Westminster Commentary
Tun other night I dreamed that the Chief Whip was dead. I awoke in a considerable state of alarm, not untinged with sorrow; for Mr. Heath, though I can hardly be ex- pected, in view of his office, to approve of him, is a most charming man in mufti, and I would grievously miss his engaging habit of laughing himself well-nigh unconscious at even the frailest House of Commons jokes (which, I need hardly say, are very frail jokes indeed). Next morning, the dream still obstinately clung; I donned a black tie and wandered dis- consolately off to Westminster, murmuring, 'I could have better spared a better man.' Great was my relief when I saw the long legs of the Patronage Secretary sticking elegantly out of his usual corner, and heard the delighted guffaw which would tell a blind man that somebody had mentioned sausages (or mothers-in-law) in Mr. Heath's hearing. My nerves went back to normal.
Worse, however, was to follow. The next day, I happened to have some business to transact at Messrs. Cook's. Glancing idly round the room, my eye fell on the 'Continental Travel' counter. There, serving behind it, was the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Now it may be that Charlie has a secret longing to be a travel-agent's counter-clerk (not, I dare swear, that he would make a surpassingly good one); but he is, as we all know to our cost, a Cabinet Minister with a tensile strength, when it comes to prising him loose, that would do credit to a limpet—nay, to the Foreign Secretary. Approaching the counter, I was about to ask him what particularly uncon- vincing set of reasons his successor was putting out to explain his departure, when a closer examination revealed that it was not in fact Charlie at all, and did not even look very much like him. I reeled, and went home seriously dis- turbed. Could it be, I wondered, that the strain of chronicling the remarkable goings-on in and around Westminster for over a year was begin- ning to affect my mind? And if so, would it get worse? Would I start, for instance, to see two of them? Two Hoylake UDCs? Two M'Bullas? I began to quake. By mid-afternoon I had be- come almost hysterical. I began to doubt the evidence of my senses; did I in fact see a news- paper photograph of the Prime Minister, arms akimbo, doing an impersonation of the late Al Jolson. (`Climb upon my knee, Rabby-boy') in the middle of Downing Street? I do not know; what I do know is that fifty-five consecutive weekly articles about British politics is about the limit, physical and nervous, that any man can stand at a stretch—and when I say stretch, I am using the word in the sense that they employ on Dartmoor.
The upshot was that I dashed back to Cook's and, looking fixedly away from the spot at which the apparition had appeared, I transacted a good deal more business. By the time you read these words I shall, unless my passport has been im- pounded, be over the Alps and far away; nor need you expect my return until the moon hath raised her lamp above thirty-three times. Which, close students of political form will not be slow to realise, means that a spring election is finally out of the question, since Mr. Macmillan would hardly be so discourteous, not to say foolhardy, as to go to the country while I am out of it. For the next four weeks, then, this column will be occupied by four different Members of Parlia- ment. Their attempts to bend the bow of Ulysses will no doubt cause many a merry laugh up and down the land; for my part, it would verge upon bad taste to wish them well.
Before I go, a few random thoughts on the political situation may be in order. Mr. Mac- millan (unless that was an hallucination?) is home, and a fine armful of babies Mr. Butler has handed, mewling and puking, over; though to be fair, it must be said that they were almost all gestating before the Prime Minister left. Mr. Emrys Hughes, who is always at his charming best in situations of this sort, had the right idea last Thursday; during the questions which fol- lowed the announcement of the following week's business he rose, donned his most ingenuous air, and asked, 'Can the Leader of the House tell us when the Prime Minister will be back?' pausing for a couple of seconds before adding, as an afterthought, 'and why?'
