I confess to being a serial book scavenger, to the despair of the groaning bookcases in my London flat. Last week in Tokyo, true to type, I wandered up Jimbocho, the city’s famed book town, to Kitazawa, a fourth-generation English-language antiquarian shop. On its narrow shelves I found Roy Jenkins’s Asquith, Churchill’s Marlborough, Harold Nicolson’s George V, and Harold Macmillan’s The Past Masters, all together in that Japanese bookstore. That unlikely shelf prompted a familiar reflection: the long tradition of statesmen who wrote history.
The writing of history and philosophy was … a natural extension of public life
It was one of the most enduring habits of the ancient world: the tendency of prominent statesmen in Athens and Rome to turn their hand to history, philosophy, and even serious literature. Consider, for example, how Pericles, in his Funeral Oration, sought to distill the defining virtues of Athenian democracy at its fifth-century peak. Or how Julius Caesar chronicled his own times with cold precision and beautiful Latin, shaping the legacy of the Gallic and Civil Wars in anticipation of how they would be remembered after his death. Marcus Aurelius, emperor and Stoic, remains one of the most accomplished philosophical writers in the Latin tongue. For such figures, the writing of history and philosophy was, indeed, a private indulgence and an intellectual exercise, but also crucially a natural extension of public life.
If we move forward through the Renaissance and into Georgian and Victorian Britain, we find this classical instinct alive and well in the British Republic of Letters. Major politicians conceived of themselves as heirs to the ancient world and continued its literary tradition. The names of Burke, Gladstone, and Disraeli are only the most conspicuous examples. Churchill, an amateur journalist and self-taught historian, chronicled his great contemporaries and wrote one of the most perceptive accounts of the Second World War. In the post-war years, politicians from every party balanced life at Westminster with writing: diaries, memoirs (Macmillan’s may be the most alarmingly detailed ever published); biographies of political ancestors like Roy Jenkins’ great Liberals; works of political thought like Crosland’s The Future of Socialism, or literary essays such as Michael Foot’s studies of Byron, which suggest a better critic than party leader. This was not an articulation of politics as something more than spreadsheet politics, but an offering of civic instruction.
This flashback stirs a certain nostalgia (in great and growing supply these days), at least in those who prefer to dwell between past and present, and view the future with something closer to mistrust than hope. But one must not linger on the surface of reminiscence, however tempting the impulse. What matters more is the fact that such works are no longer produced by politicians. This speaks, in part, to the condition of political life, but also to the reading public, the consumers of such writing. Consider just one example that captures both sides of the phenomenon.
In 1995, Jenkins won the Whitbread Prize for biography. Lord Jenkins, surely with a feline flicker of satisfaction, gathered his friends in the House of Lords: Rothschilds, Avons, Devonshires, and a smattering of political and journalistic grandees from across the spectrum were in attendance. Jenkins prided himself on being the last Whig who kept friends in every party. The book in question was his biography of Gladstone, still found today in Oxfam shops (I spotted two in my local at Kensington last month) and the second-hand corners of Charing Cross Road. Jenkins was not the greatest historian; someone once called him the supreme purveyor of other people’s wisdom. But that was hardly the point. By sheer force of personality and reputation, he turned political history into a product fit for wide consumption, and there was still an audience ready to receive it.
That entire scene, not so distant in time, belongs to another aesthetic and intellectual world. Perhaps even another galaxy. It is hard to imagine any contemporary politician pulling off the same evening. Imagine a similar party today: the Chancellor presenting a book on Ramsay MacDonald to a crowd of TikTok advisers and communications directors.
There are, admittedly, a few exceptions. William Hague has written one of the finest biographies of William Pitt the Younger (projection, or unfulfilled dreams?). Jesse Norman, the Tory MP, has tried to re-introduce Burke to his party and its voters with a well-researched biography. And on the left, Tristram Hunt — though he left politics for the V&A — remains a serious historian of early modern Britain. These are only the edge cases, not the norm.
Writing is intertwined with another intellectual activity, from which it usually springs, reading. Today’s political leaders rarely cite The Leopard, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare when invited onto Desert Island Discs. And those who still read and write produce very different works altogether. The reading public, for its part, has become accustomed to political memoirs or pseudo-manifestos designed for short-term consumption. Most of them serve one of three purposes: to burnish a career, to salvage a fading reputation, or simply to rewrite the story. In some sense, this has always been the case. But it was once done with historical perspective and intellectual reach, measured both against the present and the past, offering a kind of depth that shaped not only our understanding of what was, but also our thinking about what could come next.
What does this intellectual drought reveal about public life today? First, the inner life, the vita contemplativa, is simply no longer available to most modern politicians. They should not be sneered at. Most of them work harder than the public imagines and genuinely care. In Westminster they are expected to perform as media personalities rather than as parliamentarians who reflect in their spare hours. Intellectual depth takes time, and time has been consumed by communications strategy, social media, and the relentless churn of twenty-four-hour politics. Even the most ambitious would-be political author (and there are still some) is likely to find the air unbreathable. The old idea that an MP might spend the summer reading Livy, or writing an essay on Wollstonecraft seems almost laughable.
The first requirement of a statesman is a capacity to describe
Second, there was once a time when the ability to write (and to speak) well was seen as a necessary condition of a complete political personality, statesmanship. Writing and rhetoric were the vehicles through which public figures explained their ideas to the wider world, a conduit to exegesis. The first requirement of a statesman is a capacity to describe.
Here’s a caveat: The decline of literary politicians should not be mourned out of snobbery, but because it signals a deeper loss: that public service, the vocation of citizen and statesman alike, requires imagination, judgment, and the capacity to step back, to see events in proportion and perspective. For all their faults the politicians of old read and wrote for pleasure, for argument, because they believed it was their duty to understand the culture and country they were trying to govern. If history is the lifeblood of a people, we must study the veins from which it flows.
Pericles at the Pnyx and Jenkins in the Lords likely wrote their words with their own hands. Can we say the same of today’s political memoirs? The shelf remains marked “Politics,” though what it holds is seldom political, and only occasionally prescient.
