The genius of Hilary Mantel

Yes, but why did the IMF put out its Tuesday night statement? Even if all its criticisms of the government’s new economic policy were correct, why the rush? The IMF’s action is insulting to a G7 country and premature because its thoughts were inevitably composed without full knowledge. It is best seen as part of a pattern, like the early attempts to reverse Brexit, or the US government’s related interventions over the Northern Ireland Protocol. The people who have been running the developed world badly for more than two decades resent those who now challenge them. They pick their moments. The coup de grâce to Boris Johnson earlier this year was delivered by Lord Macdonald, the former head of the Foreign Office. I would not be surprised to learn that friends of Sir Tom Scholar, the head of the Treasury recently and abruptly pushed out by the Truss government, have been expressing their dismay to their friends in the IMF’s headquarters in Washington. There are plenty of sensible anxieties about the Truss/Kwarteng project to be expressed, but for a global institution to attack it in public at its birth is not wise counsel: it is a deliberately unfriendly and political act. I hope the Chancellor and Prime Minister now fight back.

Judging a literary prize can be a wearisome trudge through mediocrity, but I remember an opposite experience. Towards the end of 1986, I chaired the judges of the first Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for this paper. It was for ‘the writer best able to describe a visit to a foreign place or people’, something that Shiva, who had died much too young, had done so well. I picked up an entry which began thus: ‘There are children, frail and moribund, who live inside plastic bubbles; their immune systems have not developed, and so they have to be protected from the outside world, their air specially filtered, and their nourishment – you cannot call it food – passed to them through special ducts, by gloved and sterile hands. Professional expatriates live like that.’ I knew at once that the author could write and think arrestingly well. The judges, who included Martin Amis, gave her the prize for her piece, which was about her time as an expatriate teacher in Saudi Arabia. Her name was Hilary Mantel, already a published novelist but, at that time, little known.

Hilary’s essay also exhibited her challenging way of thinking: ‘When I travelled at first I used to ask what I could get out of it and what I could give back… I saw the world as some sort of exchange scheme for my ideals, but the world deserves better than this. When you come across an alien culture you must not automatically respect it. You must sometimes pay it the compliment of hating it.’ (This essay and a few other pieces by her are now online.) I decided to make Hilary our film critic. I would like to add ‘And the rest is history’, but it would be better to say the rest is her story, not The Spectator’s. She rose way above journalism to become the foremost British novelist of her generation. She died last week, rather young by modern standards, but with her masterwork complete.

Nearly 30 years later, I was delighted to receive an email from Hilary. She said she had enjoyed the first volume of my life of Mrs Thatcher, partly because ‘I am also “working with” a character (in the shape of Thomas Cromwell) who is clever and complex but doesn’t spend time in introspection: who really lives in the present moment, like a Test batsman facing fast bowling.’ That is a good description of her subject and mine, and it may shed light on how the world looks to someone from ‘humble’ origins who faces hostility as he/she rises to the pinnacle of power. It was to convey this ‘fast bowling’, I think, that Hilary Mantel, who keeps the reader in the room with Cromwell throughout, always uses the historic present: she is writing as if it were happening. As a biographer, not a novelist, I never had that freedom, but I envied hers.

As I understand it, the house style of the Times, when reporting on peers, whose title differs from their surname, is to include their surname, then the title, and use the surname at second mention. As a reader, I find this irritating, because such person’s titles are, in most cases, what they are called in real life. Who refers to the Duke of Northumberland, for instance, as ‘Percy’? I sense the usage is the Murdoch Group’s subtle indication that if it had its way, there would be no titles of nobility. So I was interested to note that, on the front page of the Times on Tuesday, its story about the Duke of Norfolk’s driving ban abandoned the paper’s normal style. He was described as ‘the Duke of Norfolk’, his surname was never mentioned, and he became ‘the duke’ at subsequent mention. Why? I think the paper subconsciously wanted to get the word ‘duke’ in as often as possible, because the story was rather embarrassing for him.

The one important proceeding that I failed to follow during the days after the demise of Elizabeth II was the Accession Council, which was televised. I recently watched it on catch-up. Given the controversy over the new King and his pen (wags now refer to Charles III as ‘his nibs’), I particularly scrutinised the signing ceremonies. On the document signed first and in the absence of the King, the Queen Consort comes forward, looks hard at the page and then rather tentatively writes her name. She is followed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who looks almost flummoxed, and delays signing, as if searching for the right place. My guess is that the new Queen signed in the Justin Welby slot. Perhaps in a thousand years, archaeologists finding the book among the ruins of the ancient civilisation known as Britain, will falsely conclude that the Archbishop of Canterbury was a woman called Camilla.