Shortly before Christmas, the journalist David Aaronovitch, who has sometimes struggled with his weight, agreed to appear on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour with Katie Hopkins, the Mail Online columnist whose pet subject is her loathing of fat people. For listeners, the debate that followed was predictably unedifying: the day we learn anything from Hopkins is the day we don our skates to scoot across the frozen expanses of hell. But Aaronovitch, transfixed by his opponent’s “self-hatred, her horror of loss of control”, found it fascinating. Afterwards, far from trying to forget all about their encounter, he pointed this out to her on Twitter, the social network on which he perhaps spends just a little too much of his time.
Personally, I remain uncertain of Hopkins’s self-hatred, and its capacity to fascinate. But I do know one thing, which is that this story tells us more about him than it does about her. Leaving aside his insight into her inner engine – born, perhaps, of the years he spent in psychoanalysis – it reveals above all his deep and near-constant need to be heard. Clever, busy and successful, you might imagine that he would have better things to do with his time than bang his head against a brick wall in a BBC studio. But, no. Not only is he up for such futile altercations, he enjoys them to the degree that he sometimes likes to prolong them via the internet.
Where does it come from, this necessity for argument? Of course, it’s useful to him: it’s how he makes his living. (Far from ever being stuck for a subject for his column in the Times, he tells me proudly, he usually arrives at his desk with no fewer than three ideas.) But isn’t it wearying? Doesn’t it have any ill effects on his soul? Above the barking of his terrier, Dora, to whom he is, for the purposes of my tape recorder, rather annoyingly devoted, Aaronovitch insists, for the second time this morning, that the answer to both these last questions is “no”. As to the first, although he hates to be referred to as a contrarian – he would never take up a position just for the hell of it – he is well aware of his own engine, which manifests itself in what he calls “defensive clarification”. It’s a tendency he can trace back to his childhood.
“One of the things I grew up feeling was an intense need to explain myself. I have to try, somehow, to lift myself beyond other people’s negative assessments of me.” So why go around disagreeing with people all the time? “Yes… Well, I guess I tend to proceed through self-provocation. I get myself out of a slough that might lead to a depression by making myself do things [that I don’t really want to do].”
Aaronovitch’s childhood, singular and rather bleak, is laid bare in his extraordinary new memoir-cum-social history, Party Animals, which tells the story of his parents and their enduring love affair, not with each other, but with the Communist party of Great Britain. It is quite an honest book, and a surprisingly measured one, all things considered. But it is also, surely, another of the self-provocations to which he has just referred. In his world, deadlines are as frequent and as commonplace as breakfast; he should have been able to bash through the writing of it as if through a meringue. Yet it took him a decade. “Doing the personal bits took some goading,” he says. “One of my friends, John Lahr [the biographer of Joe Orton and Tennessee Williams], was always saying to me: the bit that’s the most difficult to write, the bit that makes you wince – that’s the thing you really should say. I think that’s broadly right.” Did it feel transgressive to be writing about his parents? “If you mean: do I feel guilty about the fact that the reader’s takeaway impression of them might not be one they would have wanted people to have in perpetuity? Yes, is the answer.
“But then, you know that old Janet Malcolm thing that writers are betrayers ever.” He gives me a meaningful look. “It’s what we do, isn’t it?”
It’s bewildering to remember that he grew up only a short distance from the huge Victorian house high on a Hampstead hill – in 2016, this is plutocrat central – in which we’re now sitting (he shares it with his wife and three daughters). From this vantage point, his beginnings, complicated and unhappy, seem to belong to another world. Aaronovitch’s father, Sam, was the son of Jewish immigrants who’d grown up in grinding poverty in east London (Sam’s father, Morris, did piecework repairing buttonholes, and the family, five strong, shared two rooms in a terrace just off Cable Street).
