Whitehall’s murky recesses

Peter Hennessy is one of the most engaging and perceptive commentators of our time, so it was with a feeling of pleasurable anticipation that I approached his latest book. This was increased when I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that he had stood as the Conservative candidate in his school’s 1964 mock general election.

My anticipation was heightened by his introduction, which promises an examination of the roles of myth and imagination in the writing of history. Of the many quotations we are treated to, the one which seemed best to reinforce that promise appears on the very first page, and comes from Enoch Powell:

All history is myth. It is a pattern which men weave out of the materials of the past. The moment a fact enters into history it becomes mythical, because it has been taken and fitted into its place in a set of ordered relationships which is the creation of a human mind and not otherwise present in nature.

Most popular

Alexander Larman

Prince Andrew’s Easter appearance was a royal blunder

An examination of this fundamental and eternally fascinating question from the Hennessy pen would indeed be a prospect to savour.

This book, however, is not it. What we have instead is a series of chapters almost all of which had their origin in lectures which the author has given to various distinguished audiences. This inevitably means that it is difficult to discern a common theme — certainly not the theme promised in the introduction — and that the chapters are of variable quality.

There is, for example, an interesting one on the history of policy-making in relation to Britain’s nuclear deterrent. But whether it was necessary to take up 22 pages with a comprehensive chronology of every meeting and document dealing with this subject between 1940 and 2011, including a separate listing of each of the six meetings of the Official Group on the Future of the Deterrent in 2005-6 is, to put it mildly, questionable.