ANOTHER VOICE
A disgraceful proposal for winning the next general election
AUBERON WAUGH
Keith Waterhouse, most respected of all newspaper columnists, has issued what amounts to a firm instruction to his fellow practitioners that we should stop writing about Aids. He is absolutely right, of course. There is a limit to the amount of instruction on the anal mucous membrane which ordinary people can take. Furth- ermore, there is a new rival to those dreadful, thrice-monthly letters in the Daily Telegraph regretting that the nice old-fashioned word 'gay' has been ex- propriated by homosexuals. That is the commentator who smugly announces as a new discovery that the best way to avoid such diseases is to abstain from all sexual activity except with one's lawfully wedded spouse, on Saturday nights, after a warm bath. It seems to me that there is a concerted effort being made to exaggerate the risks of ordinary heterosexual inter- course, which accounts for only a tiny, if slowly growing, proportion of confirmed infections. Soon, I feel, Lord Whitelaw will be advising us to go easy even on the Saturday night ritual — welcome advice, no doubt, in many parts of our idle, aging population with winter coming on, and a great source of comfort to those whose interest in such matters has already with- ered, or retracted, or dropped off.
For my own part, I shall follow Mr Waterhouse's instructions and pretend not to notice from now on as people keel over all around me. But before I leave the subject for the last time, I would like to draw attention to an extraordinary sugges- tion mooted in an article in the Sunday Telegraph this week. It seemed to float the idea that an Aids epidemic might be of some electoral advantage to the Conserva- tive Party.
Most decent-minded people will recoil in horror from any suggestion that a human tragedy on this scale could be put to such frivolous use. Even those who do not recoil from the tastelessness of the idea might wonder how such a silver lining can be found to the cloud of Aids, since its only political manifestation so far has been in the knee-jerk reaction of our moronic leader-writers to the refrain that t' govern- ment has not done enoof about Aids, it has not told the people enoof, it has shown indecision and complacency . . . .
Perhaps I have not been entirely frank in discussing the disgraceful suggestion which appears to have been made in the normally respectable pages of the Sunday Telegraph.
In fact it was made by me, in a fortnightly column I continue to write for that estim- able organ, but only in the most mealy- mouthed terms. 'I am not of course sug- gesting,' I wrote, 'that the Aids tragedy could become a vote-winner.' Indeed it is crucial to the success of any scheme to harness public anxiety about Aids to the Conservative bandwagon that no such con- nection should be apparent. A simple slogan, along the lines 'Labour gave you Aids, vote Conservative', would almost certainly be counter-productive. People would judge it tawdry and opportunistic at best, uncaring and ur apassionate at worst.
Nobody can risk bell nought uncaring or uncompassionate in tne present height- ened atmosphere. Between the two ex- tremes of voluntary euthanasia and a spe- cial cash grant for Aids sufferers, there is no doubt a wide range of positive sugges- tions to be made, although I should not encourage the Conservatives to adopt the latter idea at this stage. Labour might be encouraged to toy with it, perhaps.
Be that as it may, the obvious way for the Conservatives to cash in on public anxiety about Aids is by reminding the country of all the encouragement which Labour has been giving to homosexuality over the past ten years. The easiest and simplest way for the Conservatives to do this is by denying that they have any intention of doing it, even asserting their repugnance at the idea, as loudly and as often as possible. The trouble is that half the electorate is too thick to receive the message, the other half too suspicious to accept it. Ugly words like 'hypocrisy' would fly around, and those Conservative candidates capable of blushing would be seen to blush.
No, the best way of putting Aids before the country as an electoral issue is more oblique. With the enormous propaganda resources at its disposal, the Government should encourage a bullish approach to the pandemic question in the eight weeks before the election. There is certainly no shortage of enthusiastic Scotsmen waiting to tell us that several million Britons are about to die. Friendly newspapers might give them slightly more prominence than usual.
Next, three weeks before the election, a senior member of the Cabinet — Lord Whitelaw, perhaps, or Mr Biffen — should unattributably brief a senior member of the parliamentary press lobby, or perhaps several of them individually, that Mrs Thatcher planned to make Aids the main issue in the final run-up to the election, blaming Labour for it in the roundest terms. The senior Cabinet minister might hint that he, personally, was rather unhap- py at the idea.
As soon as the story appeared two things would happen simultaneously. Mrs Thatcher would take the opportunity of her pre-election television appearances to deny in the most compassionate and ring- ing tones that she had any intention what- ever of using these unfortunate people to her electoral advantage. Far from doing anything of the sort, her government was examining the feasibility of setting up a huge centre exclusively for the care of them on the Isle of Mugg. It may not be popular to spend large sums of money in this way, but she would not shrink from it.
At exactly the same moment, Labour's most trenchant spokesman — Dennis Skin- ner, Roy 'Attersley, dear little Gerald Kaufmann — would be seething with genuine self-righteous anger at this squalid suggestion. To use unfortunate sufferers in this way, for whom all decent people felt nothing but compassion, was ootterly dis- goosting and typical of Tories, with their crooked, opportunistic tricks. If Thutcher thought there were no boogers on t' Goovernment front bench . . . .
Finally, three days before the election, Lord Hailsham (or equiv.), stung by the injustice of these accusations, would appear on television to rebut them. He would treat the suggestion that the Gov- ernment intended using Aids to be re- elected with the contempt it deserved, but the electorate would not fail to notice that this despicable claim was being made by the party which had done everything in its power to encourage and promote the hideous sin of sodomy . . . teaching it in schools . . . giving sodomists preferential treatment in housing . . . even down to Newham's latest proposal to hand children taken into care over to cohabiting homosexual foster parents. No doubt Cen- tral Office has a dossier on Labour's encouragement of homosexuality. If it doesn't have, I certainly do. The general election would seem to be in the bag. Praise the Lord and pass the wine.
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