Lodge landed
Sir: To return from a sixteen-day voyage in a Russian liner and find oneself so low down on Skinflint's New Year Honours List is dis- appointing and a bit ungenerous on his part. Perhaps the one re- deeming feature of his awards is to have bracketed me with Pere- grine Worsthorne who has been writing some sound sense in the Sunday Telegraph ever since the general election. Admittedly I have just been at sea in rather a pleas- ant conservative atmosphere for a change. And this could have con- ditioned me to a long r:moured Tory restoration of the fairly re- cently abandoned conferment of hereditary baronetcies. But I scorn a mere 'Sir', or indeed any other favour that might be offered me through Skinflint by the present Government. I say this because the public might mistakenly in- clude me among those receiving the pay-off reward which Conser- vatives normally arrange to quieten misfits and failures when they have a shaky team at Westminster.
Altogether apart from what I have just said, it happens that genealogists have for some time now been trying to establish seve- ral long back-dated links which could make me heir to a Middle Ages barony at present in abey- ance and associated with the county from which my father's family comes. If in due course things de- velop as I indicate, for Skinflint to classify me as a mere baronet would in retrospect make him look silly especially if I was in a posi- tion to insist, as I would in his case, on being formally addressed as 'My Lord' whenever I met himl As for the services I am alleged to have rendered to Harold Wilson I am as unaware, as he no doubt is, that I have ever provided any. To be loyal and vocal on behalf of a person one admires in the teeth of the scurrilous and politi- cally motivated abuse poured on him while Prime Minister by the Tories and their allies as soon as they found themselves incapable of matching him in ability and argument, well, in my case it just meant I acted as I was brought up to act. If because of this I am regarded as 'a square' or a toady I care not a rap. That others, inside and outside my party, have not fol- lowed the same course is to their discredit and helped quite a bit to lose Labour last June's election.
You, Sir, have kindly allowed me in the past to write in defence of Harold Wilson. And at the present juncture in our affairs I would like to go on record once more in say- ing that he was, and will again be, the most outstandingly competent peacetime Prime Minister of this century. He stands head and shoulders above all his second-rate predecessors—Attlee excepted— and shines by comparison with the obstinate reactionary now in temporary charge at Westminster. History will, I believe, endorse my view which I will continue to ex- press, title or no title, in or out of Parliament, and which I found myself involved in stating pretty vehemently in the Soviet ship on which I was a passenger over Christmas and the New Year.
I believe the Government's pre- sent policies will fail. When that happens the takeover bid for the leadership of the Tory party which Enoch Powell was poised to make had Heath lost the election, will be resurrected with consequences like- ly to involve a complete re-orien- tation of the present political spec- trum. Mr Powell in his every speech predicts this development, and I guess that no one has it more clearly in mind than Harold Wilson. He is right to bide his time a bit just now, so as to get the measure of ministers and their out- look. This will the better enable him to get his grip on a situation in which the Government, having splintered the country into fac- tions indulging themselves in bitter recrimination, may face the pos- sible collapse of our democratic system as we have known it. It will be at this crisis-laden point, I prophesy, that Britain will turn to Harold Wilson with relief as its most likely saviour from catas- trophe.
T. C. Skeffington-Lodge 5 Powis Grove, Brighton
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