PERSONAL COLUMN

An open letter to Edward Boyle

PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE

Dear Edward, Although we have known each other for many years, the relationship has never been close--which perhaps excuses me for writing to you in the form of an open letter. (An additional advantage is that I get paid for my trouble.) The news of your decision to give up politics for academic life came as a great shock. You were the first contem- porary of mine to go into politics and infinitely the most successful. Why has it all ended in Leeds rather than Downing Street? The question haunts me, because I have watched your career for pretty well forty years, thirty-eight to be exact, which gives me a kind of vested interest in it. The Leeds Vice-Chancellorship may not seem an anti- climax to you but it does to me I say that I have watched your 'career' for nearly forty years. Perhaps career is not quite the right word, because you were only a schoolboy of about eight when my interest, and admiration, was first aroused. But you became at once, in my eyes, a public man, not really very different from what you are now. You may recall the occasion when we first met. We were new boys at a notably progressive preparatory school called Abinger Hill, near Dorking, which was experimenting with the revolutionary Dalton plan under which pupils were allowed to determine their own scholastic preferences. If one felt like studying Latin, one studied Latin: if one didn't one didn't. You clearly profited greatly from the system, being naturally studious. I, alas, judging by our respective academic fortunes, was less well suited to make good use of its regimen of freedom, which perhaps explains your sub- sequent approval of progressive methods and my own less favourable reaction.

But to go back to that first day as new boys at school. The master of studies, Henry Brereton, who later became headmaster of Gordonstoun, began the proceedings by reading out loud an extract from, I think, one of Macaulay's grandiose essays. The object was—he has subsequently assured me, since the occasion became indelibly im- printed on his memory—purely therapeutic, to soothe our troubled nerves through the balm of sonorous-sounding words. After about twenty minutes he stopped and said, -Well, boys, have you any questions?' I remember my own reaction, which was one of total blankness. Not having understood a word, I was absolutely mute. So was everybody else, except you. Up shot your arm. `Yes, Edward', said the master, 'what is your question?"Well, Sir', you replied, in that earnest, persuasive, almost lilting voice that I have heard so often from public platforms since, `It is not really a question, it is more of a statement. I just wanted to tell you that with that voice you could fill the Albert Hall'.

Your contemporaries, no less than the master of studies, were, of course, immensely impressed by your manifest mastery of the situation. Clearly you were somebody worth watching, and I have gone on watching ever since. ft occurred to me that this might be the moment to try and sum up the fruits of this long process of observation. I have sometimes tried to do so face-to-face, when we have lunched or dined together, but never very successfully. You are not an easy man to talk with. Whenever one tries to make a point, you seize on it in, so to speak, mid- stream, with some such remark as, `Yes, that's what Friedlander puts so well in his excellent monograph in the March number of the Sociological Journal'. This would be all right if one read Friedlander's excellent monograph, or any other of the excellent sociological monographs with which you are always so impressively familiar. But if one has not—and I never have—your reaction always tends to drown my point in the swirling waters of technical expertise.

But I do have a point and since I was never able to get it across to you in person, while you were still in politics, perhaps you will allow me to do so now, as a kind of parting shot. Your trouble has always been a failure to understand the true source of the Tory party's strength, the secret of its class- less appeal, the reason for its deep roots in the hearts of working people. It is precisely because it is not the 'civilised' party, because, on the contrary, it understands the places of prejudice and passion, instinct and greed, in human affairs, and does not try to impose on them too rigidly the pattern of reason and principle. It is in this sense that the Tory party is truly democratic. It respects the feelings of the masses rather than the thoughts of the few.

'Civilisation', at any particular time, tends inevitably to be associated with intimations of truth and beauty which are apparent only to the highly educated; tends, that is, to seek after a kind of society which would appeal, if it could be created, to a relatively small and select section of the population.

It is civilised, for example, to abhor nationalism and favour internationalism, in spite of the fact that for the poor and simple national glory is the great vicarious source of excitement and satisfaction for lives that lack much direct excitement and satisfaction. It is civilised to approve of coloured immi- gration, in spite of the fact that to the poor and simple such an incursion of unfamiliar elements, far from seeming exotic and interesting—as they do to the sophisticated —seem frightening and menacing.

It is civilised to favour libertarian changes in the laws affecting censorship, divorce, homosexuality and so on, in spite of the fact that alterations to the moral climate impose far greater strains on the simple, whose feelings they outrage, than on the few, whose principles they placate. It is civilised to be against capital punishment, in spite of the fact that the idea of retribution, of an eye for an eye, corresponds to a human instinct that is deeply rooted in popular mythology, however much it may be des- pised by the cognoscenti.

This is why it has always seemed to me a profound mistake on your part to want to turn the Tories into a civilised party. Heaven knows there is enough about the Tory party that is bound to be unpopular; bound to seem antagonistic to majority

needs and aspirations. Free enterprise and the market economy are never going to be popular causes. An unequal distribution of wealth is never going to go down well in Limehouse or the Gorbals. The preservation of a governing class, so central, in my iess, to the Tory idea of the good society. cannot be expected to woo a mass electorate. NIuch of Toryism, in short, is profoundly antauo- mstic to the prevailing egalitarian spirit of the age. Its only chance, therefore, of retain- ing mass popular support, of maintaininu its links with working people whose class interests it can never hope to represent, !s to appeal to what you contemptuoush dismiss as their atavistic prejudices.

The great success of the Tory party has

been its ability to appeal to them without pandering to them; to understand them with- out being dominated by them. This skill is what Tory leadership is all about. You, it seems to me, have never mastered it; nor. for that matter, has Ted; still less did your mentor Rab Butler. It cannot, alas, be learnt from sociological journals. Perhaps Walter Bagehot came nearest to the heart of the

matter when he observed: `Talk of wavs of spreading a wholesome Conservatism throughout the country, give painful lectures. distribute weary tracts . . . but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concerned—try a little pleasure . . . So long as this world is this world, will a buoyant life be the proper source of an animated conservatism.'

You once told me, at the time of Suez.

that you bitterly regretted having been to Eton, because this upper-class upbringing cut you off from nine-ienths of your fellow. countrymen. You found you could not communicate with them. This seemed to me a sadly revealing remark, because one of the advantages of going to Eton is precisely that it so often endows its beneficiaries with a feeling for the 'buoyant life', an instinct for pleasure, which can be communicated to all walks of life, regardless of social class. This is what lots of ordinary people want from their rulers more than anything else. and want it all the more at a time like the present, when the pressures of impersonal technology seem to be taking the flavour and spice out of life. Yet it has always seemed to me that

it is this side of the Tory party that you have least enjoyed. Its feel for the passions, prejudices and pleasures of the people, which accounts for its continuing hold MC( popular loyalties—at a time when this hold. according to all rational sociological estimates should have been broken—has always seemed to you more a source of embarrassment than pride. You have wanted to turn the Tory party into the civilised party. Yet its strength really rests on it having enough men at the top who base the intelligence to realise that it must. at all costs, go on being the stupid party. the party of heart, yes, lots of that, but not too much soul and not too much head.

This is not a point, of course, that sal

commend itself in the university over which you are now to preside, where you will be welcomed and acclaimed as the erstwhile civilised conscience of the Tory party. But I hope you will forgive me for trying .° make it, however belatedly, because I think it may help you to understand—it certamb helps me to do so—why a political career which started off with such a bang ill's ended, no, not with a whimper, but with something which—unless my ears deceive me—is rather sadly like a sigh. Yours ever, Perq.