This book review of Rotten Borough by Oliver Anderson, penned by Tom Sharpe, appeared in the Evening Standard on 6 March 1989.
IT IS strange how often publishers put one off a good book by printing something misleading on the cover. Rotten Borough, which first came out in 1937 and is now reprinted, has as a sub heading “Real Story of Mrs Thatcher’s Grantham”. On the back the reader is promised insight into the “cradle of Thatcherism” and one of the book’s corrupt councillors runs a corner store “not unlike the one where Mrs Thatcher was born and reared.”
This is suggestio falsi with a vengeance and I was fortunate to read Oliver Anderson’s statement that Mr Roberts was in fact a thoroughly honest man.
Now I dislike Mrs Thatcher as much as anyone else, but I am not a believer in the maxim that any stick will do to beat a dog. Worse still, the blurb may persuade a lot of humourless ideologues to read the book while putting off people who would enjoy a farcical novel and avoid political tracts like the plague.
Rotten Borough is a romp, a series of escapades glittering with delightfully awful epigrams, bad puns and frightful jokes and with innuendoes about the sex life of the county set and the corruption endemic in any small town.
To suggest that splendid galaxy of poncing eccentrics and cocktail-swilling dandies is a serious expose of life in Grantham in the Thirties is about as sensible as confusing Pamella Bordes with Christine Keeler or even Mata Hari.
What is really fascinating is to discover that the county mob, including the Lord Lieutenant and the local councillors in Grantham, hurled so many writs for libel at Mr Anderson and his publishers that the latter pulped the remaining copies while the author took refuge somewhere obscure in Yorkshire, presumably to escape the horse-whipping the Lord Lieut had promised him for defaming his amateur actress wife.
To arouse such local fury takes a genuine talent: It also reflects the arrogance and stupidity of those who felt defamed. By my standards the Lord Lieutenant came out rather well. But the real indictment must be of the libel laws which prevented Rotten Borough’s decent sales.
It is the law that stultifies talent in England and it is in Mrs Thatcher’s attitudes to official secrets that we see the real influence of Rotten Borough’s fate in Grantham.
● TOM SHARPE’S novel, Wilt, is about to be filmed.