'The most interesting thing is the index' - Review: Malcolm Rifkind: Power and Pragmatism

Harry McGrath

ACCORDING to Malcolm Rifkind in the introduction to his memoir, pragmatic politicians have convictions but consider the consequences of their actions. A conviction politician, on the other hand, “is guided by a clear doctrine, ideology or set of beliefs” and is not for turning.

Rifkind places himself in the first category and there are no prizes for guessing which conviction politician he has in mind as the “supreme” example of the second. However, one man’s pragmatist is another woman’s vacillator and Margaret Thatcher was never entirely convinced by Rifkind. To teach her a posthumous lesson, he identifies Churchill and Disraeli as fellow pragmatists while citing Hitler, Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot as examples of where conviction politics can lead. It’s not the last time that Rifkind appears to be talking across the reader to the ghost of his former boss.

Rifkind was born in Edinburgh into a Lithuanian Jewish family which had immigrated to Britain in the 1890s. He attended George Watson’s College and the University of Edinburgh and, as a young man, travelled to India, Africa and the Middle East. A government minister for 18 years, he was Secretary of State for Scotland, Transport, Defence and Foreign Minister. Only Palmerston exceeds him in uninterrupted service. Add shadow roles and the chairmanship of committees including Intelligence and Security and his should be a glittering story full of intrigue, insight and revelation.

Sadly, the most interesting thing about Rifkind’s memoir is the index. Bill Clinton said that a lot of presidential biographies are self-serving and dull, but even a president of modest intellect would struggle to turn all this promising raw material into such a tedious narrative. Rifkind touches down all over the place, makes no effort to distinguish the profound from the trivial and seems incapable of adding colour to anything. The Clintons are a good example of his gadfly style. His association with them provides the following insights – Bill is a great absorber of information, Hilary is “articulate, good humoured, and clearly a serious public figure in her own right.” From there, it’s on to Cypress.

This inability to focus doesn’t prevent Rifkind from peppering the book with his incontestable authority. A favourite phrase is “quite properly” which is the equivalent of Dr Johnson’s “there’s an end on it”. So, for instance, after the 1979 devolution referendum the government “quite properly” refused to set up a Scottish assembly despite a majority for Yes. The alternative view – that the fix was in – goes unrecorded.

Rifkind’s line on Scotland generally is that Margaret Thatcher didn’t understand the place and needed him as an interpreter. But he didn’t understand Scotland any better than she did. He boasts of being “more Thatcherite than Mrs Thatcher”, managing to privatise the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board when she thought it couldn’t be done. His assessment of Scotland’s opposition to Thatcher is both reductive and offensive. “She was a woman. She was an English woman. And she was a bossy English woman. The combination was impossible to overcome.”

Rifkind’s political career ended in 2015 when he stepped down as MP for Kensington after a Daily Telegraph/Channel 4 “cash for access” sting. In one of the few sustained passages in the book, he portrays himself as an innocent dupe. As is his custom, he tries to draw a line under the affair with “All’s well that ends well”. However, his reflections at the time on entitlement and the inadequacy of MPs' salaries may live longer in the public memory than he would like.

Most retired politicians are “yesterday’s men” to one degree or another, but Rifkind’s career reads like something from the distant past. The position of Secretary of State for Scotland which he once considered viceregal is now diminished to the point of absurdity. The SNP has ended “right to buy” for all council and housing association tenants, reversing the Tenants’ Rights (Scotland) Bill which he lists as one of his achievements. Since the book was published he and Ken Clarke have been caught in an inadvertent Sky live-microphone discussion on the Tory leadership, the two of them subsequently portrayed on Twitter as Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets.

Whether you agree with his politics or not, Rifkind’s career was a remarkable one and it deserves a good memoir. Sadly, those dogged enough to reach the end of this one will regard “the right to produce a second volume of memoirs” as more of a threat than a promise.