The best of a bad bunch ... Benjamin Disraeli. Etching by John Jabez Edwin Mayall/Hulton
"Novelist" is an unlikely early trade for a future prime minister, which is probably why we have only produced two of them and only one that achieved anything with the form that could be called successful.
Politicians don't usually go in for anything like the frivolity of novels. The common accusation that those bestowed with the great privilege of representing our people don't hold much interest in the arts is generally a fair one, especially when looking through a list of the former ministers for culture, media and sport.
When you get a squint at the books politicians keep on their - visible - bookshelves it's very often just biographies you see: great politicians, great newspaper editors, great military leaders (particularly Napoleon), and sundry other great and good sorts. (One rather fears they think of these people as kindred spirits.) Scant room is given to books about stuff that didn't really happen, other than the odd complete Shakespeare or dribble of Trollope.
Every summer politicians delightedly hand over their reading list to any journalist who'll accept it, and what we learn is, well, Westminster has yet to move on from the early 18th-century idea that fiction is a bit of a distraction. Last summer's winners for the MPs' hols were Richard Dawkins, Hague's Pitt, and anything on Blair, Brown or Cameron - the latter bundle presumably purchased so they can rush to the index and check whether they've earned a mention.
It's surprising, then, that the two PMs that did have a go at pretend were pretty big cheeses. Not Cavendish, Chamberlain or even Macmillan (who only made his own publishing house suffer a chestful of indulgent volumes of autobiography). Instead we have Churchill and, of course, Disraeli.
Describing Churchill as an "unsuccessful" anything is a dangerous act on the internet, but hopefully even the twitchiest British patriot will concede that, despite his Nobel prize for literature, the world could have managed just fine without his novel Savrola. A romantic adventure that remains rightly out-of-print, it is difficult to find outside of the British Library where I took a peek at it. Suffice to say, it's like reading Flashman without a tongue being near any cheek, and we should be grateful that in his later books he dropped the fiction bit and starred as his own hero.
Disraeli, on the other hand, would probably still be remembered as a respectable 19th-century novelist even if he and Mr Gladstone (who surely found novels too vulgar) had not dominated the political scene for the second half of the century. The satire of Vivian Grey isn't a huge leap in plot and humour from Evelyn Waugh: Disraeli explores the commercial disaster he experienced when he and some chums tried to start a newspaper. Meanwhile, Henrietta Temple, based on his fun old time with Henrietta Sykes. does for Disraeli's audience what Edwina Currie did for us: giving the reader the pleasure of learning how prime ministers go about their affairs.
His later books become more political, less autobiographical and, for me, less sophisticated as they attempt to show that it's rather grim up North, or so a chap down the club claimed. At times (such as with Manchester-set Sybil) they read like a surreal version of Caroline Aherne's Royle Family, crossed with A Taste of Honey:
"Don't mother me," said the jolly widow with a kindling eye; "go to your own mother, who is dying in a back cellar without a winder, while you've got lodgings in a two pair."
"Dying; she's only drunk," said the youth.
"And if she is only drunk," rejoined Mrs Carey in a passion, "what makes her drink but toil; working from five o'clock in the morning to seven o'clock at night, and for the like of such as you."
"That's a good one," said the youth; "I should like to know what my mother ever did for me, but give me treacle and laudanum when I was a babby to stop my tongue and fill my stomach; by the token of which, as my gal says, she stunted the growth of the prettiest figure in all Mowbray."
Actually, perhaps we should be grateful more PMs haven't had a stab at a novel. As Disraeli's later books show, if they were to try writing it once they knew which job they were aiming for, they'd churn out enough pious crap to depress the whole nation.
We can only hope Gordon Brown doesn't decide it's up to him to step up the plate and save the cultural day. If his last book is anything to go by, we'll be looking forward to a three-volume account of a strict Scottish priest bringing hope to a crippled nation.
