The Spice of Life

I’ve written before about political diaries – one of my favourite forms of literature – and I’ve just been reading another example of the genre in the form of Michael Spicer’s The Spicer Diaries, published earlier this year by Biteback Publishing.

First, a word about Biteback itself. It’s terrific. Back in the good days of Politico’s Publishing, when it was still run by Iain Dale, you could be sure of getting hold of political memoirs and studies of current affairs that no one else wanted to touch, because sales were never likely to be sufficient to pique the interest of a major publisher.

This was particularly the case with books about the Tories at a time when the Conservative Party was at its lowest ebb. Politico’s published biographies of Ann Widdecombe and William Hague (by Nicholas Kochan and Jo-Anne Nadler respectively), reflections on the nature of office by Gillian Shephard, and Simon Walters’s magnificent account of the Hague years, Tory Wars. None of these were huge hits, but they made a major contribution to the historical record, for which I – amongst many others – am extremely grateful.

Biteback is a continuation of Politico’s by other means. Again run by Iain Dale, it’s again putting out books that other publishers would turn down without a second thought. Including this one.

Michael Spicer was one of the key figures in the failed Tory rebellion against the Maastricht Treaty in the early-1990s and a leading backbench Eurosceptic. He wasn’t as well known to the public as some of his noisier colleagues, say Bill Cash and Teresa Gorman, but as he explained: ‘If you want to be effective, don’t go for recognition.’

The Diaries are, to be honest, more useful than they are interesting. Spicer doesn’t have the eye for gossip and human detail that makes for a genuinely great diarist. Instead we get over six hundred pages chronicling an endless round of meetings and telephone calls, many of them concerned with episodes and issues that barely touched the public consciousness at the time. A few years on, it’s hard to care a great deal about a letter that the MP Christopher Gill wrote (but didn’t send) to the Daily Telegraph concerning fishing policy; but it still warrants a page of its own, dutifully recording discussions on the question with Michael Howard, John Redwood, Eric Forth and John Townend.

As I was reading it, I was constantly reminded of Woodrow Wyatt’s diaries and for a while I couldn’t quite work out why. After all, Wyatt – despite the irritating snobbishness and the tedious stuff about wine and horse-racing – was at heart a social-climbing gossip. But then it twigged. With the exception (in both cases) of Margaret Thatcher, none of the key collaborators or interlocutors are women. The likes of Teresa Gorman, Ann Widdecombe, Edwina Currie and Theresa May wander past occasionally, but they really don’t interest Spicer at all.

Instead, this is an almost exclusively male vision of high politics, as practised in the back-corridors of power, in gentlemen’s clubs and at private dinners.

It’s also striking that there is hardly any mention of Spicer’s electorate, just the occasional reference to local party officials in his Worcestershire constituency. There's not much about the media, either, since Spicer was seldom to be seen or heard on television or radio, and hardly a glimmer of humour anywhere to be found. Consequently, it feels like a terribly old-fashioned account of a political life.

So it’s not really a book for the general reader. But then that’s the point of Biteback. When historians look back at the Maastricht debate and its fallout, they’ll be grateful that The Spicer Diaries exist.