Notebook
If the Daily Mail defames a Government minister, the earth shakes and financial calamity threatens — there is already talk of six-figure damages for the Leyland story. If the Times grossly defames a Cambridge don, it receives (and prints) prim reprimands. There are two interesting differences between the two affairs. Firstly, the Times does not offer a shred of evidence against Donald Beves, indeed it says that ‘1415 recently decided that information concerning Beves and the Cambridge connexion should not be made public as the time for its disclosure was not yet ripe'. (The Mad at least offered concocted documentary evidence.) The other difference is that Beves is dead, and any accusations can be made against him with impunity. The question which the Times story surely poses is who provided it, and why? It presumably came from a senior intelligence source. The kite-flying must have seemed to him to serve some useful purpose; one is puzzled as to what it might be.
Almost everyone seems to have his own fourth man theory. I was once told the name of the man who was said to have recruited Burgess and Maclean by a friend only at one remove from Burgess himself. It seemed unlikely but then the world of espionage, double agenting and treason breeds fantasy. At the time of the 'missing diplomats" defection many people who had known them — and Guy Burgess knew pretty well everyone in London — were questioned by MIS. Even a man as distinguished as Sir
Anthony Blunt, now Advisor for the Queen's Pictures, underwent a lengthy interrogation. A new bout of spy fever, if one is on its way, may have interesting results.
It is easy enough to feel outrage over the goings-on at Grunwick. But industrial confrontations are full of ironies. Of course the present Government is particularly servile in its relations with the unions. But the process by which trade unions have come to enjoy their weirdly privileged position is by no means just a socialist plot. The prime minister who began to place unions outside the law was Disraeli; and it is more than just arguable that the critical period when the unions achieved their present power over the economy was the 1950s, under successive Tory administrations which found it convenient during the economic boom to treat the unions with great deference. Another and less amiable irony was the presence on the picket line of those two democrats, Mr Ian Mikardo and Miss Joan Maynard. In the 'peoples' republics', for which certain Labour MPs have a tendresse, indus
trial relations are quite differently conducted. In fact, the blackest reactionary heart might warm towards the standard Soviet procedure for settling disputes (which do sometimes take place): call out the militia and shoot the strikers.
The pettiness of the union mentality is well illustrated by a very different 'dispute'. The Welsh National Opera has engaged two young American singers, Neil Schicoff and Catherine Malfitano, to sing the Duke and Gilda (as Fowler would say, 'respectively' ought to be unnecessary there) in a forthcoming production of Rigoletto. Shortly before they were due to arrive in this country, Equity announced a ban on them on the grounds that there should be British singers capable of taking the parts (the union does not have to say whom it has in mind). It is possible to argue against the grandiose schemes of the recently formed Scottish and Welsh opera companies for presenting international casts. But it is no business at all of a 'union' to dictate casts to artistic managements. It is reminiscent of the period — decades long— when the Musicians' Union prevented American jazzmen from playing here because there was no equivalent demand for British jazzmen in America; which was rather like banning Japanese drama troupes because the Japanese were not begging for our own Noh actors.
The affairs of my own union, the NUJ, become almost too depressing to jest about. Mr Bernard Levin has offered his advice on voting in the election for our new secretary general. I notice, without surprise, that four of the six candidates are called Ken, Mike, Bob and Steve; and I am almost inclined to toss a coin between Charles and Gordon, if
only because they don't call themselves 'Chas and Gawd'.
One of the year's more preposterous events is the 'World Congress on Suicide and Crisis Intervention' taking place in Helsinki. It represents the ultimate social workers' dream of discussing gravely a 'problem' which in truth exists mainly in the mind of social workers, psychiatrists and other 'crisis interventionists'. It is too much to
expect those gathered at the Congress to read Thomas Szasz's profound discussion of the subject of suicide, so I give them two less taxing suggestions to consider. A coarse friend has long pointed out that suicide by drug ingestion would be made if not impossible at least impractical were all potentially lethal drugs available only in suppository form. My own, even simpler, suggestion is this: if the lugubriously serious Finns really want to drop in the league table from third highest suicide country, they might make it easier to get a drink in Finland. Though Johnson said that melancholy should be driven away by all means except drinking, there are few things as melancholy-making as semi-prohibition.
On the Monday of the Test Match I made my way to Lords, not an entirely safe place nowadays. As Woolmer came up to his century a group of Sydney intellectuals almost knocked me over, chanting a song that began, 'We all agree-ee, all Pommies are wankers'. I say began; they had left the Penguin Book of Australian Verse behind and seemed unable to recall tbe next line. With some more congenial friends I discussed an interesting sporting-political hypothesis. When Rhodesia becomes 'Zimbabwe', it will no.doubt be readmitted to international cricket. Assuming that the white population is not expelled or massacred (an assumption as unlikely as you wish to regard it) they will have the makings of an excellent XI. Leicestershire has P. B. Clift (Salisbury born) and B. F. Davidson (Bulawayo). Middlesex has Norman Featherstone (Que Que), as well as Phil Edmonds (Lusaka) who might squeeze in from over the border in Zambia. P. W. G. Parker of Sussex is also from Bulawayo. To lead this side we might even hope for the return of the Oxford captain of my days, F. S. Goldstein.
Nos temps, nos mceurs. There is a series in Gay News called 'Coming Out', which does not, it seems, have to do to Queen Charlotte's Ball. (1 was incidentally not entirely pleased to see that 'gay', alongside 'camp' and in the same sense, has just received the accolade of appearing in the Times Crossword Puzzle.) In the latest article, a lesbian lady tells of the ups and downs of her emotional life. It includes this sentence: 'I now have a fairly happy, stable, almost non-sexual relationship with my second husband, who is bisexual.' That just about says it all, does it not?
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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