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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Martin FarrORCiD
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The political obituary was one of the first genres of political writing I came to appreciate. They're a feature of several projects, and extend longstanding research and teaching interests in political lifewriting. I study in the main British politics, and political obituaries are in many ways peculiarly British, with four distinct daily publications. Yet the subject lacks its own literature. For present purposes I take obituaries to be immediately posthumous lives of politicians, or political actors taken more widely. Such accounts appeal to certain aspects of a certain manner of political writing, and are also prone to what critics might deem to be their limitations. Historically, and often, still, they're written anonymously; much of what they contain comprises impression, anecdote, even gossip; they're prone to whatever axe an editor (or proprietor) may wish to grind. They were, certainly in their original incarnations, and perhaps inevitably, imbued with values and assumptions of class, gender, race; the first obituarial publication, in the late eighteen century, made such preoccupations titular: The Gentleman’s Magazine. The Times soon became the principal organ for obituaries, which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to be political, and tended, too, to prevailing norms: the identities of the obituaries editors at Oxford and Cambridge were closely guarded secrets; the Civil Service provided their own obituaries. The paper was concerned only, as one editor, William Haley, put it, with the "small national elite". Times obits have been republished in book form since 1870, and the paper appointed its first obituary editor in 1920. From the mid-1950s, Colin Watson, in the words of the official history of the paper, “simplified the language of the articles for the benefit of the ordinary reader while keeping up the accuracy and, so far as space allowed, the completeness which made them essential reading for historians and biographers”. Notes in early volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography encouraged contributors to “Begin with the Times”. There was no serious competition to The Times and its daily, still largely political, obituary page until the 1980s when a revolution in the genre took place. It was made possible by one whose own obituaries will further demonstrate the variety and vitality of the form: Rupert Murdoch. Digitisation and de-unionisation made for both increased pagination and new newspapers. And asylum-seekers from the Murdoch-owned Times to write them. In 1986 The Daily Telegraph, under High Massingberd, inspired by John Aubrey's Brief Lives, established its reputation as the home of eclectic obituaries of often eccentric public figures. The Telegraph made obituaries both more popular – a series of bestselling thematic compilations, and celebrity status for an editor who did for obituary what Lytton Strachey did for biography – and so less relevant for the political historian (though its obituaries of major figures – Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, Edward Heath– could be superlative). However novel the choice of subject, Telegraph obituaries inclined to the implicit contrasting of an idealised past with an imperfect present. In 1986 The Independent, under James Fergusson, inspired by the DNB, felt, as it did in other areas, as something of a tabula rasa. Unlike the Times and Telegraph it printed the name of the author, referred to published sources, based its obituaries on interviews with those who knew the deceased, and illustrated, boldly. Obituaries were written by experts rather than by expert obituarists. Tam Dalyell, astringent and scrupulous, specialised almost weekly in political obituarists, often of those he knew. The Guardian had obituarised irregularly (Lena Jeger, another Labour MP, presaging Dalyell, though anonymously). In 1988 it went daily, with full-page, authored, obituaries (it followed the Independent also in eschewing the unattributable parliamentary lobby system). The Guardian, like the Telegraph, if for different reasons, made less of conventional political obituaries and reflected a more broadly defined public life. As the Cold War came to an end something of an obituarial arms race began, and with it the end of the mortuis nihil nisi bonum as a principle. More than before obits reflected reflect the openness, and prurience, of their times. Causes of death (euphemism: "he died at Northampton”), sexuality (more euphemism: “He died unmarried”; the lives of some – Tom Driberg – as candid as those of others – Anthony Blunt – were opaque), photographic illustration (The Times provoked the Queen's displeasure when it illustrated its obituary of Defence Secretary Fred Mulley with the famous photograph of him fast asleep next to Her Majesty at a public event), rancour (Norman Stone on E. H. Carr; Richard Evans on Stone; Edward Pearce on Peter Shore; Tony Howard on the Bishop of Edmonton; Roger Scruton on Freddie Ayer); whitewashing (Lord Roll on Hermann Abs); proprietorial influence (Conrad Black’s Telegraph’s obit of Lord Hartwell implicating him in the state of the paper from which its present proprietor rescued it). In the twenty-first century, for three of what Marilyn Johnson, in her obituarial survey, called the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", tabliodisation diminished impact. Online publishing began to supplement but will eventually supplant the unalterable clipping that lives forever even when its perspective far from does (“vitriolic champion of Negro civil rights”: Martin Luther King). Fewer and fewer buy a newspaper and see the political obituary in its natural habitat. Obituarial lives: Geoffrey Robinson during the First World War "ghoulishly" writing his Times obituaries at night; Churchill denied a preview of his; Harold Wilson denying Driberg a peerage over the latter’s leaked, unflattering, obituary of the former; Gerald Kaufman writing a vitriolic obit of Wilson shortly before becoming his press officer. William Rees-Mogg neutering the Times’s obituaries of Iain Macleod and Rab Butler; Alden Whitman, of the New York Times (which began its obituary page in 1965), meeting his subjects (Anthony Eden's first private interview). Gordon Brown painstakingly writing an obituary of John Smith when Tony Blair was not. Much of the allure of political obituaries – the passing of piety, and patriarchy; the parsing of time and chance; the prominence of personality; the art, the craft of them – is as the appeal of politics itself.
Author(s): Farr M
Editor(s): Love G; Toye R
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: In Press
Book Title: Writing Politics in Modern Britain: Genre and Cultures of Publishing since 1900
Year: 2026
Acceptance date: 29/08/2025
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Place Published: Cambridge
Notes: 9781009634304 online ISBN.
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9781009634281
