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One of Gordon Brown’s defects is that he does not defend his colleagues properly. On the Today programme on Monday, his choice of words made Alistair Darling sound like a thing of the past, and his answer over the Damian McBride scandal managed gratuitously to drag in Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, even though the latter is one of his own Cabinet ministers. Mr Brown’s one concern seemed to be to prove how unthinkable it was that he himself could have done any wrong. Doesn’t he realise that leaders are supposed to be unreasonable in the public defence of their colleagues, even when they hate them? Doesn’t he understand that if he won’t defend them, they will kill him?
Reading Antony Beevor’s powerful new book, D-Day (Penguin), I was struck again by how difficult it is for us to understand how people who were not necessarily personally wicked supported the Nazis. Perhaps it helps to read across to the recent story of the discovery of new poems by W.H. Auden. These were, in fact, translations, which Auden turned into English poems, of songs from a Soviet pro-Lenin film in 1935. Rendering one of them more or less as a hymn, Auden has a peasant speaking of being ‘…a slave although unchained,/ Till through my darkness shone a ray/ And Lenin’s truth I gained’. The purpose of the poems was, via Lenin, to glorify Stalin. When these poems were published last month, people did point out that they were slightly embarrassing in their propaganda for totalitarianism, but no one pushed the point. If it were discovered that Auden had written this sort of thing, at that sort of time, about Hitler, we would never hear the end of it. Yet you can only begin to comprehend the pseudo-religious appeal of the 20th-century totalitarians when you recognise that one was very much like another. The reputations of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao etc. diverge more according to whether or not they survived than because of any moral difference.
Kingsley Amis once told me a story about how this point was well made. He knew a man who was an interior decorator. One day, the man was commissioned to improve the house of a rich, left-wing woman in Hampstead. Above the main staircase was a huge portrait of Lenin. Kingsley’s friend decided on a tease. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked the real-life Mrs Dutt Pauker. ‘Hang on, don’t tell me, don’t tell me… I know: Hitler!’
It was encouraging to read at the weekend that hard times are making it more likely that museum charges will need to be reintroduced. Although it sounds a wonderful thing that everyone is allowed free into great collections, the effect is to give more power to the body that pays — the government. It is not a coincidence that the Labour government which ended museum charges has also terrorised museums over ‘access’, and even over what they choose to exhibit. It has promoted an idea of culture in which artistic value is judged solely by getting the right ‘footfall’. The belief that collections have a duty to the past and to the future and to the objects in their care has been supplanted by the doctrine of ‘diversity’. Our great national collections, like our great universities, would be much better guardians of their contents if they had their own endowments and their own revenue. Charge!
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