Westminster Commentary
AND, mark you, I went there with the best of intentions — even though all that drivel in Paris had kept the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary away so long that the debate had to be put off to 'day, of all unlikely days. Was not Christmas proaching, season of whatever-it-is and mellow atever-it-is-fulness? Scrooge's nephew, in fact, erred to have the right idea : . . the only time know of, in the long calendar of the year, when en and women seem by one consent to open eir shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people low them as if they really were fellow-passen- rs to the grave, and not another race of people ound on other journeys.' So, as my taxi sped rough the Christmas-laden streets of the West nd at the speed of frozen lard flowing uphill, determined that I, too, would open my shut-up heart, would look with a kindly eye upon those elow me, would radiate goodwill.
Ah, but, you see, Scrooge's nephew had never card the Foreign Secretary making a speech. fter ten minutes of this perfectly dreadful stuff y goodwill had vanished with the last rose of ummer. Hoylake UDC stood there, his pink nose -quiver above his script, and read it out in a and of plainsong chant, without the smallest trace ts qu f expression, understanding, or even interest. I to M ave on occasion heard his courtesy impugned; he tk an ill not give way for interjections, it is said, as
ven the Prime Minister (albeit with a shockingly stoo urly mien) will. On this charge, at any rate, Hoy- t spit ake UDC is acquitted. He gives way so rarely ng fo ecause he simply does not see the Member who urne fishes to intervene; and he fails to see the inter- Com ening Member because he fears to raise his eyes :lativefrom the text before him (even though, in this eakedcase, it was so bad that there seems to be the I dealstrongest likelihood that he wrote it himself) even cntly,for a moment, lest he lose what slight grip he may of its be lucky enough to have on the proceedings. nt on Alexander Woollcott used to quote with relish an itable ineffable line from a thriller by William le Queux: The head of a murdered woman was certainly an hun- odd thing for a man to be carrying in his luggage; orre- the mystery had now assumed the proportions of
► rch- a veritable enigma.' Well, the present Foreign pro- Secretary is an odd thing for the Prime Minister- tates any Prime Minister, even this one—to be carrying y of in his Government; the mystery has long since with assumed the proportions of a very veritable Uni- enigma indeed.
dis- For—and this is something which only emerges clearly from a reading of the Foreign Secretary's rims speech, so infallible is his gift (a sort of inverted fore Midas touch) for making everything he says sound ling like nonsense—he was, by and large, right. His ries case was largely vitiated, it is true, and not merely ink by his delivery; like every non-swimmer he in- fhe on leaping in at the deep end, and was soon red gulping unhealthy mouthfuls of chlorinated ish Marxism, Marxism being one of the many things be Hoylake UDC knows nothing about. But when ted he said—I mean read—things like this : 'As we cal see it, there has emerged a consistent record of Soviet deeds since the war all pointing to a policy
of expansion . . . they want to freeze the status quo in Eastern Europe . . . to split off Western Germany . . . to divide Europe from the United Kingdom and the United States, and to divide the United Kingdom from the United States. . . . A Summit Meeting which is an abject failure would increase tension rather than diminish it . . .'—when he said things like this, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that he was saying sooth.
Which only serves to make yet more inexplic- able the enigma 1 mentioned earlier. For by the time he had finished (he was, incidentally, woe- fully thrown out of his stride by a goon in the Public Gallery, of whom more anon), the Oppo- sition had its fangs deep into the throat of the debate, and they did not thereafter let go. Yet it need not have been so; a Foreign Secretary who had displayed some interest in, and grasp upon, his theme might have tilted the whole balance of advantage the other way, and might even have roused a genuine feeling of enthusiasm for the NATO conference, even if not for the acres of pitiful twaddle that emerged therefrom.
