Obituaries elsewhere are saying plenty on the politics of Leo Abse, the former Labour MP who died today, and they were certainly interesting. A convinced unilateralist, Abse opposed even the Falklands war – but he had no time for Tony Benn and appeared to think John Smith the ideal Labour leader. He sponsored the private members bill that legalised homosexuality - and he was a passionate opponent of abortion. As I say, an interesting set of convictions.
But I really only know Abse from his books. I think it was Iain Dale who described Abse's Margaret, daughter of Beatrice as the weirdest book one is ever likely to read on the former Prime Minister. Abse seemingly let his Freudianism inform every page – and so everything from Thatcher’s polices on inflation to her attitude to nuclear weapons is predictably brought back to, well, you can guess.
The irony is that Abse himself was a brilliant observer of other politicians. When he abandoned the mumbo-jumbo and applied his own thinking to those he encountered, he showed himself to be a far better psychologist than Freud (of whom the best mainstream scientists are likely to say today is that he was on to something). In his book on Thatcher, and in others like Private Member and Blair: The Man Behind the Smile, Abse profiled figures he knew such as Sir Keith Joseph, Hugh Gaitskell and Enoch Powell so well that some years later I remember his accounts as if I read them this morning. All this backed up by a vocabulary that, though not 'accessible', was brilliant. I think I’ve observed elsewhere on this blog that of all who observe and write on modern British politics, only Leo Abse and Matthew Parris seem to have any real insight into the psychology of politicians. Now, sadly, we’re down to one.
