Portugal was his self-portrait

Jonathan Meades on the dictator Salazar, a frugal loner who presided over his brutal regime for 36 years

ASALAZAR by Tom Gallagher 350pp, Hurst, £25

lthough Dr António de Oliveira Salazar ruled Portugal as an autocrat for almost four decades from 1932 until 1968, he can hardly be said to have sat at the top table of the last century’s European dictators. He certainly presided over the obligatory state crimes, brutal colonial repression, a paramilitary youth movement for seven to 14-year-olds and a secret police which routinely employed torture. But, horrible as they were, these were minor trespasses in comparison with those of his contemporaries.

He was an unfanatical pragmatist, an upholder of equilibrium, repulsed by what he deprecated as Hitler’s “pagan Caesarism” and Nazi antiSemitism. He was a conservative who did not espouse the radical modernism of Italian fascism and was unimpressed by Italy’s African adventures. He did not believe, like Mussolini, that peace was an inconvenience that interrupts near-perpetual war.

He supported Franco’s revolt, somewhat reluctantly, fearful of what might happen to Portugal were the Republicans victorious. The two men were, of course, abusive about each other in private. Face to face they conversed in Galician dialect, shared often awkward relationships with the changing Catholic Church and were both mother-fixated. They were paranoiac about communism,

“the greatest heresy”. But while Franco adored pomp and was a tiresome show-off, Salazar was a frugal paternalistic loner who cheered himself up with eucodal, an opioid also favoured by

Hitler: “I can’t have friends. I am nobody’s friend.” Which sounds mawkishly self-pitying.

Salazar believed in the primacy of the fecund nuclear family. Although he never married – or maybe despite his never marrying – the family represented an ideal, but a far from realistic ideal given the poverty and borderline famine in much of northern Portugal.

His own household was odd. He had an unofficial family. He was counselled and perhaps domestically dominated by his initially illiterate, eventually elegant and worldly housekeeper Maria de Jesus Freire, a onewoman kitchen cabinet who was apparently in touch with “the people”. They shared a billet for half a century. He brought up her two nieces who were rumoured to be issue of their union.

Perhaps incorrectly rumoured, for when Dona Maria died in

1981, 11 years after Salazar, the director of the care home where she had been living bizarrely took it upon himself to insist that a post-mortem be carried out to prove that she was virgo intacta and so preserve her reputation and that of the ruler who had sacrificed himself for his country, as these dangerous delusionists all do. Whether the result of this presumptuous intrusion was challenged is unclear.

Salazar was a cautious man. Such demagoguery that he possessed was tempered. He was not an orator. His Estado Novo was constructed in his image. It was Catholic, resolutely provincial, nationalistic, corporatist and quietly prying. It quite lacked fascism’s stoked-up excitements and savage melodrama. Salazar recognised the solaces of an unchanging society in “this land of placid habits”, though under his rule Portugal became largely literate, which of course opened the door to dissent: a more resolute autocrat craves a basically illiterate populace which can just about understand a threeword slogan.

His safety-first approach to governance is well illustrated by his reaction to the assassination in 1965 by PIDE, the Portuguese secret service, of Humberto Delgado, his sometime ally who had become “his most troublesome internal foe”.

Delgado was then in exile and, as usual, planning a coup. “Just look at the result when a country caves in to an adventurer,” warned Salazar, whom Tom Gallagher, in this fine biography, hesitates to accuse of direct involvement, though he does remark drily that “much official documentation concerning the Delgado affair seems to have been destroyed”. That Delgado was being supported in his schemes by Ahmed Ben Bella, the former terrorist and first president of an independent Algeria, suggests that he, rather than Salazar, was more in touch with the fashion of the times, anti-colonialism preached with massive hypocrisy.

Goa fell to Nehru’s troops in December 1961: Leonid Brezhnev, in India at the time, spoke smugly of “the liberation... from the last remnants of colonialism”. JF Kennedy had been interferingly militating for

on the kitchen table because people eat there.”

Gabriel’s narrative voice is couched in the Jamaican patois picked up from his associates in the gangs, and I suspect most of the people who have bought this novel as part of an annual attempt to plough through the Booker longlist will be keeping Urban Dictionary open on their nearest browser. It may not be easy to follow, but it’s undeniably vibrant: isn’t saying that people will “pay you mad p’s to go and turn a man ghost” so much more evocative than “pay you a lot of money to kill someone”?

As with so many novels that are really thinly disguised memoirs, there is no real structure other than one damn thing after another as it really happened to him; the book is a grim catalogue of violent acts and betrayals, and although the jet-black humour compensates at first for the lack of any chinks of optimism, most readers will end up pretty dispirited – but then that is,

I suppose, the only honest way to tell the story.

It is slightly disappointing that Krauze never really conveys what it is that he loves about literature – why he felt that he would “go mad” if he couldn’t study it at university. Gabriel often quotes Nietzsche in moments of selfjustification, but he talks more eloquently about the pleasures of Grand Theft Auto than about Salinger, his favourite author.

This is a shame, as it is clearly his love of books that has enabled Krauze to claw his way up out of his hellish former life. The novel ends with a sad coda in which Gabriel, several years after graduating, is still drifting and unhappy, but hoping to turn his life around by becoming a writer. Well, fortune has now smiled on Krauze, but a happy ending is only guaranteed if he can continue to write decent books now that he has juiced the most fascinating part of his life dry. On this evidence, I’d say he has plenty of talent to see him through.

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