Press

Leading questions

Bill Grundy

The ins and outs of the Tory leadership struggle are no concern of mine. I leave that to the learned Doctor Cosgrave, my venerable colleague. But what the papers say about the struggle is very much my concern — and here may I just say. with the modesty typical of The Spectator office, that the great Doctor seems to have done a lot better than the others, with his long-term insistence that Heath will go, and his selection of Mrs Thatcher as the Woman of the Hour a couple of weeks ago. Still.

by the time this appears, the second poll will have taken place and the mighty Doctor may have got it as wrong as the others have done. And how wrong that is!

Last week's Sunday Express led with an article by Keith Renshaw headed 'Now it looks like Heath.' Well, now it doesn't. The Guardian ran a story by David McKie headed 'A 'Heath wind blows from the _

grassroots.' Not very powerfully. it would seem. Walter Terry, the

political editor of the Daily Express went out on a limb with a story on the very morning of ballot day.

'Ted stays in front' it said; Mr Terry's limb broke very shortly afterwards. On the same day. the Telegraph leader was saying "at present • it seems likely that Mr Heath will be re-elected either today or in some future ballot."

Sometime never. Even that home of political punditry the Sun. had a

on. And got it wrong, of course: 'Heath gets new boost.' The Evening Standard decided to get it

wrong with a bang: 'Heath within range of an outright win'. Somebody's range-finder wasn't working properly. And on the morning of the ballot the Guardian came out with a straightforward 'Buoyant Heath looks set for a clear lead,' apparently not noticing that there was a leak in his buoyancy tanks.

It's all very sad, and it reminds me of my old mate Bertrand R1.15;.:01. The Sage of Penrhyndeudreath once observed, in his usual salty \vay. -When all the experts agree. they are probably wrong." I couldn't have put it better myself.

Now. how does it come about that all these clever gentlemen — and make no mistake about it. they are clever, and they are knowledgeable, and they normally do know what's going on behind the scenes — how come they all got it so disastrously wrong? Well, you may remember that the celebrated William Shakespeare once declared -There's nothing good or bad. but thinking makes it so." And that's What all the lads seem to have been doing — thinking themselves into a corner and then finding it's the wrong one. The trouble is that political iournalism suffers from the same defects as the Palace of Westmin• -aer: it is too cloistered. Cribbed. cabined and confined in its claustrophobic corridors (alliteration is the thief of time), the practitioners of the art are forever in each other's pockets. A whisper here. a rumour there, and almost instantly everybody is saying the same.thing.

What seems to have misled all the experts was the report that the consituencies were solidly for Mr Heath. Now that may in fact have been true. But there are two things to observe about it. One. 'the constituencies' actually means only a small number of politically active people. And two, the Tories in Westminster were under no obligation to pay any attention to what those far-flung folk were thinking. After all, it is the MPs who would lose their jobs if Mr Heath led them to another defeat, not those people out there in the sticks. And it is they who have suffered under Mr Heath's arrogant aloofness over the

years (there is a great deal of illumination in the story of the Junior Minister who approached Heath one day and said, "Prime Minister, I wonder if I could have a word with you?" to which Heath merely replied, "If you want to resign put it in writing"). So they paid no attention to the constituency reports, whereas our clever clogs did, and so got it wrong.

And the Tory MPs were right. If those journalists whose patch is Westminster actually got out and about and' listened, in pubs and places where they sing, to what people are saying. they might have realised that to masses of your irdinary voters Mr Heath was just pain in the neck, and like most pains in the neck, something to be :lot rid of as soon as possible. But you can't get out and about when you're stuck with Parliament. So inevitably your outlook becomes parochial — parish of Westminster, of course, but still parochial. Which how even the cleverest can boob badly as they did this week.

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