Afterthought
By ALAN BRIF,N Yet going back over the newspapers, day by day, I read how politicians, commentators and psephologists have been announcing, with vary- ing degrees of confidence, that they always under- stood what our day-by-day intentions were for October 15. We the people, they tell us, have been swinging and counter-swinging, stampeding and landsliding, acting and re-acting, according to the progress of an entirely imaginary pheno- menon known as The Campaign. I ask you—is it likely? Does it bear any resemblance to any- thing you have observed inside your own skull? Have you met anyone who admits to harbouring this maelstrom of conflicting intentions?
Having answered myself 'No,' I thought I had detected the tell-tale signs of something I had long been seeking to capture and dissect—a Pseudo-Event. But a Closer -look convinced me that, though the area was buzzing with Pseuds, nothing even resembling an Event was in evi- dence. The Campaign has about as much reality as the Conspiracy of the Elders of Zion, the Secrets of the Pyramids, the Phlogiston Theory or the Music of the Spheres. It is a hoax, an im- practical joke, a c011ective hallucination, an occupational obsession, a psychic shadow-play, a monstrous great warm-air balloon of stale words and exhausted emotions blown up by at the most ten thousand professional inflaters. I do not doubt that all of them (well, most of them) have sincerely grown to believe what they have hypnotised themselves into saying about Us. But there is no more dangerous enemy of the truth than the man who believes he cannot tell a lie. The Inflaters are incapable of answering any question with such a dull and colourless reply as 'Don't Know.' They are like civilians in an under- ground shelter boasting to each other that they can tell where the bombs are dropping. For them the last rumour is always the best rumour, the most fantastic explanation the most reasonable explanation, the most complicated paradox the simplest proposition. They have cut their throats with Occam's Razor and are now trying to auc- tion off the blood.
Someone who files his newspapers more tidily than I do must really document the six-week ex- pansion of the Smith Square Bubble, the rush- job from weaver to wearer with the Emperor's New Clothes by the Invisible Menders and Imaginary Button-holers of Fleet Street. We Britons pride ourselves on being inoculated against panic—only Wops, Dagoes and Yankees trample each other as the ship goes down. I would not like to have been on the Titanic with this crew as they rushed in and out of the state- rooms screaming that the Captain had gone blind, the Mate seen a vision, the Purser begun sleep- ing with the Stewardess, the Cabin Boy started training rats to savage the Wireless Operator, and the Company Agent found smuggling immigrants in the hold. The Owners would be revealed at one moment as the firm of Burke, Charles II and Trollope and at another as Lenin, Cromwell and Lloyd George Ltd. The loudspeakers would drip statistics suggesting that fares would be lowered by 50 per cent, that the ship would definitely arrive either overloaded in New York or empty in Moscow, that between October 2 and October 3 the new space-age Navigator had been born and the old one exposed as a pensioned-off veteran of the Armada. It would be tragic if it were not so comic. And if the passengers were not carefully sleeping with their tickets under the pillows, ready to disembark, dead on time, carry- ing their own-baggage.
A straightforward chronological and factual record of what was said (for nothing was done) by the forecasters would reveal that 90 per cent of them must have been wrong 90 per cent of the time: no pair said the same thing at the same time and everyone said the same thing at some point. The pollsters, those augurs and oracles of
our days, had the strongest claim to be reporting opinions held by real people—even if their magical numbers of 2,000 and 1,750 and 684 interviews seemed sometimes as peripheral to the intentions of the silent millions as the entrails of the sacred cocks or the excretions of the sacred cows. But polls are to newspapers what watches are to travellers—each proprietor believes his own. And there is no GMT to check which is fast or slow until the train leaves.
Journalists march round to confront politicians. Politicians sidle round nobbling journalists. Everybody telephones everybody to pass on what somebody else has said. Everybody denies telephoning anybody and nobody admits to saying anything. Psephological laws are promulgated one Sunday and repealed the next. Contradictory assertions spar with each other in the same sentence. We are told that HomE/Wil- son is PANICKY/rattled. The TORIES/Labour have their BACKS TO THE WALL/are in a blind alley.
HOGG/ Brown has alienated floating voters by THREATENING/promising IO BRING UP ADULTERY/ bring down mortgage rates. CENTRAL OFFICE/ Transport House has made an obvious error by KEEPING TEMPERATURE DOWN/stoking passions up. There is always a last-minute swing to the' GOVERNMENT/Opposition as was proved in 1959/ 1950 according to GALLUP/National Opinion Polls. TORIES/Labour/Liberals are the true heirs of the RADICALS/Radicals/radicals. The decisive factors will be TELEVISION/Public Meetings/door- to-door canvass. Like a legion of women trying on hats at a sale, each commentator continually dis- cards what he has in his hand to seize what the other has dropped.
Meanwhile, the rest of us read about ourselves with a passive, almost bovine interest. We might be wild cattle tuned in to the Metropolitan fat- stock prices. We know what we weigh, and what we are worth. All but a handful of us in even/ hundred are immune to the undulant fever. Still it is mildly satisfying to learn that we will net stomach this, and must reject that, traditionally support the one and have always refused to be swayed by the other. On Thursday, most of .us will herd ourselves in decent, unhurried convoy to the polling stations, treading through the clouds of commentators as through a cluster Of gnats. Whichever side clicks up the higher coudt, some of the experts should be eating cold post- mortems for supper on Friday, turning in their slide-rules to the quarter-master or jumping if the tops of their columns with. their eyes closql.
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