His mother, Lavender, by contrast, was the middle-class daughter of Worcestershire industrialists. However, by the time they met in 1951 – they were married in January 1954, and David was born that July – both had something of a past. Sam, who’d been married twice before, had a daughter, Frances, by his second wife. Lavender, meanwhile, was alone in the world – her widowed father had rejected her, having begun a new family elsewhere – save for the daughter, Sabrina, she had conceived towards the end of the war (she would be brought up as Sam’s).
For both of them, you sense, communism rushed in to fill an emotional space, as well as an intellectual/political one. Sam, autodidact, ambitious and desperate to escape his roots, had joined the Stepney branch of the Young Communist League in 1934, at the age of 14, motivated by “hatred of fascism … of capitalists who had squeezed the blood out of my father and made Stepney the slum it is”. In the years since, he had slowly worked his way up the organisation, and by 1954, was its (full-time, salaried) cultural secretary – a job that earned him, thinly disguised, a walk-on part in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.
What about Lavender? For years, Aaronovitch assumed that his mother owed her politics to the influence of his father. In fact, this was not the case. She joined the Communist party of her own volition, shortly after becoming a homeowner in 1948 (her uncle helped her to buy the house, a 1920s semi near Parliament Hill Fields, in which Aaronovitch lived until he went to university). It isn’t clear why, exactly, she did this, but from here on, her commitment to the cause would be even more absolute than that of her future husband. In Party Animals, her son includes a selection of entries from her diary of 1963. They make for rather comical reading. “Went to Sam’s class on surplus value,” says the one for 13 June. “Very good, exhilarating to see light dawn on new members re profit etc!!” Life was one long round of demos, jumble sales and frosty mornings spent selling the Daily Worker.
What did all this mean for the boy David? (Sam and Lavender would go on to have two more sons together – Ben, now a writer of supernatural crime novels, and Owen, an actor). “I wasn’t indoctrinated,” he says. “It was just there. It was like growing up in a Catholic family, or a Muslim one, only we were communists.” All the same, his family existed at a right angle – or perhaps I mean a left angle – to the rest of the world; they lived in a state of “complete otherness”. Some of what went on is, I suppose, wholly predictable: the fact, for instance, that his family was never to be heard moaning about strikes, for the simple reason that it was all in favour of strikes. But the isolation was near-total – the Aaronovitchs only associated with other communists – and for a child of school age, life involved a certain amount of deprivation. Unlike his friends, David was not allowed to read the Beano because its publisher, DC Thomson, was non-union. Walt Disney (anti-union, anti-communist and allegedly anti-black) movies were also forbidden. In place of the Cubs (royalist) he had Socialist Sunday School, at which the hours were mostly spent writing plays with anti-fascist themes (one year, he got to play a Nazi general). The family finances were, moreover, parlous. “We’d no bloody money,” says Aaronovitch. “We were the poorest people we knew.” On one occasion, his mother made the family loaf last four days. On another, out of money for coal, she sat around in her dead aunt’s fur coat. Intellectually, the family was rich, in as much as the house was full of Sam’s big, if inflexible, ideas (also, his parents’ collection of books). But in every other sense, it sounds to have been utterly joyless.
His parents were ascetic, difficult, and self-absorbed. His father disliked small children, and longed in the evenings only to be shut in his study (Sam would miraculously go on to read for a DPhil at Oxford, courtesy of Christopher Hill, the master of Balliol and a fellow communist). His mother, meanwhile, felt thwarted, stuck at home. She was, says David, “a classic person who’d had an exciting war” and thereafter felt the walls closing in on her. She and her oldest son had a particularly bad relationship. “She said I’d had a character change at the age of two, and that after that she didn’t like me much. She preferred my brother, who was softer, more pliable; I was famously and absurdly articulate, and always arguing, and I suppose that was annoying.” It is his mother that he blames for his need always to argue, explain, justify. “She would tell you that something hadn’t happened that you both patently knew had happened. When you’re a child, that really fucks with your head.”
