Another voice
Birds in their little nests
Auberon Waugh
There are two good reasons for delaying any public expression of the rage and nausea which must be felt by nearly all school-fee-paying parents after Sir Keith Joseph's proposal to introduce a means test for education vouchers. We are told that his scheme would effectively exclude all parents with a net income of over £12,000, and ex- clude all the better and more expensive schools. The first reason is that one should never do anything in a rage. As someone who has been working himself to death for many years to raise £9,500 a year for school and university fees from his taxed income, my judgment of the matter might be cloud- ed in any case.
The second reason is that New Morality has not yet pronounced on the vexed ques- tion of tyrannicide. I should have thought that a prima facie case for putting a bomb under Sir Keith's car existed under the old dispensation which allowed choosing the lesser evil: no legal redress exists where a government elected under a Conservative banner suddenly reveals itself to have been, secretly, a party of levellers; the greater evil which threatens is that of violent revolution or, alternatively, the genocide of Britain's upper-middles and professional classes. But I am not sure, and would suggest that a Committee of New Moralists be set up to adjudicate — composed, perhaps, of Mgr Worlock, Cardinal O'Fiaich, 'Two-Wafers' Shirley Williams and Mr Wilfred De'Ath before we waste time and money destroying good cartridges and alarm clocks.
Sir Keith's lunacy was originally leaked to the educational correspondent of the Daily Mirror several weeks ago but nobody except me seems to have spotted it. At the time, I assumed that Sir Keith was flying a kite to see if he could sell his admirable idea for education vouchers to the lower classes with the sugar coating of a means test which would prove, on closer scrutiny, to have no application to the likes of you and me, be- ing confined to things like an allowance for uniforms and 'extras' like beagling. In the event his ploy (if such it was) failed and the Mirror reacted with the traditional fury which workers reserve for any attempt to improve their education. I could have guessed this would happen — a better educated working class would defect, en masse, to the Daily Telegraph — but also hoped that Sir Keith, seeing the result, would drop his idiotic plans for a means test. Instead of which he made the Daily Telegraph's education correspondent, Mr John Izbicki, the next recipient of his con- fidences, with the predictable result which appeared in that newspaper on Monday: `SIR KEITH would be well advised to
think again and either launch bold ex- periments with vouchers, or spare us this ridiculous mouse.' What SIR KEITH has in fact achieved is not only to enrage the working class and give comfort to his political opponents, whether on the Labour benches or sitting behind him in the horri- ble form of MR EDWARD HEATH, but also to disgust and antagonise the middle class. Perhaps he would be even better ad- vised to retire from politics altogether before the New Morality Committee has time to report.
At least, in retirement, he will be able to nurse his baronetcy, and thank his lucky stars that Mr Churchill was still around in 1943 to award it to his father. Of all the crimes of his present government, the one which will stink to heaven for the longest is surely Mrs Thatcher's pigheaded refusal to resume the creation of hereditary titles. I have written at enormous length on this subject already, pointing out how an entire generation has now grown up without the slightest incentive to toe the line, reck the rod or generally be respectable. In the case of my own contemporaries, it will soon be too late for us to mend our ways and set our feet on the path which might eventually lead us to an earldom. Where Sir Keith can still retire with a copy of the Baronetage as his occupation for an idle hour and con- solation in a distressed one, we have only Mr Patrick Marnham's history of Private Eye (The Private Eye Story, Deutsch £7.95) as our guarantee that we do, in fact, exist. Like Alexander Chancellor, in last week's Notebook, I was struck by the 'quite dif- ferent note' in Christopher Booker's review of the book. Booker started by complaining at enormous length about Marnham's inac- curacy — he counted 40 factual errors relating to himself. Marnham has a 'quite remarkable gift for getting his facts wrong', he is a man 'who does not even seem [sic] to be able to get the simplest fact right'. Final- ly, 'he is not in the grip of a love of truth'.
Oh dear. In the first instance, I am puzzl- ed by Booker's reverence for 'the facts'. As a religious man, he must be aware that truth is known only to God. All that we poor
mortals can do is point people towards our own perception of it, ever prepared t° acknowledge that we may be quite wrong. It is like leaving trails through a vv0°d' which others may follow or not as they choose. Marnham did not get his, Marn- ham's, facts wrong; he got Booker's facts wrong, which is not the same thing at all. If Marnham's path crossed misleading signs which seemed to point in another direction, then plainly it was an act of kindness 10 alter them.
`Facts' which one reads in newspapers or encyclopaedias are no different. Any 'fact' one is ever told should be examined more for the information it reveals about the teller than for anything it purports to con' vey in itself. It is only by an evaluation 01 people's motives for telling one anything that one arrives at one's own perception 0 where the truth is most likely to lie. How' otherwise, does Booker manage to read the newspapers? But it is my experience, in 22 years of journalism, that complaints about inae. curacy usually hide some deeper unbar); piness. Following the signs, I would hazard that the item which caused Booker distress is hidden in his reference to 'one markedlY embittered exception (someone who has not been centrally involved with Private Eye for 15 years, although a valued contributor)' who had been encouraged by Marnham to make unpleasant remarks about his e°1- leagues. The 'embittered exception' is John (otherwise Jawn — 'I've been swept °P. wards in society') Wells: `Wells gets on better with Ingrains than he does with either Booker or Waugh. He sees the latter two as "demented". He sal "Booker is a bad influence on Ingrains; 4-1 that unabated Mary Whitehousery. And her shares with Waugh a peculiar kind 3; viciousness, more sadistic than satirical.' Oddly enough, of all my 53 mentions this
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is the one which causes me the keenest pleasure, especially in the context of Mar°- ham's perception of Wells. There was Booker like some baby bird in its nest, his beak wide open for more and more `facts', and Marnham pops in this horrible slug: Birds in their little nests agree and `tis,a shameful sight when children of one fartluY fall out and chide and fight (Watts). Wells, as Marnham sees him, has alwaYs been a bit of a cuckoo in the nest, corning from an inferior public school (Eastbourne College) and acutely conscious of it. Deter:, mined to be a.social success, he first use.',. his Eye connection to ingratiate himself with Princess Margaret (the former dancing_ partner of Alexander Chancellor's brothel, John) but has more recently consolidated his social position with a spectacular mar- riage at the age of 47 — to RICHARD INa GRAMS'S SISTER! She was probably, former wife of Christopher Booker, 111‘.., most of the women in London nowadays but I believe he actually pinched her fro my cousin Bernard Dru. These, then, are the facts. One can make of them what one will.
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