Why do so many politicians write history books? Does a knowledge of the past help with the challenges of today? And should MPs pay more attention to history? Our reviews editor, Matt Elton, headed to Westminster to ask a panel of history-loving politicians.
Which came first for you, history or politics?
Peter Hennessy: Gossip – which links the two. Weapons-grade gossip is the link and the motivation; gossip with footnotes.
Kwasi Kwarteng: Very few youngsters really have a passion for politics. For me, an engagement with, and love for, history came before that. So I see history as coming before in terms of sequence of interest.
Chris Skidmore: I was different: I was thinking about applying to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, and was dissuaded by my schoolteacher who said that I’d learn more about politics if I studied the court of Henry VII.
Tristram Hunt: I had a passion for history first of all. I had a wonderful teacher who taught me about the battles of Bannockburn and Waterloo – but who also introduced me to politics through history because we studied [19th-century social scientist and co-founder of Marxist theory] Friedrich Engels and his account of Victorian Manchester. So it segued from history to politics.
PH: My elder sister was a history schoolteacher, and for Christmas 1958 she bought me RJ Unstead’s Looking at History. It had a profound effect on me because I’m a Catholic, and I remember a wonderful drawing of the ecology of the monastic system in the productive and pietistic sense. It led me to want to be a monk – until puberty, when mercifully that went, but the love of history remained. That’s the thing that really set me off, and then a succession of wonderful teachers, which I suspect we all have in common.
This story is from the Christmas 2016 edition of BBC History Magazine.
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This story is from the Christmas 2016 edition of BBC History Magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
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