DIARY
ANTHONY HOWARD hat a phenomenon is Roy Hatters- ley. Press the knob on a radio or television set and there he is, open a newspaper and you can't escape him, cleave the wood and I have no doubt you'd find him there too. He has had a remarkable run as the scourge of the Charter 88 crowd — and, Predictably, he has taken some lumps for his pains. On the central issue, however, I am sure he is right. It can make no sense to have radical energies dissipated in a cla- mour for objectives that are simply un- attainable. So long as Mrs Thatcher re- mains in power, you might as well bay for the moon as call for electoral reform or demand a Bill of Rights. An electoral pact, of course, is a different matter: that is something which lies within the Labour Party's own control. It won't happen, though — ask Woodrow Wyatt. Back in the mists of time he advocated just such a scheme — and the only impact it had lay in the fury it unleashed from his friend and Party leader, Hugh Gaitskell. Over this, things have not changed. Neil Kinnock, I am told, was far more incensed by his colleague John Evans's plan for marginal seat 'deals' than by any of the suggestions made by the signatories of Charter 88 (whom he characterises as 'a collection of whingers, whiners and wankers').
Next Tuesday sees the annual dinner revealing the name of the lucky £20,000 Whitbread Literary Award winner. I was recruited last summer to be one of the Judges on its biography panel and was later Promoted to the star-studded cast of the 11 final arbiters who decide to whom the prize Should actually go. On Monday — by noon — I have to ring in with my choice of 'Book of the Year' (and a runner-up), by no means an easy task since one is required to Choose between novel, first novel, chil- dren's novel, poetry and biography. I was surprised, though, to learn from its orga- nisers that there had seldom been any difficulty in the past: there had usually been a runaway victor on the votes tele- phoned in, removing the need for any heated disputes along the lines of those that have sometimes plagued the Booker judges. I suppose the organisers, who strike me as very efficient people, count on the laymen's vote — of important person- ages, like the Home Secretary, whom they recruit to their celebrity panel. Given half a chance (and I suspect I shall do my best to provide it by casting a rogue ballot), I look forward to disappointing their ex- pectations on this occasion. Nothing would divert me more than an agonised discus- sion — conducted against the clock — with distinguished figures who have all too evidently left it to their staffs actually to read the books under consideration. 0 ne occasion where I should very much like to be a fly on the wall is whea the Archbishop of York confronts the Con- servative Philosophy Group later this month. It is hard to account for the violent feelings Dr Habgood arouses among Tories — though some of the more recent ones go back, I imagine, to the Crockford affair of a year ago. They hated him, however, long before that — indeed, I have heard it said that Tom Stoppard's latest stage play, about a Russian spy, was called Hapgood quite deliberately (the Hasburgs, too, can take a 'b' or a 'p' according to taste). Of course, in a sense, the Archbishop does stand for everything that Thatcherites loathe. There was a moment of vivid political theatre on BBC1's political programme On the Re- cord last month. Interviewing the Archbishop, Jonathan Dimbleby suddenly threw at him the charge that the Church's trumpet always seemed to give forth an uncertain sound. Habgood promptly stop- ped him in his tracks. 'Has it occurred to you,' he asked with deceptive innocence, 'that the lust for certainty may be a sin?' I wouldn't give much for his chances in Jonathan Aitken's drawing-room in Lord North Street if he starts uttering that kind of political heresy there.
Tbe invited to the 30th birthday party of an ITV company — which you can just remember being launched — is to begin to feel your age. Last Sunday evening found me in Newcastle attending Tyne Tees's celebration of its debut in the north-east exactly 30 years ago. Today, of course, it is just the kind of company most threatened by the Government's imminent White Pap- er on Broadcasting. Scheduled to be knocked down to the highest bidder, it is hardly likely to enjoy much of a future (or, indeed, a present) in terms of making its own programmes. Still, we had a jolly party, marred only by my eventual return to my hotel, once the celebrations were over. There I saw something I had never seen before — a piece of plastic affixed to my bedroom television screen announcing: 'Warning: Watching television alone in your room may be hazardous to your health.' Rejecting the temptation to won- der whether I should be all right if only I was watching in company, I read on. The burden of the message was to encourage me to toddle down to the hotel games room where, it emerged, I could, among other things, watch 'videos' to my heart's content. Somehow I got an icy feeling that that is what Mr Douglas Hurd's resolute march towards a television 'wasteland' is going to mean for all of us.
Do any rules still survive governing death announcements in newspapers? I ask because an odd (paid) announcement appeared the other day on the normally rather austere 'Gazette' page of the Inde- pendent. The top item in its deaths column recorded the departure from life of a man who must presumably have been an Inde- pendent reader. He had, we were assured, 'died suddenly but in swinging style amongst friends'. Bully for him — but what exactly can that have been supposed to mean? That he was dancing the night away, imbibing rather more than was good for him, or that — perish the thought — he was cut down in one of those situations beloved by a certain kind of popular novelist? In any case, this distinctly 1960s trendy language (out of Antonioni's Blow- Up and a notorious cover-story in Time magazine) hardly struck me as reflecting the somewhat serious, worthy ethos of the paper. How different, I could not help murmuring to myself, from the home life of Andreas Whittam Smith.
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