By Jonathan Todd
“These days I keep coming across traces of vanished Labour social programmes,” writes Polly Toynbee in her 2023 memoir, “where some academics have kept measuring the results, holding onto proof of what succeeds in improving lives for the future day, if it ever comes, when another government as keen on social programmes revives these attempts.”
I was lucky to interview Polly on stage as part of the Political Therapy series that we run at 1000 Trades on the day that Rishi Sunak called the general election that ended with such a government. It was a great evening – but I wish I had read the memoir more closely beforehand.
We might have spoken more about her family’s connections to the city in which we were speaking. Her father edited, “a small left-wing newspaper … called the Birmingham Town Crier … One of its purposes was to rally the people against the Munich appeasement and to bar the city to its most famous son, Neville Chamberlain.”
A generation later, Polly’s sister was running, “one of the local neighbourhood housing and social assistance hubs the council was opening … She found herself at war with the council, because although they built the hubs they never let go, never devolving power let alone funds to neighbourhood control.” Plus ça change.
We might have discussed Polly’s touchpoints with Labour giants. “That family holiday in Yugoslavia when aged thirteen I stood on the quay and yelled for help and saved the lives of A. J. Ayer and Hugo Gaitskell who very nearly drowned.” There are, too, entertaining reflections on knowing Roy Jenkins, details of Harold Wilson’s role in Polly’s youthful, African adventures, and Peter Mandelson’s interactions when Polly worked, for journalist purposes, as a nursery assistant.
Or even the many salacious vignettes: “eye-popping tales of the unlikeliest ladies of the house screwing a tradesman on the kitchen table”; “the lavish, extravagant, exotic wastrel beloved of the gossip columns for nearly marrying Princess Margaret”; “sitting on the art roof hurling down tiles before she was expelled (from boarding school): she’s now a splendid radical doctor.”
It is, as ever, the narrative tension that keeps the pages turning.
There are tensions between civic and family roles. Of her great grandfather Polly writes: “Paragons of virtue are hard to live up to. Vegetarian, teetotal, donors of a large slice of their income to good causes, unmaterialistic, high-minded with relatively humble tastes, vigorous anti-imperialists, campaigners for all the great liberal causes – yet all but one of their children went to the bad in one way or another.” Generations of her family alternate between alcoholism and teetotalism.
Tensions between faith and science. The Pope asked a celebrated archaeologist and practising Catholic relative to investigate whether some bones should be ascribed to St Peter. Based on her findings, he proclaimed that they should in his 1950 Christmas message. “Great-Aunt Jocelyn was not quite so unequivocal in her verdict on the holy bones, but nor did she refute the Pope’s more or less infallible assertion.” Jocelyn’s religiosity is unusual among Polly’s family – with a turn to Christianity by her father becoming a tension between him and her.
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