This is a beautifully drawn, wistfully evocative portrait of an England that is long gone. And yet, you suspect, perhaps not quite gone enough.