Still in the dark

From the timing of Michael Crick’s book on the Leader of the Opposition we can surmise that the author, like most of the rest of us, has made his mind up already about the result of the imminent election. There will be nothing significant to add after 5 May. The Tory party will not win the coming contest, and Michael Howard will not be prime minister. So best to get this unauthorised biography out on the shelves now, when at least its subject is doing something interesting. Even though the Tories seem placed to do better than in the last two debacles, there is unlikely to be such consistent publicity for this work in a month’s time.

Mr Crick is usually a careful journalist — there is one exception to that, and an important one, to which I shall come later — and this book is a work of careful journalism. It is thorough and well-researched, in some respects exceptionally so. Not only does it chart the life of Michael Howard through its many vicissitudes; it also traces the far more complex story of his antecedents. Those who know Mr Howard will recognise him clearly from the picture Crick paints of him. That is not least because he is as enigmatic, inconsistent and puzzling in real life as he is in these pages.

Aspects of Crick’s work on this book seriously rattled the Leader of the Opposition, who professed to begin with to be ‘relaxed’ about this interim work of biography. Relaxation changed to concern when Crick managed to establish that Howard’s grandfather, one Morris Wurz- berger, had lived here as an illegal immigrant for almost the last 20 years of his life. Indeed, when Howard’s father, Bernat Hecht, and his aunt (a survivor of Auschwitz) applied for naturalisation in the late 1940s, they both claimed their father was dead.