Belgrano bores

Paul Johnson

This lacklustre election has produced many new varieties of tedium. One is the leaked 'secret' report, which turns out

on examination not to be secret at all, nor to bear the political construction placed on

it. Another is that odious New Society-type

word 'caring', worse even than 'compas- sionate' and 'supportive'; every time David Steel uses it he sinks another point or two in my personal poll. I hope too, that now the election is over, Roy Hattersley (who has had a good campaign on the whole) will drop using the word 'message' in a statistical context: it ill becomes a man with literary pretensions.

But the biggest bore of all is the Belgrano Bore. And, my goodness, there are a lot of them in the media. The Belgrano buliness is a classic example of old-style CP agitprop. Don't state a general case: make it concrete, personalise it. Thus, over the decades, we

have had Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, liberez Henri Martin!, the

Scottsboro Boys and, most succesful of all, Guernica, which Stalin's propaganda machine used to distract attention from his massacre and torture of the anarchists in Catalonia. The Left feel they cannot fight Mrs Thatcher successfully on the main issues of the Falklands War, so they have

constructed an extraordinary mythology about the Belgrano. According to this,

Thatcher, who desperately wanted a war in the Falklands, partly because she likes war anyway but chiefly because she needed one to boost her desperately sagging political popularity and keep herself in office, was terrified that the 'Peruvian Peace Plan' would lead to a negotiated settlement. So

she broke her own rules of engagement and ordered the Belgrano to be sunk, though at

the time it was returning to harbour inten- ding to take no further part in the affair. Thus, at a stroke, she torpedoed not only the cruiser but the peace talks too and so got her war — and her political dividends.

It does not matter that every single ele- ment in this fantasy is false, and has been shown to be false over and over again. Nor does it matter that the loss of life in the

Belgrano was largely due to the behaviour of its escorts who turned tail and left their comrades to drown. What matters to the Belgrano Bore is the power and magic of the myth itself, which 'proves' Mrs That- cher is wicked. Belgrano Bores were very active at the Tory press conferences last week, brandishing 'facts' and 'disclosures' from such unimpeachable sources as Senor Costa Mendes, Argentina's Ribbentrop.

Some innocent foreigners, who do not understand the glutinous opacity of the British fringe-Left mind, believe the matter can be settled by producing documents. A dim American told Mrs Thatcher that, since many journalists were becoming fed up with Belgrano questions (me: 'Hear, hear!'), she should end the controversy by printing something or other. A talkative German, whom Mrs T rather likes, as he is an excellent comic feed, wanted her to publish 'admiralty papers'. But she knows, as well as anyone familiar with agitprop, that such a concession would merely serve as a platform on which the Belgrano Bores would build further monuments of men- dacity and self-deception.

Not that she has shirked battle with them. She took more questions on this than on any other topic, and banged them back across the court with ferocious top-spin. Pursuing her consistent tactic of never bringing up the Falklands herself, but return- ing charges with interest if the Opposition 'Well, it will get them into church at least twice in a lifetime.' Spectator I I June 1983 overwhelming majority of British people (including most journalists) welcomed the sinking of the cruiser, because it persuaded make them, she knows quite well that the the rest of the Argentine fleet to stay in har- bour for the duration and thus saved manY lives. All this is incomprehensible to the Belgrano Bores, who cannot be made to understand that most of us do not hate our country or wish it to be humiliated and defeated. So they plod doggedly on and doubtless will be raising the issue twenty, years from now, until the word 'Belgrann loses its evocative spell and joins such defunct emotive phrases as 'Marconi', 'Groundnuts', 'Collusion' and 'Bank Rate Leak' The BBC, needless to say, houses a good many Belgrano Bores in its seething en- trails, and it would be interesting to know how many thousands of pounds of the licence-payer's money has been spent by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the pursuit of this anti-British propaganda vendetta. Newsnight, for whom the sinister Costa Mendes is a kind of folk hero, was at it again last week, much to the indignation of David Owen. Tory complaints against the BBC are mounting, and I sympathise with them. Cecil Parkinson was furious about the composition of the audience in last week's Question Time. The problem with this programme, on which I have ap- peared once or twice and dislike intensely, is not Robin Day, who conducts things, as always, as fairly as possible, but the way in which the studio audience is selected. It is not drawn from the general public, as the viewer might suppose, but from a variety of activist groups. Thus, though political `balance' in a theoretical sense may be preserved, the mob in the studio is thoroughly unrepresentative, composed as it is largely of zealots, fanatics, obsessives, windbags and cranks. It is in complete con- trast to the Any Questions audiences on the radio, who are much closer to cross- sections of the people. Indeed, if the British as a nation were like the Question 71/11e crowd, one would want to blow one's brains out. However, useless to protest to the BBC about the behaviour of Newsnight Ques- tion Time or indeed some of the news bulletins, which had a strong resemblance to Labour Party Political Broadcasts. To make a protest assumes that someone is in control, and nobody is in control of the BBC. In practice, Alasdair Milne can no more determine the output of such Pro- grammes, or even influence them to .anY Edttor real extent, than I can. His title of , in-Chief', which he has in addition to °s: Cor Director-General, is misleading. The

poration is far too big, diffuse and it

ities.

ed of private empires and principal

is, typically, holding two rival electione night parties), to be 'edited' by any one man. It must be broken up. Now that thne election is over, I shall be returning to problem of what to do about Britain s £3,000 million-a-year Public Sector

Culture Industry, of which the BBC is only a part.