Why, indeed. Not, I imagine, to join in the delirious huzzas that greeted the Victor Ludorum, Mr. Jack McCann. Nor yet, in all fairness, to stop Mr. Butler wrecking the country. In fact, Mr. Butler has been far indeed from wrecking the country during his viceroyalty. Those whose bonnets were first over the windmill when Mr. Macmillan went to the Palace might pause to reflect that Mr. Butler's tenure of office has been neither easy nor unsuccessful. True, the Slaughter of the Innocents took place at the very end of his stay, but he could hardly be blamed for that. (I'll tell you who can be blamed for a small but not wholly insignificant share of it; whatever idiot—and wild muffin-men would not drag from me his name—permitted the traditional message to the candidate from the leader of the party to be written before Mr. Macmillan left the country, when he didn't even know Mr. Parkinson's name. You wouldn't catch Mr. G. beginning such a letter 'Dear Sir or Madam.') And the Great Rabbo, Amazing Juggler, has kept a remarkable number of clubs in the air over the past two months. Leader of the House, Home Secretary and Prime Minister add up to a burden that would have bowed the shoulders of almost any man, yet Mr. Butler appears to have thrived on it—at any rate he looks no more cadaverous than usual. What is more to the point, the Government looks no more cadaverous than usual, either, and those who are quick to cry 'Rochdale' should bear in mind that at any rate nobody has resigned during Mr. Butler's Premier- ship. He has picked his way with skill (well. nobody ever said Mr. Butler was not skilled) and courage (and nobody ever said Mr. Butler was not courageous) and modesty among the boulders that littered his path; I trust that Mr. Macmillan in gratitude has brought him back a handsomely carved boomerang and a parrot—and if anybody can think of two better presents for Mr. Butler I would dearly like to know what they are. To give but one example of his success, Mr. Butler's handling of that Mrs. Dale's Diary of question- time, the American atom-bombers over our un- protected shores, has been a remarkable exercise in patience and wariness. Indeed, I dare say those whose memories go back a good deal farther than mine were reminded, as day after day Mr. Butler stoutly refused to give away information he does not in fact possess, of his famous spell of duty as chief Foreign Office stonewaller dur- ing the Munich days. Hitler? Poof ! Fall-out? Pish! Plus ca change? Fiddlesticks!
But plus must change sooner or later. The Budget, it is now fairly clear, is going to represent a most famous victory for that remarkable jack- in-the-coffin Mr. Thorneycroft. True, Ginger-nut has done his best to wreck the show with his idiotic White Paper (I trust Ginger-nut will have the grace to resign when he finally realises—what everybody from Viscount Montgomery to myself could have told him long ago—that he isn't going to get his recruits by paying them approximately one-third of what they could get banging in rivets in a car-factory, even if that is twice as much as they could get before), but for the rest it looks as though the Government, having announced that it was going to keep expenditure down in a voice so loud that it practically convinced itself, is now finding to its infinite pain that Horatio was rather more than three-quarters right when he pointed out that you can't make a shepherd's pie without causing extreme pain to at least one shepherd. Come Budget Day, and many a back bench is going to be asking what the blazes we needed a new Chancellor for, particularly since the new one is even less of a spellbinder than the old. The country, as I have already pointed out —without claiming any actually supernatural degree of insight—will continue not voting for the Conservative candidate at by-elections, and Mr. Macmillan's nerve will be more and more savagely tried. Like Columbus, he will hear the rumblings of mutiny; like Columbus, he will have to keep thinking up new diversions to occupy the crew; like Columbus, he will in the end begin to doubt whether he might not be wrong after all. Let us all fervently hope that the shore at which Mr. Macmillan finally makes landfall turns out to be similarly analogous to that which Columbus found; it would be just too bad if he were to suffer the fate of that other intrepid explorer, Captain Cook.
Meanwhile, like a careful father on Guy Fawkes Night letting off the sparklers before the Roman Candles and Catherine Wheels, Mr. Butler's brief encounter ended with the debate on the Life Peerages Bill. I am sometimes accused—I am, really, disbelieve it as you will —of exaggerating. But it would be difficult to 'flake up a more fatuous subject for the House of Commons to occupy itself with for two mortal days than this spavined measure. How can you discuss the House of Lords for two whole days?
do not know, but they managed it. All sorts of characters I have never heard of—indeed, that nobody has ever heard of—joined in; who, for Instance, is Mr. Robert Cooke? Who is Mr. Cole? Who is Mr. Whitelaw? Who is Mr. Geoffrey Lloyd and as Mr. Hughes would say, why? It Is all very mysterious, and not even a bubblingly euphoric performance from Mr. Bevan at the end of the two days could quite clear the taste of dust and ashes out of my mouth, let alone that of gall and wormwood. So perhaps it is as well that I am going away somewhere where the division bell tolls not, where Despatch Boxes are thumped not, where the Mace gleams not, where Points of Order are raised not, and where the only things that moo soulfully across the valley, one to another, are the cows.
TAPER
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