DIARY
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE As anybody who visits the United States knows, race is even more sensitive a subject there than it is here. People go to the most extreme lengths to avoid upset- ting black sensitivities. Let me give an example. Recently in Washington I was visiting a famous publisher-editor-guru in his office. As is his wont, indiscretions, denunciations, outrageous remarks about everything under the American sun, were pouring from him in profusion — all in loud and carrying tones — until I raised the question of education. Then he paused and closed his office door. 'Our education system has gone to pot,' he said, lowering his voice, 'and nothing can be done to put it . right. For what we need is a re- introduction of rigorous streaming, sorting out the bright from the dull, and we can't do that for fear of demonstrating conclu- sively black inferiority. So we are sacrific- ing the goal of an educated nation to the goal of an integrated nation.' I asked him why he did not write about this. Surely, I said, it is a problem which needs to be aired, for a bad state educational system one that can't distinguish between various levels of intelligence — that really could put the United States at a crucial disadvan- tage to, say, Japan. 'Write about it!' he expostulated. 'You must be crazy. I can't even talk about it in public.' All this conspiracy of silence is making matters worse, not better, as the actions of the Supreme Court show. The Supreme Court has just made it legal for a most dreadful deed to be done: the execution of under- 18s in the electric chair. In reporting this decision, British television showed some of the 30 teenagers who are going to die, all of whom were black. How very, very odd. On the one hand the United States gets more and more squeamish in what it says about the blacks, and on the other, more and more ruthless in what it does to blacks. Could there be a causal connection here? Do the absence of frankness in speech and a refusal to talk or write about the realities of race, encourage young blacks to think they can get away with murder and that white society is afraid of them? At least in the old days blacks knew what they were up against. Now the danger is that quite a number of them are going to learn the truth very much the hard way.
Robert Jackson, the higher education minister, has received a lot of stickfor writing a letter to the Independent criticis- ing Freddie Ayer so soon after his death. `A new low point in public life', was how one critic described the minister's letter. Another called it 'graceless and ill-timed'. Professor Ronald Dworkin of Oxford and Harvard thought it `mean-spirited'. Such outrage on behalf of Freddie really is woefully misplaced, since he would have not expected his critics to show any respect for the dead. One can almost hear him demolish 'this foolish superstition'. Fred- die himself was shockingly insensitive ab- out such matters. Shortly after learning that his beloved wife Vanessa was dying of cancer he wrote asking me — a friend of Vanessa's — to put him up again for the Garrick Club — he had recently resigned — on the grounds that he would soon be in need again of somewhere to dine in convi- vial company. I can think of quite a few people unselfless enough to be thinking of themselves in this way at such a time; but absolutely nobody other than Freddie would have been so insensitive as to try to translate such private thoughts into action. In defence of Freddie it has to be said that, being a militant rationalist, he would have regarded his request as eminently sensible, even logical, and my reaction of distaste as sentimental and foolish. Therein lay his lack of wisdom, since so much that is conducive to good behaviour was un- dreamt of in his philosophy — like the importance of believing in miracle cures even when the doctors say one's wife has only three months to live. Not that Freddie was in any intentional way a cruel man or even all that selfish. But just as some religious people have no idea how love of God, carried to its logical conclusion, can damage civilisation, so Freddie had no idea of how love of reason, carried to its logical conclusion, can do the same.
Question Time seems to me a grossly over-rated television programme, as dull to watch as to appear on. It was a good vehicle for Robin Day's particular brand of banter, but apart from that asset it had few others. The highlights of its first ten years, which were proudly re-run the other even- ing, were really pathetic. Norman Tebbit confusing Peter Jenkins with Simon Jenk- ins; Charles Moore asking Robin whether he had ever used the services of the notorious Mrs Payne, and so on. Is this really what has to pass for wit and wisdom on the country's supposedly most presti- gious talk show? It used not to be, as anybody who recalls the old radio Brains Trust — or telly Brains Trust, for that matter — will testify. In those days we had panellists like Julian Huxley, C. E. M. Joad, Malcolm Muggeridge, A.J.P. Taylor, Father Martin d'Arcy, Bob Booth- by, and many others in that class who could tackle the big perennial subjects, like `Does the panel believe in God?' — rather than some ephemeral topic of the day such as, 'Does the panel believe in water privatisation?' The trouble with questions about topical political issues, like water privatisation, is that it takes politicians or political columnists to answer them, and boringly unrepresentative members of the public — party activists — to ask them. Given this terrible handicap, Robin Day certainly did the best anybody could with the programme. But why can't we go back to the Brains Trust format, where the subjects discussed, and the people discus- sing them, are sufficiently interesting in themselves not to need to be put through hoops by the best circus master in town?
My mother knew John Reith, whose centenary was admirably commemorated by Frank Gillard on the BBC recently. She and her husband, Montagu Norman, took him on a cruise in the West Indies shortly before the war, while he was still at the height of his fame as the first director- general of the BBC. Legend has it that in those days he was impossibly dour, gruff, arrogant and unbending, only becoming human — perhaps too human — in his long retirement years, softened by disappoint- ment and frustration. Quite untrue, says my mother, whose memory is still as sharp as ever, in spite of her 90-odd years. That he could be very difficult indeed, she does not deny. But he could also be, even in those early days, extraordinarily sweet_ She recalls how, after a bitter row, he took the first opportunity to go on shore and buy a bunch of exotic flowers as a peace- offering. But he did not present them to her. He stole into her cabin, pulled down the counterpane and carefully put the posy on the pillow with the stems tucked into the bedclothes. Unbeknownst to Reith, Montagu Norman was watching this opera- tion from the stateroom next door and could not believe his eyes when he saw this legendary monster going to such delicate lengths to bury the hatchet with a mere woman. It later transpired that Reith was at the time actively campaigning to succeed my stepfather as Governor of the Bank of England, but that is entirely another story. My mother loves to reminisce and I am only sorry that the excellent nuns with whom she resides are so busy praying to God that they have little time to listen to her.
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