Take two men and a woman in a scuttled boat …

… add the father of the political novel. It was a classic sting operation.

Diane Abbott quipped some weeks ago on This Week that some colleagues were leaving Westminster to spend more time with their directorships.

It took but a small inducement on the part of the Channel 4 Dispatches team for 10 MPs to attend an interview to expose Diane Abbott’s disdain as being well grounded. Three ex-ministers queued up to make the case for employment pursuing the interests of the clients of a ‘new’ lobbying company.

Stephen Byers ‘like a cab for hire’ will live in the annals of political sleaze. The sharp, pointed political quip is usually intended to demolish the opposition and present the speaker as belonging to the party of righteous argument. Byers’ remark must now rank with Mandy’s, no not that Mandy – Mandy Rice Davies’ quote ‘He would say that wouldn’t he!’

Lest we forget, Labour MPs were not alone and Tory MP, John Butterfill will not be taking up his expected seat on the red benches.

Some weeks ago I took down from the bookshelves John Galt’s The Member, written in 1831 on the eve of parliamentary reform that was designed to blow away the whole sordid business of a corrupt parliament. The spate of sleaze stories suggested it was time for a reread.

Galt, who shares with James Hogg a facility for language and a legacy of well written, pithy novels, is, like Hogg, an author towering above the often verbose, turgid and over-lauded Sir Walter as the real genius of Scottish literature in the early nineteenth century.

Galt knew the world he was writing about. He was the master of the autobiographical genre in fiction, deeply rooted in reality, and the father of the political novel. It seems he opened a door on a subject that may not have changed so very much with the expectations of the 1832 Reform Act.

Amongst his various occupations Galt was – yes – a parliamentary lobbyist.

Ian Gordon in his introduction to the 1972 edition of The Member wrote: ‘It is a novel, not a treatise in political science, the first political novel in English. Structurally it has all the characteristics of all the best Galt novels, which Galt himself called theoretical histories of society’.

The bubbly and effervescent Diane Abbott, late Thursday evening companion of Michael Portillo, is right to be incensed that the antics of a few tar the reputations of the many hard working conscientious MPs of all parties who do not seek to augment their parliamentary pay with thousands per day in bought ‘influence’.

Or should that be – the antics of the many tarring the few?

Of course it was different in the day of nabob MP, Archibald Jobbry. Jobbry was Galt’s fictitious but rather real politician in search of power, patronage and influence and he was not paid. He bought his constituency.

Duck houses, moats, second and third homes, tax switching, renting scams, storage shelving in derelict basements, cash for honours, cash for questions no wonder increasing numbers of voters are becoming no voters.

If the universal franchise is to mean something in reality then it is incumbent on us all to seek out the candidate who will best represent the interests of the many over the few.

A number of years ago a political psychologist noted that the swingometer had displayed a massive shift from don’t know to don’t care.

If in the coming election the ‘won’t vote constituency’ outnumber the winning party then responsibility for change and transparency is to use an appropriate phrase, ‘ducked’.

Power and responsibility is in the gift of the people. It is not an option for the conscientious to forgo making the best judgment they are capable of. Openness and transparency are virtues we must all partake of because otherwise we hand power to latter day Jobbrys.

What is so fascinating about Jobbry is that his opinions still resonate with today’s political debate and his reasoning and conclusions may display some merit. In a conversation with a long serving MP, Jobbry on impending government expenditure cuts, notes: ‘… they cannot reduce the establishments without making so may people poorer and obliging them to reduce their establishments, thereby spreading distress and privation wider. It is not a time to reduce public appointments when there is national distress; the proper season is when all is green and flourishing’.

Sir John agrees with Jobbry’s sentiments  ‘…but a mere system of economising – of lessening expenditure during a period of general hardship – is paving the way for revolution’.

On observations of difference between the parties Jobbry notes: ‘but between Whigs and Tories I can make no distinction – a Tory is but a Whig in office and a Whig but a Tory in opposition, which makes it not difficult for a conscientious man to support the government’.

