Battling Barbara: a life of Barbara Castle

Contemporary Review, April, 2004 by Michael Karwowski

Red Queen: The Authorized Biography of Barbara Castle. Anne Perkins. Macmillan. [pounds sterling]20.00. 499 pages. ISBN 0-333-90511-3.

Barbara Castle was a prominent Minister in the British Labour Governments of the 1960s and 1970s led by Harold Wilson. As Transport Minister, she was credited with introducing the 70 mph speed limit on motorways, car seat belts, and the breathalyser, and, when at the Department of Health and Social Security, with important legislation on pensions and equal pay for women. As a highly ambitious person, she wanted to be remembered for more, much more than safer roads and relative improvements in the standard of living. The first woman 'to smash the sex barrier' in Government, she became 'the most powerful woman politician in British history' when she was appointed Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity.

Opinion polls identified her as the nation's most popular minister and a realistic candidate for the top job. Hubris intervened in the shape of her decision to legislate on industrial relations in a bid to end the trade union anarchy that was threatening to destroy the British economy. The resulting Government-versus-unions conflict over her 'In Place of Strife' proposals ended in her total defeat, graphically illustrated in Harold Wilson's famous injunction to a union leader to 'Get your tanks off my lawn'. The defeat actually increased her popularity in the country--she became 'Battling Barbara'--but her top-level political career was effectively over as far as the power-brokers in Government, Parliament, the trade unions, and the Labour Party were concerned.

This biography, the first book by the journalist, Anne Perkins, was authorised by Lady Castle before her death, aged 91, in 2002. (She received a life-peerage in her later years.) Yet it is no less a no-holds-barred warts-and-all portrait for all that. The book can be read in a number of ways. In the first instance, it is a powerful commentary on the role of women in politics. A demagogic socialist, the self-proclaimed 'granite conscience of the left', Barbara Castle had little time for feminism. 'If I had bothered about whether I was called Mrs, Miss or Ms, I would never have worked up to the good neuter title of Minister' she told the Women's Liberation Movement in America. 'Women should find a cause bigger than themselves'. But her path-finding efforts surely eased the way into power for her political antithesis, the Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who finally succeeded, where she had failed, in taming the recalcitrant trade unions in the 1980s.

The book can equally well be read as a fascinating insight into the workings of Government in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. But, most pertinently of all, it provides a profound analysis of the effect of an addiction to 'the febrile, exacting and fulfilling world of power' on a human mind. Red Queen shows that power, to Barbara Castle, was, in Labour ally Richard Crossman's telling phrase, 'like blood to a ghost'. Indeed, her climb up the 'greasy pole' of politics reveals a strangely empty person who, as Anne Perkins speculates, used her undoubted sexual attractiveness, for Harold Wilson among others, to attain her goal. 'In later life', her biographer writes, 'she was occasionally heard advocating the merits of sleeping your way to the top'. As she herself admitted: 'I only got to where I am by a fluke. If Harold hadn't manoeuvred his way to power, I would probably still be on the back benches'.

When finally ousted from the Cabinet in 1976 on Wilson's resignation as Prime Minister, Barbara Castle wrote: 'When will it stop mattering to me whether I am the idol of the party rank and file or not? At present, I am curiously suspended between two lives: between the heaven of feeling I still have a major role to play and the hell of accepting that I no longer have. How soon should I begin to accept death?'

Perceived as a 'conviction politician' in contrast to the pragmatism of Tony Blair's New Labour, she revealed her true colours in her diary entries on Margaret Thatcher's attainment of the summit of political life: 'What interests me is how blooming she looks. She has never been prettier. I am interested because I understand this phenomenon. She looks as I looked when Harold made me Minister of Transport'.