the election [for party leader, with Michael losing by only a few votes to Callaghan] I was doing everything I could in the House of Commons to keep that government in office. Also, I didn’t want Callaghan to resign. I thought there was still a chance of winning the next election—much better than I would have. I pleaded with him not to do it [resign]. He was very nice to Jill. After the election [for party leader] he invited us to Chequers and showed us around, saying, “Five more votes, Jill and you would have been here.”
When I asked him about it, Callaghan did not remember saying this, but he saw no reason to doubt Michael’s memory.
“How did you and Jill feel about coming so close—five votes?” I asked.
Michael said he never thought he would win:
I didn’t think I was going to come as close as that … he did that terrible thing about sacking Barbara and Barbara will never forgive me [because she thought Michael should have resigned from the Cabinet in protest over her dismissal]. She thought from that moment onwards the government made an awful hash of it. Not the truth. My opinion is that Callaghan ran that government better than Wilson.
“What happened to Wilson?” I asked. “Did he just get tired?” Michael thought so: “Yes. Nobody knows for sure.”
18
At the end of my London visit, I discussed with Michael the possibility of joining him in Dubrovnik in September. It was difficult for me to get away because of my teaching and my two Scotties, which I refused to put in a kennel. My wife could look after them, but more than a week of that became rather burdensome for her when alone. “I could never put Dizzy in a kennel,” Michael said. I said I’d have to find someone in the neighbourhood to take care of the dogs if my wife came with me (a doubtful possibility). “That’s what we did,” Michael said. “Dizzy was quite adventurous with other people. He was very frisky. When we said he was a Tibetan, some people laughed. They’re supposed to have a terrible reputation.” Indeed, Julie had told him that the breed “yapped” all the time. “During the first two years he was a bit hard to control,” Michael said, a massive understatement. “We got him just before the terrible election of 1983. On Sundays, I’d do seven or eight miles with him up to Kenwood [in Hampstead Heath] and all those other parts.”
“How did Dizzy get his name?” I asked. “I was writing a piece about Disraeli at the time. Greatly undervalued as a writer. A better novelist than that bloody Trollope. Better on politics. . . He was genuinely interested in the women ... in women’s rights.” Thus Michael rewound the spool of his recollections. Sometimes it seemed like an endless loop.
1 See my argument in A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005).
2 I include the entire letter in To Be A Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie (London: Aurum Press, 2005).
3 Later, film historian Philip Kemp sent me a tape recording of an interview with Jill, who attacked Korda and remained unwilling to accept Michael’s defence of the producer when Michael joined the conversation.
September 2000
19
On my arrival, I found Michael and Julie sitting outdoors in the late afternoon at the Villa Dubrovnik—Michael’s and Jill’s favourite holiday spot in the last years of their life together. Michael wanted to give me the full history of his stays, so we adjourned to his balcony. It provided a wonderful view of Dubrovnik, a place so compact that Rebecca West, looking back on it as she departed, called it a “city on a coin.” Michael said, “Now to come to this place and how we got here. Jill came to see this place better than anybody else and to understand what they were up to here.” In 1980, after Michael was elected leader of the Labour Party, a Yugoslav diplomat asked him why the Communist Party in Belgrade had better relations with the Tories than with the Labour Party. “One reason,” Michael replied, “is the treatment you’ve meted out over the years to our friend Milovan Djilas.” Djilas had stayed with Michael in Hampstead, befriending Jill as well. In fact, after Michael reviewed several of Djilas’s books, Jill proposed that her husband should do a book about him.
The persistent diplomat asked Michael to come to Belgrade on behalf of the Labour Party. Michael agreed, provided it was understood that Djilas would be the first matter he would raise with Tito’s Central Committee. The diplomat did not object, except to say that he did not think Michael would change any minds and that the whole Djilas matter now seemed passé.
Michael arrived in Belgrade just after Tito’s death to address the Central Committee. He spoke to five or six of its members, apparently with no results. He was then invited to visit Dubrovnik. “They took me round the wall,” Michael said. He was never one to describe what he saw: in this case, a marvellous walkway that encircled the old city. By the time I arrived, it had recovered from Serb shelling. There were no ruins, but new tile roofs were evidence of the effort that had been made to repair a world heritage site.
When Michael got home, he said to Jill, “I’ve discovered a new place for a holiday. We’ll go there next year,” and that is what happened. They came to stay at the Villa Dubrovnik. Between 1981 and 1991, they took their holidays in Dubrovnik, a world so self-enclosed that they never managed to visit such famous sites as Sarajevo.
Jill immersed herself in the Dubrovnik arts community and Michael tagged along, developing on the fly a friendship with Stevan Dedijer, the brother of Vlado Dedijer, at one time one of Tito’s staunchest supporters, who braved considerable risk in coming to Djilas’s defence during his trial. Michael extolled the delights of Dubrovnik. He would often call spots he loved to visit, “a good place to read.” I decided to interrupt: “But what did you think of Yugoslavia then and what were your first reactions to the country’s breakup? Yugoslavia as an entity ... ” Michael broke in: “Well we didn’t think it had any sentimental … and we weren’t favouring the breakup, nor were we saying that we thought everything was being run well.” Informing much of Michael’s thinking was Djilas’s call for a more democratic society. Then came the autumn of 1991, the “first time I ever heard the words ‘ethnic cleansing,’” Michael noted. “A Belgrade chap” (Michael seemed to recall he was a journalist) said, “They’re going to claim every territory for the Serbs.” Michael said, “There aren’t many Serbs here, are there?” “Oh, they don’t mean just where they have a majority,” he was told, but any place where there are Serbs. In September 1991, the Serb attack on Croatia began in the North while Michael and Jill were still in Dubrovnik. “We didn’t know about the scale of it. We discovered we had to take a new route home.” Instead of flying home from Dubrovnik, they had to travel to Montenegro, take a plane from there to Belgrade and then change aircraft for the trip to London.
20
I gazed at the city in the distance and asked, “What were people thinking here? That separation was the right choice?” Yes, Michael and Jill went out and bought Croatian badges. By the end of September, at some public gathering having to do with the House of Lords, Michael spoke to Lord Carrington, suggesting how serious the attacks on Dubrovnik and Vukovar had become. The people in those cities had a right to self-determination. “Of course they have,” replied Carrington. “We’ll have a fresh look at it.” A skeptical Michael told me, “He pretended then to be slightly shocked at what was happening. He bloody well should have been more shocked in my opinion. From that point on, he did not become exactly an apologist for the Serbs, but he and the foreign office were much too accepting of the Serb point of view about the breakup.” The