In 1972 Georges Pompidou was quoted in the Observer: ‘A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service.’

Plus ça change. Plus c’est la meme chose. (Alphonse Karr)

John Galt 1779-1839

The son of a sea captain, John Galt was born in Irvine in 1779. The family later moved to Greenock and Galt worked for 8 years till 1804 as an apprentice justice clerk. It was around this time he started to write, continuing when he left Greenock to make a business career in London.

He spent 1809 touring the continent where he met and became friendly with Lord Byron. Galt later wrote a biography of Byron (1830) ‘It was bitterly attacked and enthusiastically praised, and it kept on selling.’

He wrote regularly for Blackwood’s Magazine and between 1812 and 1823 a great deal of his literary output was published in Maga and other periodicals. Blackwood published a spate of Galt’s best known novels in a 2 year period – Annals of the Parish and The Ayrshire Legatees in 1821; Sir Andrew Wylie, The Provost, The Steam Boat and The Entail in 1822. Then came the argument about money.

Having fallen out with Blackwood, Galt moved to Oliver and Boyd in 1823 where this reviewer, some 148 years later, first came in contact with Galt’s writing, letters and manuscripts and arranged an exhibition during the 1972 Edinburgh Festival to mark the publication of John Galt: The life of a writer by Professor Ian A Gordon.  The exhibition subsequently moved to Greenock to mark 800 years of the town’s civic achievements just before local government reform in 1974.

Oliver & Boyd published Ringan Gilhaize, a story about the covenanters in 3 volumes in 1823. Ringan broke new barriers and critics have described this overlooked novel as comparable to James Hogg’s masterpiece Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Galt succeeded in a dark tale dispassionately evoked, whereas Scott’s Old Mortality (1816) in Galt’s opinion, ‘treated the defenders of the Presbyterian Church with too much levity.’

Levity and the Presbyterian Church I will leave for discussion another day.

Ringan was nevertheless a serious study of the dark side of religious fanaticism, a tale covering 150 years convincingly related in Galt’s autobiographical style. The manuscript, now in the National Library of Scotland, I can attest was written fluently with few corrections.

Just as suddenly as he had left for London in 1804, Galt gave up novel writing and went to Canada in 1826 as Superintendent of Upper Canada. In Canada he founded the city of Guelph and the town of Galt is named after him.  Three years later he was back in London following differences with the company and found himself in a debtors prison. Like Scott, Galt returned to writing to pay his debts.

The Member and a subsequent political novel, The Radical, were published in 1832. Galt was breaking new ground again but as he had chosen a periodical rather than a book publisher neither title was reprinted.

Scottish Academic Press finally produced a new edition of The Member edited by Ian Gordon in 1975, following Gordon’s study of Galt’s oeuvre published by Oliver & Boyd in 1972.

It was not until 2000 that Canongate reprinted both titles in a single volume in their Canongate Classics series. The Radical was finally available to a new generation of readers after an absence of over 160 years.

John Galt returned to live in the old family home in Greenock in 1834 and continued to write till his death there in 1839.

Russell Bruce, Books Editor

References

Ian A Gordon, John Galt: The life of a writer, Oliver and Boyd 1972
John Galt, The Member: An Autobiography, Edited by Ian A Gordon, Scottish Academic Press 1975

Canongate Classics
John Galt, The Member and The Radical, Canongate 2000, paperback 263pp £5.99
John Galt, Ringan Gilhaize, Canongate 1995, paperback 510pp £6.99

Both paperbacks are regrettably now out of print but Canongate inform us that they plan to make Canongate Classics available  as e-books later in the year

Illustrations

Top left: the John Galt Drawing by Daniel Maclise is from the frontispiece of ‘John Galt; The life of a writer’.
The image is owned by the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Top right: the book cover – ‘John Galt; The life of a writer’ shows a portrait of John Galt by Charles Gray, which hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.