A Spectator's Notebook

There are few more beautiful artifacts than a sleek racing yacht. I chanced to see on television the launching of the Prime Minister's third Morning Cloud, and the open delight on Ted Heath's face. In the past I have sometimes narked on about these expensive yachts; and I dare say that there were many wage-frozen and price-outraged viewers who did not take kindly to the vision of a E45,000 toy sliding sweetly into the water. I covet Morning Cloud; and any residual disapproval I may have had vanished when I saw the lovely thing.

I do not suppose that a prime minister could find himself anything better to spend his money on; nor could any recreative activity make more sense than sailing. Ted Heath chooses to do his sailing competitively; and I think I see why, for if he merely sailed around the place in a desultory fashion, sunbathing himself on deck when the weather was right, he would never be able to drive the problems of office out of mind. " It is purely a racing machine " he has been quoted as saying; but it is far more than that. It is an object of delight. I hope he is selected for the Admiral's Cup team.

Well done, Willie

Willie Whitelaw has shown his customary excellent sense in accepting the arguments of the Opposition and bringing forward the date of the election to the new Northern Ireland Assembly to June 28. The Government had originally intended to hold the elections in the autumn. The difficulty was that certain essential legislation had to be carried first. An eminently sensible deal was struck, whereby the Opposition guaranteed to assist in the passage of this legislation, particularly the Northern Ireland Assembly Bill. Harold Wilson and Mervyn Rees, Labour's spokesman on Northern Ireland, in effect undertook that the Bill would be approved by May 11, and thus Willie Whitelaw was able to say "On this understanding, I can announce the date of the election as June 28."

Constitutional existence

The much bulkier Constitutional Bill, which will embody the chief proposals of the White. Paper, will be before the House comfortably ahead of the elections, and the expectation is that this Bill will in fact be well on its way to enactment by June 28. Since the new Assembly will operate the terms of the Constitutional Bill, its members may have to kick their heels for a while. The Assembly will not, in fact, assemble until after the Bill becomes law. Until that date, incidentally, the present Northern Ireland Parliament — Stormont, as it is popularly known — will still legally exist. At present Stormont is not dissolved, but merely prorogued. There will be a period in which both the old Northern Ireland Parliament and the new Northern Ireland Assembly will exist, the one prorogued but not yet dissolved, the other elected but not yet assembled: a rather quirky constitutional situation. The Assembly will only assemble after the Parliament is dissolved, which is to say after the Constitutional Bill is enacted.

Of course the fact that they will not have assembled will by no means prevent politicking going on between the leaders of the par

ties as they emerge after the elections to the Assembly. On the contrary, the absence of assembly may well facilitate the leading members to strike bargains with each other and to seek to come to terms with Willie Whitelaw. All told, very neat.

Who wants unity?

At the Cambridge conference of the newly formed British Irish Association at the beginning of this month, a pretty general demand emerged from Ulstermen of various political and religious persuasions, endorsed by the English present, that further action was required from the South. The validity of this demand was accepted by official as well as by unofficial Irishmen from the Republic. Indeed I was left with the impression that it was only a matter of time — and of not much time at that — before the new Irish government an nounced measures designed to go some way towards allaying the fears of northern Pro testants about the Roman Catholic ambitions of the south.

But does the new Dublin government really want unification? It certainly doesn't want unification today or tomorrow. Secretly, it may not want unification at all. If I were a Northern Ireland Protestant, I think I would want unification because all Ireland would become my home ground; and if I were a southern Irish Catholic, I think I would dread the incursion of protestants from the north. People from the north usually beat people from the south; just as Protestants usually beat Roman Catholics.

Distant arrangement

I would like to see the much talked-of Council of Ireland get off the ground. It could, in time, provide the nucleus of an all-Ireland federal government; but there will be no united Ireland, of whatever structure, I am convinced, until the Dail follows Stormont into oblivion. If the Ulster Assembly begins to work, it could provide a model for Leinster, Munster and Connacht assemblies, each responsible for its own business, and each province represented in a federal government and possessing veto powers. In some such distant arrangement, which I think the present politics of Ireland may be beginning to stumble towards, there is no reason why questions of citizenship and nationality should prove insuperably difficult.

Old contributors

Reading through C. H. Rolph's biography of Kingsley Martin, I was surprised to discover that Martin wrote for The Spectator before he wrote for the New Statesman, contributing occasional book reviews. In this, he shared an experience with Dick Crossman, whose regular column in these pages first brought him to the attention of Kingsley Martin when the latter had become editor of the New Statesman. Tempting Crossman away from Gower Street to Great Turnstile was one of Martin's most successful exploits. Crossman, of course, eventually became too high-powered for Kingsley Martin's taste.

When Hugh Cudlipp and the Daily Mirror tempted Crossman, he asked Martin outright what were his prospects of succeeding him.

Martin replied that there were no such prospects, arguing that Crossman could not be re lied upon not to prefer a political to an edito rial career. Despite Dick Crossman's pro testations of loyalty, Kingsley Martin would not be moved. Crossman went to the Mirror, Freeman succeeded Martin, and Martin hoped that he would be able to continue, as a kind of editor-in-chief of the New Statesman, roaming around the world talking to coloured political leaders as a kind of English Walter

Lippman. Martin misunderstood Freeman.

Freeman ruthlessly, and necessitously, drove him out of the magazine.

No soliciting, please

Mr David Mason, the thalidomide parent who has been the most awkward of all in refusing to settle with the Distillers Company, has done very well to push up their final offer. One of the conditions he has attached to his acceptance of the proposed settlement seems to me to make eminent sense. He wants a medical panel to be set up, actuarially advised, to assess each afflicted child's disability, and to distribute the Distillers' cash accordingly. He does not want solicitors to handle the matter.

This is quite understandable. Had the matter been left to the solicitors, it would all have been settled years ago, I have no doubt, at much less cost to the Distillers and with much less benefit for the children. Mr Mason's condition excluding solicitors from handling the terms of the settlement surely reflects a bitter experience of that branch of the legal profession. In my own experience there are principally two kinds of solicitor: the good kind and the grasping kind. The grasping kind likes nothing better than talking to others of that ilk, often to the detriment of all concerned but themselves.

Guns for sale

I was horrified, idly looking in a shop window in the Tottenham Court Road, to see reproduction revolvers on sale alongside air guns and pistols, telescopes and hi-ti equipment. I vaguely thought that the incident at the Indian High Commission would have dissuaded shops from dealing in these Japanese imports. Since firms are evidently not going to stop selling these things, surely their manufacture, import and sale should be banned. People nowadays spend great sums on hi-fi equipment. If revolvers, imitation or real, are now thought to be desirable acquisitions, along with the rest of modern gadgetry, it's a bad look out.