His mother prized fidelity above all else. If you had committed to somebody or something, then you had to stand by them until “death or a party congress changed the situation”. As David got older, this made his life difficult. He was not allowed to fall out with friends, or to split up with girlfriends. “She was disapproving when I grew my hair long,” he writes, “and even more disapproving when, a few years later, I cut it again. I had, in a sense, let my own hair down.”
And yet, she would never take her son’s side. She might defend him behind his back, but to his face, she was only ever cross, disapproving.
Perhaps, though, she only behaved like this because she was unhappy. Aaronovitch has come to realise that one of the themes of his book is denial: “Increasingly, I realised that there are parallels between the way people think and feel about politics, and the way they think and feel about other things.” Overinvest emotionally in a cause, just as in a person, and the same certain terrible blindness may arise. Having thought of their marriage as year zero – at home, Aaronovitch never once heard his mother mention Frances, his father’s daughter, and he did not meet his half-sister until he was in his 30s – Lavender could not countenance the fact that her project had failed and she might be about to join the ranks of Sam’s exes.
The only problem with this was the evidence of what was happening right under her nose. In one of the most appallingly memorable scenes in the book – fast forward to the 70s – Lavender rushes from her bedroom in the middle of the night, clad only in her nightie. Parked a little way from the house is the trusty Aaronovitch family van, inside which, it seems, is Sam and another woman. Not too long after this, they finally split up.
Pondering his mother’s failure hitherto to get to grips with his father’s behaviour (this was by no means the first time Sam had misbehaved), and later with his own admission to his shrink that, no, he had had no idea at all what was going when he was a teenager, something falls into place for Aaronovitch. He thinks of the way that his mother stuck with the party – even, say, after 1956, when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest – and it occurs to him that it is no good asking what those communists who were active in Britain between the late 30s and the 60s would have done “if they had known” about the millions of people who had been quietly and not so quietly murdered in Russia by Stalin and co. The questions one really needs to ask, unacademic as they are, go more like this: “How could you not have known?” and “How did you manage not to know?” and “Why did you choose not to know?” More complicatedly, the states of knowing and not-knowing can coexist.
“If we take the show trials [which took place in eastern Europe between 1948 and 1953] and people’s defence of them here [the British Communist party’s line was that, with these executions, the Soviet government had nipped a conspiracy in the bud], there is knowing, and not knowing.” This, he thinks, is a very extreme example of the confirmation bias we see at work every day in ourselves, and everyone we know. “One of the things that fascinates me is listening to people who are big supporters of Corbyn. They have invested in the desire for him to succeed so heavily, they are in no position to question anything he does.”
What about Sam? In Party Animals, he writes that while he never once saw his father cry, Sam is said to have wept when Stalin died in 1953. “And so did millions of people. This is the thing we are reluctant to get about dictatorships.” In the book, reading MI5 and Special Branch files in the National Archives, he discovers that a member of his parents’ circle was a Soviet spy: “heavy-duty treachery from a woman we saw at all the party bazaars!” he says, half-delightedly. But he thinks Lavender and Sam would have done exactly the same had they been in any position to. “My father’s file has never been released, but I suspect the worst of it was just an unrelenting late-40s Stalinism, complete with all the lies and distortions.
“Still, they would have thought it was their job to help preserve the workers’ state in the face of the attacks on it from fascism and the forces of international capitalism.” As a teenager, however, it wasn’t his parent’s unyielding politics that pushed him away from them (though he still seems furiously resentful about his comprehensive school education); he simply didn’t get on with them. Having travelled to Bulgaria alone at the age of 12 – in Sofia, he was billeted with socialist aristocracy – he refused thereafter to holiday with what he thought of then as his “lousy, fucking, bastard” parents. His behaviour grew so tricky, his teachers called in a therapist: Robin Skynner, who’d go on to write a book about family life with John Cleese.
