Stakeholder

Unsurprisingly my home is littered with hundreds of biographies from the Medici’s to Mary Tudor; from Lincoln to Lloyd George and from Daniel O’ Connell to WB Yeats. Occasionally personalities such as Eric Cantona, Terry Wogan, John Peel, Dickie Bird and the legendary Micheál O’ Muircheartaigh make the shelves. 

My preference is for political biographies and usually those that are written at the end of a career or post death. Staring at my bookcases I am amazed at how much space contemporary biographies take up. Nowadays one does not have to wait for a career to end as a life can be serialised. The first biography I read was ‘Dublin Made Me’ by Todd Andrews, the father of former Fianna Fail Foreign Affairs Minister, David and grandfather of Barry, a Minister in the current coalition government in the Republic of Ireland.  Todd Andrews was adjutant to Liam Lynch and went to become the driving force behind many of Ireland’s semi state organisations such Bord Na Mona and Coras Iompair Eireann, finally ending up as RTE Chairman. His reflections are regarded as one of the best accounts ever written about the foundations of the Irish State. He was obviously too busy with his day jobs to get around to writing a biography while in office and with astounding honesty he says of himself as a young man that he ‘rarely thought; he felt’.

These days the signatures on letters of resignation have barely dried when political biographies tumble from publishing houses into bookshops. Northern Ireland has made fertile ground for would be biographers only too willing to promote their tuppence worth. Modern political biographies are mostly amusing, if not entertaining for their factual inaccuracies and selective memory retention. Those written by technocrats and party apparatchiks are sometimes acts of betrayal either of confidences or contract. Indeed they usually contain over inflated views of advice – given or not – taken or not in circumstances that over play their importance. Two former NIO officials who have put pen to paper have ensured that a reader would need to have the Wisdom of Solomon to determine the actual truth from these two contemporaries’ accounts of the same political period.

Modern biographers claim an almost papal like infalliablity when it comes to their scribbling, but in the foreword to his book, ‘Dublin Made Me’, Todd Andrews had no such arrogance. He wrote ‘this is a book recollected by me in my seventies. It has been written largely, though not wholly, from memory. I am particularly aware of that phenomenon of memory known to psychologists as paramnesia, where events as they really occurred are distorted, telescoped, transposed or otherwise confused.’ 

In recent years the ‘midwives’ (and they appear to be legion) to the peace process have rushed pen to paper. Some are so sloppy in their detail that they could be a sequel to the Tales from Narnia. Others are little more than exercises in mutual back-slapping. A few can hit the mark and one or two are really job applications in long hand.

When it comes to the felling of forests to secure their moment in the sun, the architects of New Labour appear to be quite prolific. Peter Mandelson’s recent contribution; ‘The Third man’ is a masterpiece of creativity from the pen of a man who found the time to write his biography while running no less than fourteen government departments. Yet the biography adds little new to what we already know about the so called ‘Prince of the Dark Arts’.

 

Then along comes ‘Call me, Tony’ with his door-stop of an autobiography –‘A Journey’.  As biographies go it is refreshingly candid- though, it is by and large, an exercise in self justification. The pages heave with the cries of a man looking for affirmation. Not that it will come as a surprise but he says that ‘politicians are obliged from time to time to conceal the full truth, to bend it and even distort it’ but one doubts if the families of the several hundred dead soldiers would agree with that political obligation. If Blair went to war while ‘concealing’, ‘bending’ or ‘distorting’- the full truth, it will take more than stalwart defence of his actions in an autobiography to protect his reputation.  He has the convictions of a zealot but may yet be convicted for his zeal.

But for real entertainment the best memoirs are those of the late Alan Clarke described as lecherous, malicious, self pitying but compulsive; proving that not all politicians are uninteresting!