Political Commentary

Dark thoughts with Willie

Charles Moore

prime Minister's Question Time this week was expected to produce an il- logical but heady mixture of the Cheltenham Spy Scandal and the Latest In- telligence from Buckingham Palace. These painful security failures were certain to em- barrass the Government. But a far more painful and horrible security problem — the London bombings — intervened, and so, by the strange laws of politics, the Government escaped unscathed. Mr Whitelaw was heard respectfully.

Learned argument rages about the duties of ministers in cases such as Mr Whitelaw' s. Precedents for resignations appear to be uncertain. All one can ignorantly note are the two meanings of the word 'responsible', which are being mingled indiscriminately in the commotion. The Home Secretary is responsible for the protection of the Queen in that he is answerable to Parliament for it. He is not 'responsible' — in the sense of guilty — for the personal failures of the staff involved.

The matter of ministerial responsibility is one of several 'issues' we are supposed to discuss in the light (or rather, twilight) of the Buckingham Palace crisis. Other issues include whether or not the Queen's security should be brought under a single control, whether homosexuality (allegedly an `Establishment' pastime — no matter that Commander Trestrail's social origins are much closer to those of Mrs Thatcher than to those of the aristocracy) is a public danger, and whether members of the Metropolitan Police should be trained to notice new- fangled contraptions like burglar alarms.

But it is not so much issues that are raised by the events of the past fortnight as im- aginations. The success of the Falklands ex- pedition enabled English people once more to imagine their heroic capacities: recent events, including the bombs which add gruesome evidence to the impression, have confirmed our image of ourselves as vulnerable.

Political thinkers as well as nutcases have given importance to the idea that the Sovereign embodies the nation. As the fount of justice, the Queen may not give evidence about the intrusion. Even in her nightdress, she matters more as a mystical concept than as a wronged woman.

When the intruder reached the Queen's bedroom the idea of the sort of conversa- tion which must have taken place provides the comic aspect and the incidental detail, but what cuts deep is the fact of an undefended monarch. Add the scandal of the Queen's detective, the charges against Prime and of course the bombs, and you have a bad case of the jitters.

For the Government itself, the matter is a nightmare in the strict sense — a bad dream rather than a daytime reality. It is not (so far at least) a scandal of Profumo propor- tions, but an affair which raises horrid phantasms.

Although Mr Whitelaw declares himself not guilty, no one is more susceptible than he to the unhappy imaginings provoked by these events. People who have known him throughout his years of office in and out of power have never known him so upset. He is devoted to the Sovereign, and her protec- tion is his most prized duty. If the intruder had been a murderous psychopath rather than an eccentric chatterbox Mr Whitelaw would have been an utterly broken man.

His own horror at what happened is in- fectious. A more calculating man might have inspired more confidence. Mr Whitelaw seems swept along by the torrent of events. He has tried to restrain the press from 'premature' discussion, and yet he seems to have depended upon it for his cue to act, and even for some of his informa- tion. He is the man to whom things happen — the man who is handed the statistics of the bomb casualties to read out and the man who waits over a weekend before he discovers that Commander Trestrail has resigned. He looks like the victim of events, and he sees himself that way.

It is this impression of woolly desperation which he conveys which raises public (and particularly Tory) anger against Mr Whitelaw on more persistent problems. Of course, no one can blame him for riots, or for rising crime figures, or even for im- migration, but his character expresses the frustration people feel at the inability of Government to execute its tasks. The Tory Conference was not nice to him last year; it will surely lose patience entirely in Brighton.

Irritation is raised still higher by Mr Whitelaw's characteristic response to criticism. This takes the form of obscure statements promising improvement (as it might be, "the matter is of the gravest possible gravity and is being urgently look-

ed at"), followed, if pressed, by angry com- plaints of unfair treatment. `Everyone,' he said over the Trestrail affair, 'must give me one simple piece of credit. I came to Parlia- ment at the first possible opportunity and gave personal reasons, unpalatable and unpleasant as they were.' Honestly, sir, 1 owned up. And anyway, I didn't do it.

Just as Mrs Thatcher, even though her advisers always remark on her in- decisiveness, has made herself a one-woman expression of British determination, so, in a quite different way, Mr Whitelaw speaks for England — the England that dislikes the modern world, and yet believes there is no way of stopping it. But even without Mr Whitelaw to add colour to the picture, the problems of the Queen's security express in personal form many of the agonies of modern life which are the main subject of the Home Office's normal duties. What, for instance, is the relevance of personal morality to public conduct? Commander Trestrail seems to have been about the only policeman involv- ed who always performed his duties punc- tiliously, and yet he is the only one to have been thoroughly disgraced.

More important is the question of how exposed the Queen should be. Mutterings from those responsible for security who wish to excuse themselves imply fault on the Queen's part for not allowing strict enough arrangements. But she has to do her duty hY her people and interprets that as meaning that she cannot be a prisoner. Being at the head of a nation involves securing its trust and affection. The tension nowadays is bet- ween preserving that trust and the fact that so many people are patently untrustworthY. Writ large, this is the problem of `com- munity policing': is a community something of which all citizens are a part, or a criminal, ethnically identifiable gang? Are the organs and representatives of authority any longer among friends?

When it comes to the Royal Family, they surely are. The Royal Wedding, the birth of Prince William of Wales, even the Queen's nasty shock, have all given ample evidence of the extent to which the Monarchy secures the happiness of British people and their trust in their country.

In ordinary politics, however, and especially in the areas over which Mr Whitelaw presides, the doubts and divisions are much greater. Riots and violent crime, however one argues about the meaning of the statistics and the nature of the causes, do more than anything else to dissolve the friendly ties of society. It would be utterly unfair to Mr Whitelaw, and would attribute to him ao importance he would never claim, to lay the social anxieties of modern Britain at .his door. But in this matter of Royal securitY,' he has epitomised the powerlessness wine" people fear. A man full of facile optimisM in his place would be still worse. But there are people in public life who manage to face its difficulties with more energy and eve° cheerfulness. The Queen, for instance, Is one of them.