Notebook
For those still determined to shut their ears to.1 he roar of Britain's approaching economic Niagara', it has been another bad week. The discovery that the Government is going to have to borrow yet a further £2000 million next year just to cover existing commitments came in right on cue as the IMF men Prepared to enter the Treasury on Monday. We are nearing the moment of truth which has been entirely predictable for the last eighteen months, when the IMF finally tells us that we have got to cut public spending by more than we are prepared to accept. Vet most commentators still carry on as if, ,Pnce again; we are just going somehow to Muddle through'. Even The Times's frontPage clutches at the straw that government borrowing this year appears lower than was expected—only leaving to the end the exPlanation that much of the vast borrowing by town halls and nationalised industries has not yet been taken into account. While Panorama turns the visit of the IMF men to London into little more than a kind of 'cops iind robbers' game, complete with 'snatched' Pictures outside Brown's Hotel, and an interview with Alan Whittome's Sussex fruit-farmer cousin. Goodness how sad it all is.
New light on Britain's poor -economic performance was recently shed by an incident in Soho. A French lady, while back home on ,11Pliday, had left her flat in the keeping of an English member of the same profession. On her return, she was horrified to find that her olleague had been making £700 a week. You English,' she expostulated, `you are so lazy. You should have made £1,500 a week at least.'
last weekend I walked through the bleak and empty canyons of the City of London to Peer up through the murk at the gigantic structure now rising over Bishopsgate. For several years now I have been waiting for the moment of shock when Londoners realise that Richard Seifert's new tower for the National Westminster Bank is destined to be by far the tallest office block in the city, making St Paul's a mere tussock. This last ghostly monument to the days of the Property boom will rise, when it is finished, to 600 feet. As the Daily Mai/ revealed on Saturday, it has long since become a comPlete financial white elephant (cost £80 mullion-plus; value, less than £70 million). indeed, I have long been reminded by this budding of the haunting passage in Scott Fitzgerald's essay 'My Lost City', where he describes returning to New York two years after the Great Crash. 'I walked reverently through the echoing tomb . . . from the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building . . . the last and most magnificent of the towers'.
By curious chance, in this national Suez nostalgia week, I found myself at lunch the other day sitting at the next table to Paul Johnson and Hugh Thomas. [first met these two twenty years ago at breakfast, shortly after the great Suez crisis, when they shared a flat together in Cadogan Gardens. In a space of weeks, the young and fiery Johnson had just written a passionate book called The Suez War. The reason for my arrival at such an unholy hour was that I was at the time working in a humble capacity for the then Mr Arnold Goodman, who had been called in on the book as legal adviser. He was horrified by some of the legal risks implicit in Johnson's colourful account of those hysterical days in October and November: not just libel and the Official Secrets Act, but even the fearsome and then seemingly-archaic words 'criminal libel' were invoked. I acted as a kind of messenger-boy, as Goodman judiciously toned down some of Johnson's more lurid passages, about Eden throwing telephones across the room and so forth. In retrospect it is a remarkable tribute to Johnson just how many of the more improbable aspects of his story—from collusion to the revelations of Eden's mental state—have been confirmed over the twenty years since..
Like Bernard Levin, I am an avid collector of surprising 'links with the past'. Anthony Howard recently came up with a fine example in the New Statesman, having discovered the oldest living one-time inhabitant of the White House, a daughter of Grover Cleveland. Curiously, only a few days later came the death of that splendid lady Dame Flora MacLeod of MacLeod, who, it turned out, was the oldest surviving person born in 10 Downing Street, when her grandfather Sir Stafford Northcote had been in residence as Chancellor in 1878. I suppose (on the strength of a few conversations with him in a hotel in North Wales when I was ten) my own most impressive 'link' is everyone's favourite trump card in this game, Bertrand Russell, who of course was brought up by the man who moved the Great Reform Bill in the House of Commons, his grandfather Lord John (born 1792). But I once ate strawberries with a man who could recall raking lunch with Mr Gladstone and tea with Queen Victoria on the same day, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the last Secretary of State for India. Only a few years ago I spent several hours in a Dorset garden with the last survivor of the Jameson Raid of 1896 (who still bore a large dent in his skull from a knobkerrie in the last Zulu War). And my school librarian could recall being dandled on the knee of a man who vividly described the news of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar arriving at Bridgenorth in 1805, who in turn had known someone who, like Dr Johnson, was touched for the King's Evil by Queen Anne.
In his almost Gotterclammerung-length exploration of Nuremberg and war crimes on Sunday night, Marcel Ophyls wisely made no attempt to impose any explicit message onto his vast assemblage of film and interviews. But simply by leaving his huge cast of characters to speak for themselves, a clear enough message emerged. Two groups came out best. Those who had been guilty of war crimes, and recognised the fact: (Albert Speer was outstanding). And those who had been asked to participate in crimes, and shown considerable courage in refusing—such as the American officer who resigned his commission rather than help cover up a massacre in Vietnam. At the other end of the scale were the serried ranks of the self-righteous, the vacuous young modern Americans and Germans, and Lord Shawcross, the supreme lawyer, blithely dismissing our guilt over Dresden as he sat before a roaring log fire in his agreeable Sussex farmhouse (while the camera strayed to agreeable eighteenthcentury pictures on the wall). As Yehudi Menuhin put it, 'in the end the only judges who count are those who sit in judgment on themselves.'
As Jimmy Carter prepared to enter the White House, it may seem premature to speculate on whether he will choose to run for a second term. But as 1980 nears, one consideration he will no doubt bear in mind is the curious fate of Presidents elected every twentieth year since 1860. Lincoln (1860), Garfield (1880) and McKinley (1900) were all assassinated. Harding (1920) and Roosevelt (1940) died in office. Kennedy (1960) completed the fey sequence. Of course if Carter is re-elected in 1980 he may not be alone in risking a premature end. We cannot rule out the possibility that he may take us all with him.
Christopher Booker
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