His move away from their communism took more time. Having been sent down from Oxford after failing an exam, he arrived at the University of Manchester, where he fell for the women’s movement, and lived in digs where free love, or something a little like it, was practised by his landlady. “At 18, I was a Corbynite,” he says. “At 39, I wasn’t.” What changed him? “It was being in the National Union of Students and having to deal with real stuff. At 22, I was vice-president of services, and a month later NUS Travel collapsed, and I was having to deal with redundancies. It was a hard lot of pragmatism. The world was not like I thought it was. Then, just before I became president, Thatcher was elected. Operating assumptions about the world were completely shattered. Two years later, not one ideological brick was left standing.” He finally left the CP in 1987, when he began working as a journalist at the BBC. When he told Lavender, her sense of betrayal was so overwhelming, he reversed his Ford Escort into a Porsche – a bit of symbolism that might have come straight out of a bad novel. Four years later, the Communist party of Great Britain was dissolved.
His politics now are not, of course, without controversy. The left regards him as a Blairite apologist, while his readers at the Times doubtless regard him as a crazed lefty. Either way, he’s depressed about what has happened to Labour since the election – and he feels guilty about it. “I feel guilty that there seemed to be no exciting or realistic thing on offer to the people who voted for Corbyn. It was our generation’s job to provide that. Why wasn’t it possible for people like me to help elucidate a prospectus that would have been attractive?”
For all that he may be somewhat overestimating the power and public estimation of newspaper opinion writers, he sounds chastened. Then again, the other night, there he was, debating on Newsnight the bombing of Syria. Given what happened with Iraq – he was very vocally in favour of the war there – you’d have thought he’d be tempted to stay out of this one. Wasn’t he worried his mere presence might have made the undecided come down against another foreign adventure? “It’s interesting you say that. I only looked at it from the point of view that [getting involved] would be so exhausting. It shows I’m an arrogant git, really.”
Human beings are all, in almost equal measure, self-aware and self-deluding. But in Aaronovitch, this tendency does seem marked – though perhaps his book, which makes such a virtue of unpicking his parents’ terrible misapprehensions, has also made me more alert to it. It’s rather amazing, for instance, to discover that his siblings have seen no advance copy. “You’ve made me worry now,” he says, when I ask if this doesn’t mean he is dreading publication (every child believes their version of their parents is the true version). And then: “You can interpret it quite aggressively, which is that this is my attempt to take their parents away from them. But I didn’t want to invite a problem that didn’t exist. I didn’t want to shove it at them, making myself the centre of what they’re doing, when actually, they’ve got other things to do. None of them likes to be reflective about this in the way that I do. They regard it as psychobabble, and I don’t.”
But equally, thanks both to his personality and, possibly, to his analysis – into which he went at the suggestion of another pal, the best-selling shrink Stephen Grosz – he is brilliant to talk to. He could go on all day and, up to a point, I’d be happy to listen. Does he feel better now he’s finished his book, more complete?
“Yes. Definitely.” His parents’ unhappiness took its effect on all their children and, in turn, he used to have “a fair capacity” for making himself and other people miserable. But this is behind him now. He feels “comfortable about who I am”.
This isn’t to say, however, that he has been able completely to draw a line under their politics, to mark their file “solved”. He wrote Party Animals, in part, to answer those of his friends on the right – Daniel Finkelstein, the Tory peer, being one – who cannot get their heads around the ugly chasm between belief and outcome in the case of communism (or understand why unrepentant supporters of communism never received the same kind of condemnation that, say, an unrepentant supporter of National Socialism might have had). But I wonder if those people will be satisfied. As I read, I cheered Sam and Lavender’s “obstinate heroism” in the matter of, say, fighting apartheid. I was even able to forgive them their refusal to allow little David ever to pick up the Beano. But after 300 pages of intense examination on their son’s part – his book is so vivid and moving – I still can’t understand why they never arrived at a moment of reckoning, a sense that it was their moral duty to renounce a cause that had brought with it such appalling human suffering. Some people are able to give up on each other more easily than they are to shake off their muddled, iron-bound convictions. But coming to this realisation isn’t, in the end, much of an epiphany.
Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists is published by Jonathan Cape, £17.99. Click here to buy it for £14.39
