If political leaders turn to fictional writings to inform their global view, is that such a bad thing?

Ronald Reagan once recommended his British counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, read a novel by Tom Clancy in order to obtain a better insight into the mind of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev

Harold Macmillan, in 1960 at Oxford University (Getty)

The novelist Anthony Powell’s journals record that in the early autumn of 1982 he was invited to a dinner at Balliol College, Oxford. Here, he found himself in conversation with Harold Macmillan, then in his late eighties and the university’s chancellor. Macmillan (“fairly heavy-going”) observed that he thought it difficult to know what people were like in 1282, the year of Balliol’s foundation, which the dinner was intended to celebrate, compared with what he felt about classical times. One would, he continued, have no trouble talking to Cicero “if he came into Pratt’s”, the celebrated gentleman’s club owned by the Duke of Devonshire.

Powell, somewhat nonplussed by this exercise in historical relativism, conceded that if Pratt’s had somehow been transported to ancient Rome, where its rooms would have been full of members of the Praetorian Guard, then it was just about possible that Cicero might have graced its floorboards. On the other hand, the tone of his entry implies that he thought Macmillan’s comparison pretty absurd. And yet all the evidence insists that the former prime minister was embarking on an exercise common to nearly all politicians of all nations and parties: trying to make sense of the world around him by reference to the cultural materials – books, films and pictures – he has at his disposal.

In Macmillan’s case, as an Oxford-educated classical gentleman, these were drawn from the ancient world. By chance, last week’s release of the Cabinet Office papers from 1985 disclose a similar, if much more rough and ready, attempt at this kind of conceptualisation. It came from Ronald Reagan, who recommended that his British counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, read a novel by Tom Clancy in order to obtain a better insight into the mind of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. A memo written by the prime minister’s private secretary records that the US president believed that Red Storm Rising “gave an excellent picture of the Soviet Union’s intentions and strategy”.

Reagan, it turns out, was not alone in believing that art offered a sure-fire conduit into the world beyond the Oval Office window. In fact, a mere glance at British political life of the past 150 years throws up half a dozen premiers whose view of the world was, to a certain extent, formed by what creative writers had told them. Thatcher, for example, was once found telling a guest at one of her mid-1980s writers’ dinners that every ill from which the modern age was suffering was first discussed in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. John Major, meanwhile, recalled the visions of nationhood canvassed in Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn, with its elegies to red pillar boxes, warm beer and old maids biking through mists to holy communion.

Sometimes these attachments – as with Reagan – have a narrow, practical focus: Winston Churchill’s doctor arrived in his study sometime in 1953 to find the prime minister exclaiming over a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sometimes they are there to reinforce cherished myths, as with the solid and reliable Stanley Baldwin, known for his love of the evocations of rural England served up by Mary Webb.

On the rare occasions when the politician involved has a spark of creativity, the real and the fictional fuse, so that Disraeli’s novels, with their buccaneering adventurers, can often seem to be projections of the man himself – the Jewish careerist, whose early appearances in the House of Commons were marked by anti-Semitic insults but who ended up with an earldom and the confidence of the Queen.

What unites nearly all these attempts to learn lessons from culture is the contempt they generally provoke in political commentators. The general reaction to Reagan’s invocation of Clancy as a route into the Soviet mindset was that here was further evidence of his manifest inadequacy for the job, and that a US president would have been better off reading a Pentagon briefing than a sensationalising spy thriller. It was the same with Thatcher, who, as Everything She Wants, the second volume of Charles Moore’s official biography, reveals in extensive detail, was written off as a philistine by the nation’s cultural establishment almost from the moment she arrived on Downing Street’s steps.

But Mrs T, who quoted a line of Philip Larkin’s verse to him when they first met and appointed a practising poet to the job of arts minister, was far from being a philistine. To discover, for example, that the leading British politician of the 1980s thought that The Possessed offered a guide to certain aspects of the late-20th century malaise is rather comforting, for the “message” of Dostoevsky’s novel, surely, has to do with nihilism, the dangers of imagining that the ordinary rules of existence don’t apply to yours truly, the futility of cultivating unrealisable expectations and the necessity of reaching some kind of accommodation with life based on what lies within your grasp.

This, it might be argued, has much more to do with the average citizen of a parliamentary democracy’s hopes, dreams and disquiets than an economic primer or a tract about constitutional reform. If there was one handicap that ought to have disqualified Michael Dukakis, George Bush Snr’s opponent in the presidential election of 1988, it was the admission that he never read novels. The same point applies to Reagan’s other great literary favourite, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s accounts of her early life on the Western pioneer trail of the 1870s. Certainly, the “Little House” books are somewhat romanticised versions of Wilder’s actual life with Ma and Pa in the Dakota townships, and they appealed to Reagan’s folksy side in a way that may now seem slightly ominous. But there are worse things for American presidents to read than stories of travail and aspiration in a newly colonised world – even if, as modern critics never tire of pointing out, the native Americans are more or less written out of the story.

Naturally, it can be argued that politicians who take their cue from books – or, in Macmillan’s case, intensely personalised assumptions about the classical world – are merely devising myths for themselves when what is really needed is a serious dose of practical reality. But, in doing so, they are really only mimicking what the ordinary person, metaphorical light years away from the White House or 10 Downing Street, does with his, or her own life. To particularise, I spent my pre-teen years believing that education was conducted along the lines suggested by the boys’ school stories of the 1920s and the 1930s on my father’s bookshelf; and my adolescence believing that the literary world was as described in Orwell’s thoroughly embittered Keep the Aspidistra Flying and symbolised in the character of Gordon Comstock, a moth-eaten poet with a ton of grudges yet surprisingly attractive to women.

That neither of these illusions turned out to be true isn’t perhaps the point. People need myths of this kind to keep themselves going, just as politicians – however naive and credulous they may seem to those on the outside – need a view of the world that goes beyond technological hardware and special advisers. And so, having first sniggered over Reagan’s fondness for Red Storm Rising and the idea that it might make a useful preliminary to a sit-down with Gorbachev, I then began to feel much more sympathetic. After all, what would the modern equivalent be? What cultural artefacts does Donald Trump employ when he conceptualises the world? Grand Theft Auto? Sin City? In this context, it is possible to feel as nostalgic for Reagan’s artlessness as John Major did for the old maids cycling to church through the early-morning mists of an unfallen world.