Arena of Ambition; Icon Books 418 pp; £25.00 stg; by Stephen Parkinson
IN BRITAIN, the expenses claims made by MPs for moat-clearing, non-existent mortgages, ornamental duck houses and the like have generated much appalled comment. Yet it is worth remembering that the House of Commons and its members were once held in higher regard. In Victorian England, working-class men even formed debating societies deliberately modelled on the lower house at Westminster. Rather posher, longer-established and more elaborate than these proletarian associations were the Oxford and Cambridge Union Societies, the latter being the subject of Stephen Parkinson’s diverting book. Founded by undergraduates in 1815, the Cambridge Union held formal debates on the topics of the day, adopting parliamentary-style nomenclature and conventions, from the layout of the chamber (despatch boxes and all), to motions of no confidence.
The parallels with parliament were no coincidence: the 19th-century union was designed to provide training in British politics to well-born men who saw a political career as their natural destiny, duty, or some combination of both.
For these men, rhetoric mattered, speechmaking prowess being a criterion for political success; mastering the arts of politics in the union chamber was more important than getting a good Master of Arts. It is unfortunate, therefore, that this book devotes relatively little space to the union’s early history, the years 1815-1939 being confined to an introductory chapter. Things improve thereafter, with Parkinson’s story being complemented by the recollections of union luminaries, including Douglas Hurd, Norman Lamont and Arianna Huffington (of Huffington Post fame). What emerges from these reminiscences is the seriousness of it all. The future Labour peer Greville Janner hired a speech trainer to improve his rhetorical performance while Norman Lamont “spent the whole of the long vacation” mugging up for a speech against the motion that “Germany should remain divided”. Such dedication was absurd, but not entirely inexplicable. At least until recent decades, such debates could be significant cultural events, sometimes reported in the Times and even broadcast on radio and television.
Since the 1970s, however, the extra-Cantabrigian world has evinced progressively less interest in the oratorical efforts of evening dress-clad undergraduates, something that Parkinson – union president in 2004 – perhaps understandably sidesteps. This may reflect the fact that the set-piece speech is less important in politics (at least on this side of the Atlantic) than it had been previously: “there isn’t oratory any more”, Sir John Nott complains in his contribution to this volume. More generally, the union’s decline can be connected to the fortunes and status of the institution it emulates. In Britain, the reputation of parliament is at a low ebb and has been for some years. After the generation of Howard and Lamont, the stars of the union shone less brightly, and many of those that coruscated at all tended away from politics and towards the City, the law and the media. (union president in 1975 and a man whose gifts to British culture include Ready Steady Cook and Big Brother, Peter Bazalgette is an outstanding example.) And whatever we may make of the Cambridge Union, with its long history of social and political conservatism, pettifogging internecine politics and undergraduate tomfoolery, this is probably a development that should give cause for concern. Probably.
Paul Readman is head of the department of history at King’s College London, and author of Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880-1914 (Boydell Brewer, 2008)