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Lord Manny Shinwell has indeed "lived through it all". His memoirs—a record
of seventy years in the political and trade union arena of this country—are
in effect a political history of our century. He takes us from Lord
Salisbury's victory in the election of 1900 to Edward Heath's in 1970. He
was already heckling a future Prime Minister, Bonar Law, in the election of
1906; he was a Parliamentary candidate in Lloyd George's "Khaki Election" of
1918; he became an M.P. in 1922, and was immediately invited to become a
junior minister, in charge of the Mines Department, in the first Labour
Government.
When Ramsay MacDonald and a few of his colleagues broke with the Labour
Party in 1931, and formed a coalition with Baldwin and the Tories, he urged
Shinwell to go with him, but Shinwell refused; and in the 1935 election
Shinwell achieved a remarkable triumph by ousting MacDonald from his
seemingly safe seat at Seaham. And since then Shinwell has been Minister of
Fuel, War Minister and Minister of Defence. Now he is finally established as
one of Parliament's Grand Old Men.
He writes here with the frankness and pungency, and with the fairness and
moderation, that we have come to expect from him in Parliament. His purpose
in this book, as he says at the outset, is "not to rake casually over
political history" but to draw particular attention to "events which
confounded expectations, either fortuitously or deliberately, and failed to
promote any fundamental and progressive change". He takes a broad view at
all times.
He is fascinating, too, about some of the great "ifs" of modern history.
Churchill's impetuous resignation in 1931 cleared the way for Chamberlain to
move into No. 10: if only he hadn't resigned . . . Rival Tory candidates
stood in the St George's by- election of that year, and the victory of the
pro-Baldwin candidate (Duff Cooper) made possible the National Government,
and destroyed the hopes of a Labour victory at the general election: if
only...
The General Strike; the years of Appeasement; the War Cabinet; Labour's
first period in power as well as in office; the thirteen years of Tory rule;
the Wilson Administration—Shinwell takes us through it all. His criticisms
are often severe—of Chamberlain, Hoare, Lindemann (Churchill's "backroom
brain"), Hugh Dalton, Stafford Cripps—but his assessments are always
balanced.
The book is a splendid survey of our times—perceptive, humane, personal,
factual, provocative—and it concludes with an Elder Statesman's political
analysis of our present and future. It is a fitting climax to a memorable
career.
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