SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

Roy Jenkins is doing extremely well, almost winning the Labour Party's deputy leadership on the first ballot. He will have no difficulty in finding the extra couple of votes necessary to defeat Michael Foot the second time round. It is good that the issue is now, in effect, settled, and well settled at that. Apart from Jim Callaghan, who sensibly did not stand and who, in fact, would now succeed Harold Wilson in the event of the proverbial bus, Jenkins is the best deputy leader the Labour party has got. Michael Foot did nicely — the Left has never polled so high — but the coalition of centre and right-wing Labour MPs still, ,thankfully, retains its easy dominance. There is no lurch to the left. There is nothing to be frightened of.

A seat for Ted

There is continuing speculation about the Prime Minister's seat. Some of his senior advisers think that he should get himself an entirely new and safe and solid one.

Ever since he entered Parliament in 1950 Ted Heath's seat has been Bexley. He scraped home against Ashley Bramall, now Leader of the Inner London Education Authority, thanks to a Communist candidate who took away enough Labour votes to let Ted in. Since then he has never been in serious difficulty and has been (as may be imagined) an exemplary constituency member. Bexley and Ted go together like peaches and cream. But under the proposed arrangements, Ted's present seat disappears and is replaced by• one which is regarded as highly marginal.

Naturally the Prime Minister has not been without offers of absolutely safe and solid seats — he could have had the Cities of London and Westminster, for instance, when John Smith packed it in. But he is personally inclined to stay and fight and has let it be known that in any event he does not want any sitting member's seat. Some have suggested that Dame Pat Hornsby-Smith's neighbouring Kent seat of Chislehurst, which becomes safe and solid Tory, would have been near enough to Bexley for the Prime Minister not to attract the jibe of running away. It now seems most likely that Ted Heath has bowed to the urgent pleadings of his Close political advisers and accepted that it Would be best all round if he left Bexley at the next election and found himself a new seat. There will be no shortage of offers. But one which has been mentioned is already getting restive. A new seat is being made down Bournemouth way, called Christchurch and Lymington, with suitable yachting connections and solid enough to survive any Labour landslide. The Bournemouth Second Chamber Debating Society (which has been going since 1945 with procedure modelled on the House of Lords) had before it an emergency motion proposed by a local and lifelong Conservative, Dr Ella St John, that "any suggestion of providing a safe seat for Mr Heath in a local constituency is repugnant to this House." The motion was carried by a large majority, and the Lord Chancellor,' Major A. H. Beal, directed that it be sent to the Conservative Central Office. The 'Leader of the House' said that he had encountered kite-flying in both the Christchurch and New Forest divisions.

Champagne for the masses

The Bow Group's annual cocktail party, at the English Speaking Union's palatial headquarters, was surprisingly congenial. One trick was learned quickly by several old party hands. There were two kinds of glasses — champagne glasses for hoi polloi, who were expected to drink champagne only, and wine glasses for those considered grand enough to be offered the choice of whisky, gin or sherry. You could only get a decent drink if you had the right sort of glass. Thus about half way through the party whenever someone put a wine-glass down it was promptly snapped up, and in no time at all the tables were littered with discarded champagne glasses and anyone who had obtained one clasped his wine-glass firmly as a precaution against theft. Once it was oysters for the masses. Now it is champagne.

Straw in the wind

One of the Bow Group's amiable officials started talking to me about how he had reached the conclusion that Harold Wilson would defeat George Brown for the leadership of the Labour party. I said that I knew no one who thought there was any doubt about it. He pressed on (Bow Groupers do press on) saying, "I was at a party once. Harold Wilson and George Brown were there and suddenly I looked around and I saw that nobody was paying any attention to George Brown and that they were all flocking around Harold Wilson. Then I knew Harold was winning."

At this, I looked myself around the crowded Bow Group party.

"Very interesting," I said to the Bow Grouper. "Now cast your eyes around this splendid room, filled with distinguished Tory politicians and look at that group there. Is not that group the biggest? Who is it who is commanding the attention at your annual Bow Group cocktail party?"

He looked. "Oh dear," he said as he considered the dominant circle. Who was at its centre, talking fiercely to a rapt audience?

Enoch Powell.

The loyalists

I said to a senior Tory knight "Why don't you lay off them a bit. You're all being really very nasty to the Tory thirty-nine.

He said "What do you mean?"

1 said "Stop sending out nasty little messages and messengers trying to force them back into line."

He laughed very nicely, eyes twinkling like diamonds, saying "Oh, we never do things like that now, you know us better."

One curious aspect I came across time and again: and that was the great anger many of the younger and junior Bow Groupers felt towards The Spectator for taking the anti-Market line. They seemed to think we had no right to oppose. The middle and senior ranks of party managers and government ministers are not anything like so fanatical as the young and frequently faceless backbenchers who went around (largely unsuccessfully, I thought) trying not to look like the Bow Group officers they once were but endeavouring instead to carry on like the middle and senior men they hope to become. They have yet to learn not only that loyalty tends to corrupt, but also that absolute loyalty gets you absolutely nowhere.

An excellent party, much better than the one Private Eye gave in Brighton.

Unwelcome guest

President Tito's visit here recalls last year's visit of his Prime Minister, Mitja Ribicic. On that occasion Tibor Szamuely wrote an article in these pages, entitled 'Enter Tito's policeman,' which dealt with Ribicic's record as supervisor of the slaughter of tens of thousands of antiTitoite Yugoslays in Slovenia immediately after the war's end. The article aroused considerable interest and comment, and Sir Thomas Brimelow, one of.the top Foreign Office knights, said afterwards that the article had "ruined the whole visit."

The way to avoid such visits being ruined, short of censoring the press, is not to have them.