A Spectator's Notebook
There is this to be said for the disastrous events in Ulster which began in the early hours of Wednesday this week and continued throughout the day and night, that Britain has been enabled to see the 'loyalists ' in their true light. Whatever it is to which some of these men may be loyal, it is not to the Crown and the flag they sometimes choose to wear, it is not to any sense of patriotism and it is not to any religion worth the name. These 'loyalists ' may be loyal, after their fashion, to some kind of ancestral pride, to some historical myths which inform their beliefs and inflame their minds ;and they may also be loyal to such of their neighbours as share this pride and these myths. But to what else are they loyal? Not to Ulster, for what they are doing can only destroy the economic fabric of the Province; and certainly not to the United Kingdom, whose troops they fight in open insurrection.
William Craig must have forfeited virtually all political respect. The extreme Pro testants, fighting, striking, and intimidating are likely now to produce in Great Britain the gut reaction of disgust. In contrast, Brian Faulkner, Ian Paisley and others, speaking out against violence and the incitement to violence, gain stature. And for speaking out his mind in the middle of crisis, Dr Desmond Downing, consultant anaesthetist at a hospital at Ballymoney, also earns the greatest respect. He had had the responsibility of keeping Craig's own son alive during an operation; but at 3 o'clock on Wednesday morning, because of lack of electricity caused by men striking at the behest of men like Craig and the ' loyalist ' organisations, two patients of his almost died. These self-styled loyalists, who to my mind, are disloyal to everything that matters and certainly to their country and their faith, cut off power supplies. "Why," cried Dr Downing, "why, in the name of humanity, what appears at the very least to be hooliganism on the part of two members of the community should lead to the misery and very possibly the deaths of many innocent children, old people and very ill patients?" Why, why indeed?
Religion, faith, loyalty: far more crimes are ccmmitted in their names, than in the name of liberty.
Brittle, very brittle
I asked an up and coming young Tory MP at a very amiable party at the Carlton Club given by Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism, what the condition of the party in the Commons was. " Brittle," he replied, "very brittle." He also said that it was his clear impression that Members of Parliament were becoming very reluctant to make speeches in their constituencies, for they find themselves contradicting almost everything they have said since the general election. I have since checked this out and have discovered that the number of weekend speeches made by Conservative MPs has declined by a third since the general election. In the last four months, the number of speeches on economic policy made by Tory MPs has almost halved. "If the prices and incomes policy works," he said, "then we'll be able to talk about overcoming the national emergency and desperate measures being necessary for desperate situations and so forth; but if they don't work‘ —? " He shrugged his shoulders. Worse still, the Conservative Research Department's Weekend Talking Point — a small sheet designed to send the same message to each Conservative member and candidate, and produce a uniform set of speeches the country over, lavishly reported in local papers — is being increasingly derided. Members of Parliament, increasingly, are not prepared to deliver speeches made by the publicity machinery of the party against their convictions, even when they are pliable enough in their lobby votes.
Incidentally, I also heard from more than one source at the party (which was naturally attended by the top party functionaries) that pressure is being exerted in certain areas of Fleet Street with a view to quietening down the rising noises of disaffection being made by various specific journalists and leader-writers in various specific newspapers. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time such discreet pressure has been applied since the election.
Mercurius intercepted
By good fortune, I was able to intercept a communication from my old friend Me:curius Oxoniensis written on this occasion to his brother in learning in California. The old gent has been silent of late, and I feared that he might have piped down for good. When a mutual friend told me he had picked up his pen again I was delighted.
Cash and the BBC
I see that Charles Curran, Director-General of the BBC, is predicting that the Corporation will have piled up a debt of £15 million by 1975, and that an increase in the licence fee will by then be inevitable. His remarks will once again prod people into wondering whether the BBC is not already far too big and too cumbersome for its own and everyone else's good. It is very unlikely that an outfit the size of the BBC produces economies of scale: rather the opposite is likely to be the case.
When the BBC starts asking for more cash, people may start asking why the BBC should not accept advertisements and become, at least in part, commercial. The BBC may reply that if this were to happen, the standards of television would drop. Would they? If the BBC nowadays paid no attention to its ratings, then the argument might well apply. But the BBC chiefs are just as keen as their ITV rivals to seize and to hold the' maximum audience.
The Corporation's decision that the gratuitous use of words like ' God ', ' bloody ' and ' bleeding ' (an odd juxtaposition), together with ' unnecessary ' nudity and sexual explicitness, is to be stopped may well be not unconnected with its forthcoming monetary requirements. Cash is in this case providing the motive for censorship, as in most other cases it provides the motive for permissiveness and pornography.
New Master
The dons of Peterhouse have just concluded their deliberations in electing a new Master of the college, and their choice has fallen upon one of the college's — and indeed one of Cambridge's and the country's — foremost scholars. Grahame Clark, Disney Professor of Archaeology at the university, is a Peterhouse man: he graduated there in 1930. He is sixty-five, and will probably remain as Master, after he takes up the position in June, for seven years. His work as an archaeologist has not been among the classical Mediterranean and the Egyptian and Mesopotamian sites, but in northern Europe. He is perhaps the greatest authority on the prehistory of this country and the northern European countries, as his honorary membership of most of the principal academies of these countries indicates.
He is no revolutionary. Under his mastership, Peterhouse is unlikely to go in for some of the wilder excesses of contemporary academic fashion and mis rule. The' college's more progressive ' fellows, who may have hoped for some outsider to bring in what they would like to think would be 'a breath of fresh air ', have seen the majority of their society elect a man whose scholastic credentials are unsurpassed, and are , equalled among their number only by , those of John Kendrew, the Nobel prizerwinning molecular biologist and chairman of the Defence Scientific Advisory Council, who did not allow his name to go forward in the election.
Previous page
