- The Guardian,
- Thursday March 8 2001
Political leaders seem especially afflicted with relatives who keep getting into scrapes. Across the Atlantic, Jimmy Carter had brother Billy; Reagan had a daughter ill-disposed to him and a son who became a ballet dancer; Clinton had a maverick brother and married into a family which now seems even more accident-prone.
Over here, Tony Blair has a teenage son who got drunk and fell down in Leicester Square; a sister-in-law who has taken to journalism; and a father-in-law (Tony Booth) who, the Sunday tabloids tell us, admits to having used cannabis in the sacred precincts of Number 10. Before that, there was John Major's perpetually embarrassing brother Terry. Margaret Thatcher had Mark, the son whom everyone except she and husband Denis thought had been horribly spoiled, who famously distressed her by getting lost in the desert, and whose business interests sometimes looked murky.
There was also, though less disturbingly, Denis, whose rightwing tendencies sometimes broke out when they shouldn't have. I once saw him on the platform at a Conservative party conference flapping his hands together with huge enthusiasm for someone defending a ferociously rightwing cause - which the rest of the platform was pretending not to support. Suddenly in mid-clap he caught sight of Maggie, ostentatiously not applauding, whereupon his hands froze in mid-air.
Harold Macmillan had a wife who conducted a long affair with a louche Tory backbencher of dubious sexual proclivities, though in those buttoned-up days it never got into the press. Churchill's son Randolph, another whose behaviour suggested a spoiled childhood, was famous for causing trouble and making enemies. (When he had a benign tumour removed, Evelyn Waugh remarked: "It is a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph which was not malignant and remove it.") One of his daughters drank and married a comedian.
An even more spectacular case, perhaps, was Oliver Baldwin, son of decent, pipe-smoking, ultra-respectable Stanley. Returning to Britain at the end of the first world war, he repudiated his family, announced his allegiance to Marxism and became a leftwing Labour MP. Despite his break with general practice of refusing to communicate with his family, he relented just enough to denounce his father's government across the floor of the Commons. Also, though such things were not so widely discussed in those days, Oliver was gay, and when unexpectedly appointed governor of the Leeward Islands took his live-in boyfriend along with him.
Relations like these are conventionally seen as a trial to a politician. I'm not so sure this is true. I even suspect that having some family mischief-maker may be a help, not a hindrance. Those with no black sheep in their families can bask in a sense of superiority as they read of the Billy Carters or Hugh Rodhams. Those similarly afflicted can take comfort, perhaps even hope, from seeing that even world leaders have the same problem.
To have difficulties like these humanises politicians, bringing into their lives that dimension of soap opera for which the world nowadays yearns. But there seems to be no one around to humanise Hague. Being ffragrant rather than fflagrant, Ffion is no help in this context. His three older sisters have nothing to give the tabloids. There might have been a frisson of hope when his auntie Marjorie won the best part of a million on the National Lottery. She could have gone wild like the polls winner Viv Nicholson long ago with her war cry of "spend, spend, spend" and even in time got made into a musical.
She might have embarked on wild adventures in Las Vegas or Marrakesh. But not a bit of it. She simply threw a party which was generous but demure and remained in all other senses unspoiled. There ought to be some institution on the lines of the Battersea Dogs Home where political leaders in trouble could acquire some honorary relative, the equivalent of a loveable but constantly mischievous pooch. What an opportunity there is here for some brilliant young entrepreneur! But unlikely to come in time, I fear, to rescue poor William Hague.
