Norman St John-Stevas, Lord St John of Fawsley, who has died aged 82, was as vivid a personality as politics can bear. Mannered, self-applauding, with an aura of camp and given to tiffs and squabbles, he had outstanding intellectual gifts, vitiated, despite an underlay of real scholarship, by eternal public performance.
No-one of course would think of Tony Blair or David Cameron as being 'vitiated ... by eternal public performance'. Yet we no longer have a government of the wits: not since Macmillan has a leading politician dared aspire to wit, as distinct from the obligatory jokes at Prime Minister's Questions. Jokes and wit are not the same thing. You can have other people write your jokes for you, as Mrs Thatcher famously did with 'The lady's not for turning', but wit is a state of mind.
I suppose that is what made Norman St John-Stevens seem so unreliable to his political colleagues. In a political culture that regards revealing one's reasoning, as distinct from one's set conclusion, as a sign of weakness and a threat to smooth and effective process, politics gravitates naturally to the semi-corrupt cultivation of the popular press and the centres of wealth and to the erection of a system of boxes and references as a substitute for thought. (See, for example, any planning officer's report to committee and consider the government's complete helplessness, or surrender, when it seeks to 'do away with red tape'.)
Norman St John-Stevas's offence was that 'He commonly split his time between earnestness and frivolity', but amongst his various achievements he left a solid and lasting contribution to good governance and democracy in his work on the strengthening of select committees in the House of Commons, which deserves to be remembered alongside his frivilous quips and ernest scholarship:
Once, he was asked by David Frost about the colour of his shirt: "What's that – purple?" "No," replied Stevas, "crushed cardinal." Meanwhile, his work on Bagehot grew, with volumes appearing in 1966, 1968 and 1974.
