Notebook
Watching Christopher Booker's magnificent television programme about the aestruction of British cities by planners and property developers, I was reminded of a less serious but still horrible way in which London was defaced during the 1960s. This was the middle-class fashion of painting one's house some disgusting colour. Hundreds of decent early 19th century terraces, often designed as a unity, came out in garish stripes — strawberry, inigo, butterscotch — which entirely destroyed their appeal. I often wondered why people had the right to show off in this way, as the external appearance of a house cannot be regarded — in a city, at any rate — as the owner's exclusive concern. Fortunately, this practice died with the death of the Swinging Sixties. Or so I thought. But I have found a new villain in our midst. She is Miss Vivien Hislop of the Daily Mail who, in a recent article on the woman's page, declares magisterially: 'Nobody wants to live in uniform boxes'. 'It seems a shame ... not to break into a colour that really suits YOU', she says, going on to extol various colour combinations — 'Bamboo' and 'Buttermilk', 'pale-yellow' and 'avocado', 'anthracite grey' and 'light buff. 'Highly individual Colours like mustard and deep-blue look best on period or even neo-Georgian houses where the woodwork can be a crisp relief of buff and dove-grey.' In case anyone should still be frightened of thus defacing his period house, she praises the example of a man 'who kicked suburban sameness by painting his up-and-over garage door canary yellow to match his Capri'. Miss Hislop, you are a dangerous woman.
An old New Statesman profile of Humphry Berkeley contains the following anecdote 'An old [Conservative] backbencher once asked him why he, seemingly a decent chap, liked Africans so much. "Because I love their fuzzy hair," replied Berkeley. Afterwards the backbencher went around saying he feared Berkeley was not quite right in the head.' Knowing Mr Berkeley, I doubt if he loves their fuzzy hair any less following the attempt on his life last week by a group of Transkei security police. Indeed, he said from his hospital bed in South Africa that he would return in March to Transkei Where he has been employed by the government as a 'diplomatic representative'. Whatever one may think of Mr Berkeley's curious activities, one can only admire his courage. His account of how his assailants ran away when he started to pray for them is astonishing. Not often are would-be assassins disarmed by prayer. But it is also a sad truth about Africa that those Europeans who love the Africans most appear to arouse the greatest hostility and run the greatest risks. It is the cynical opportunists who get on best.
There are certain people whom it is now becoming rather embarrassing to attack, for they have become universal targets of abuse. Among these one must include the social workers, the members of NUPE and, of course, Dr David Owen. Indeed, so widely are they denigrated that one feels they should be ripe for some sort of comeback. Dr Owen, however, refuses to recover; his standing continues relentlessly to decline. The Chancellor of Germany may not have called him 'a brash lout' and an 'unbearable boor', though Herr Schmidt is often given to this kind of outburst. But he does not deny describing him as 'a bit young' and 'occasionally hyperactive', which cannot be good for the Foreign Secretary's morale. The humane sentiment now towards Dr Owen is one of pity. I felt it strongly a couple of weeks ago when I watched the Sunday television programme Weekend World, devoted on this occasion to Iran. Dr Owen cannot be very fond of the Shah, or at least as a socialist and human rights campaigner, he ought not to be. But Dr Owen is also a patriot, and when interviewed on Weekend World last October, he presumably felt it his duty to express his support in stronger terms than those used by any other western leader. Opposition to the Shah, he said, was naive, for the alternatives were a mad, ranting form of Mohammedanism or Soviet-inspired leftwing extremism. While such statements were guaranteed to anger the Labour Party, they could be sure to please at least one person — namely, the former occupant of the Peacock Throne. But apparently not. It is claimed, astonishingly, that Dr Owen's interview was one of the factors which decided the Shah that the game was up. Appearing on Weekend World two weeks ago, the Shah's former chief of protocol, a Mr Zand, said that what the Shah had most feared was to appear in the eyes of his people as a western puppet. Dr Owen's statement had conveyed just this impression. What rotten luck!
Even if the Government wins its disgraceful devolution referendum in Scotland, it will have done so against a background of extreme apathy (an apathy which, given-the space we have devoted to the question in this issue, we can only hope our readers do not share). Over the last couple of years, some half a dozen opinion polls have been. conducted by Fieldwork (Scotland), a subsidiary of Charles Barker, on behalf of the antidevolution campaign. While these surveys have consistently shown the devolutionists at around 40 per cent and the antis at around 30 per cent, they have also shown devolution to be something in which people are hardly interested at all. In a list of six issues — employment, housing, and so on — devolution has always come bottom. No more than five per cent have ever rated it the most important question for Scotland. This, at least, helps to put the argument in perspective.
One hates to distress the Queen any further, as she cannot be having fun at the moment in the Middle East. But it is not too early to question the wisdom of the plan that she should visit Zambia this summer to open the Commonwealth Conference. A report in the current issue of Business Traveller, a magazine for air travellers, contains a frightening report of the situation of Lusaka airport. 'Since early November the (Rhodesian) nationalists have been firing at planes on their final approach to the airport,' it says, 'Approach patterns have been altered to avoid overflying some of the camps, but one concentration of guerrillas lies directly under the final descent path and the route cannot be altered at night. So far no one has been injured and no planes downed, but pilots point out that it only takes one lucky bullet to cause a crash'. Rhodesian Airways has already learnt that the nationalists are by no means inept at shooting down planes. We would hate the Queen to face a 21-gun salute before she even lands.
Alexander Chancellor
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