DIARY
DAVID STARKEY It's now exactly a year since I began pre- senting a Saturday phone-in on Talk Radio. 'Phone-ins are armpit radio,' I was warned by David Sexton, interviewing me for the Daily Telegraph. 'How are you going to talk to people that you'd ordinarily go a mile to miss?' At the time I could only mutter something about having encountered all sorts in the meat-market of the gay scene — though it has to be admitted that extend- ed conversation was not usually the name of the game. A year later I can be much more confident: phone-ins are not armpit radio but lucky dip. Every so often, it is true, you draw up something nameless from the depths and hastily fling it back in. What you do, actually, is 'pot' it. That is, you fade the speaker out with a flick of your finger on the volume slide — or potentiometer, as it was in the days of steam radio. If what they say is really naughty, you're supposed to use the 'dump' button. The station is broadcast on a few seconds' time delay. Activating the dump button takes you back into the time delay. You can then listen to What has been said, and, when the offensive Phrase is about to be uttered, you come in With something bland and the listener is none the wiser. But these moments are very rare. A more typical call is notable only for its banality. It's a prosy version of what the tabloids say on anything, without, alas, the catchy headline. It is, in fact, the cliché- laden conversational equivalent of the typi- cal prizes you'll find in a real lucky dip: the cheap plastic toys, the fluorescent ear-rings, the badly plated nail-clippers.
13 ut a surprisingly high proportion of calls are of a different order: raw slabs of experience that even a Daily Telegraph jour- nalist would think worth reporting — were he adventurous enough to know how to find them. I've had calls from prisoners in gaol (don't ask me how they do it), social workers at their wits' end with problem families, mugging victims still sobbing with Pain and loss, soldiers back from duty in Northern Ireland, army instructors with direct experience of using CS gas in chemi- cal warfare training. Last Saturday's discus- S.10n on the Isle of Dogs bomb and the end- ing of the IRA ceasefire produced two such gems. When you bring a caller on air, all You have to go on is the information con- tained on a computer screen. The screen is Split into eight numbered boxes. Pressing the corresponding number on the console brings in the caller described in the box. I pressed '3' for 'Tom, Belfast. Met Ian Pais- in jail. He's interesting'. He was. He'd met Paisley when he and other Protestant leaders were imprisoned in the Sixties. Tom was there for gun- running. 'Were you doing it for the IRA?' I asked. 'Oh no, it was purely private enter- prise,' he replied. 'But you're from a Catholic background,' I persisted. 'Yes, but I'd describe myself as more of a Marxist free-thinker.' And he proceeded to think more sharply on the Irish question than anyone I've yet encountered. You remem- ber the 1066 and All That joke on Ireland: 'Every time the English solve the Irish Question the Irish change the question'? Well, Tom showed that the question has changed yet again, and so has the answer. 'The trouble', Tom said, is the politicians. You'll never get a settlement with the politicians. What's needed instead is an all- Ireland referendum on whether Ulster should be reunited with the Republic."But, Tom,' I remonstrated, 'how would you get the Unionists to accept the "yes" verdict? Where would its legitimacy be?"Now, Dr Starkey,' he replied, 'you know a lot about Ireland for an Englishman. But you don't understand. There wouldn't be a "yes" ver- dict. You see the North would vote for the status quo and against reunification because the Catholics don't want to lose a better standard of living and higher British
Is that another bomb or the Scott report?
social security benefits. And the South would vote against reunification too because they don't want to take on a mil- lion and a half unemployed.'
Ithink Tom may be right. For the alter- native was represented by the other star caller. He too was Irish. He'd lived in Britain for 40 years and worked and paid his taxes: 'I owe this country nothing, and this country owes me nothing. You talk of democracy, Dr Starkey,' he continued, 'democracy doesn't mean anything. Instead what we want is logic. Logic dictates that each people has its own country.' He would neither confirm nor deny that he was an IRA supporter. My taxi-driver home turned out to be a regular listener and a fan. 'That Irishman,' he said, as he asked for my auto- graph, 'didn't he make the blood run cold?' He did. For he spoke for the Clausewitzes of the Bogside. It was their 'logic' that set off the Isle of Dogs bomb. The politicians have proved impotent against it. John Major has said that he's open to any sug- gestions. He should listen to a tape of Tom's analysis and go for the referendum. It could be the last chance for peace — and for his premiership.
But at least the icy winter, if not the chill of Northern Ireland, may be releasing its grip. My favourite experience in the big freeze occurred in my local greengrocer. It's a rather old-fashioned shop, of which you'll find examples on a score of London high streets. There is neither door nor win- dow; instead it's open to the street. When the shop's open, there's an awning and a display of assorted fruits and flowers on plastic-grass-covered trestles which over- flows onto the pavement. When it's closed, a rolling shutter protects the interior. This means that, in the sort of weather we've been having, the shop has been freezing cold during the day and several degrees below freezing at night. I'd gone to buy some salad. I poked despondently at the shrivelled, frost-bitten lettuces on display and wandered off to the vegetables to see if there was something I could improvise with. 'What were you looking for?', asked the owner, who was looking fairly shrivelled and frostbitten himself. 'A lettuce,' I replied, 'but those are past it.' Don't you worry about that,' he said. 'They're only for show. We've kept our stock nice and warm in the fridge, and they're fine. In fact,' he said when he brought me a fresh, plump lettuce from the back of the shop, 'we've been stepping into the fridge ourselves for a minute or two to warm up.'
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