Well, Mr. Macmillan may ponder on his own troubles; but we have troubles of our own. For, bad though our present Foreign Secretary is, he is a great statesman compared to the alternative which faces the country if there should be an election and if the Labour Party should win it. Mr. Bevan's speech was in one sense a triumph the like of which, all were agreed, the House of Commons has not heard since the greatest days of the Member for Woodford. At the end of this magnificent oration the Opposition cheered for minutes on end; on and on rolled the great wave of sound, gathering strength and volume and fierceness as it went. Wriggling with pleasure, as well he might have been, Mr. Bevan sat amid the huzzas, while the Tories remained numb and silent, except for Mr. Sandys who, possibly be- cause he had just heard a very good joke or pos- sibly not, roared with laughter. And yet I shivered as I listened to the Labour Party cheering, and M r. Gaitskell in his hammock and ten thousand miles away. For it is true that Mr. Bevan had dis- mantled the Foreign Secretary and left him in pieces all over the floor; it is true that his oration (though, like many speeches which are great to hear, it does not read nearly so well) was a splen- did succession of splendid periods, splendidly delivered; it is true that he faltered only once (when asked whether the practice of flying H-bombs on standing patrol had existed under the Labour Government, it was clear that he did not know, despite the fact that he was denouncing the Government for having been ignorant until the other day that it was happening now), and that he had one classic riposte. (`You cannot be deader than dead,' he declared, and when Mr. Philip Bell—of course—interjected 'Dishonoured,' Nye replied : 'All these terms are ceasing to be meaningful in this relationship, because honour implies a relation between a man and his social code, but if society is itself destroyed, nothing either honourable or dis- honourable will be left.') But when all was said and cheered, Mr. Bevan's speech was what Mr. Hagerty would call unadul- terated rot. At Brighton Mr. Bevan coined a phrase—`the deadly dangerous polarisation of the world' (and my word ! but didn't it sound good in his accent, with his weak 'r' and the beautiful sound of his Celtic long `a)--and it is now clear that the shallowness and ignorance that the phrase represents really arc Mr. Bevan's sub- stitute for political thinking. Indeed, he used the very phrase again during his speech, and made it worse by varying it; it ran `. . . what we 'must strive to avoid is getting the world polarised by these two irrational attitudes.' And these two Irrational attitudes,' stigmatised equally by Mr. Bevan, are the Russian attitude that the West is hell-bent on dominating the world, and the Western attitude that Russia is ditto. Now if Mr. Bevan really believes that these attitudes are equally irrational, then the prospects for Britain and the Western alliance, should Mr. Bevan become Foreign Secretary, are grim indeed.
Yet it is clear that he does believe precisely that. He quoted with scorn passages of the Paris communique: 'This materialistic, atheistic des- potism, aimed at dominating the world, is a for- midable challenge . . . one basic weakness was the Soviet attempt to suppress what, in the long run, was not repressible, namely, the desire for freedom . . .,' and after the second passage actually went on to say, 'Every single distortion is imported into it.' Well, does Mr. Bevan not think that Communism is a formidable challenge? Does he really think that Hungary, say, is no concern of ours, and to call such things by their true names is to import distortions? Yes, he does; and have we not good reason to fear the prospect of any- body whose thinking is as warped as this becoming Foreign Secretary? As for Mr. Gaitskell, what he must have thought as he read the accounts of the debate does not bear dwelling upon. Mr. Bevan has taken the opportunity of his Leader's absence to give the Labour Party a good, hard shove, not to the Left—for the instability of the party's latitudinal movements is notorious—but backwards; backwards, that is. towards the dis- credited idea of the Third Force, of a great mediator who shall speak with tones of wisdom and breadth of understanding to both factions (the great mediator, it is hardly necessary to add, has silver hair and a Welsh accent) and in doing so may quietly, and with the best intentions and the sincerest of regrets, destroy the world.
Nevertheless, until the uproar during the Prime Minister's speech, the rest of the debate was anti- climax,. though Mr. Shinwell, to a regrettably empty house, larrupped Mr. Bevan's fallacies all over the green leather, waving his arms about in great cabman gestures as he did so, and Lord Hinchingbrooke spoke for the rebels in a speech the like of which 1 for one have not heard since I saw Wailing for Godot. 'We are absolutely at variance,' he said, 'with what I may call, for brevity's sake, the Liberal concept of the mechanistic Society of Nations, founded on a spurious morality' (dig that crazy brevity, man !) 'We are against,' he continued, 'the process of counting heads [I suppose I would be considered an impossibly vulgar fellow if I were to suggest that the reason 'Lord Hinchingbrooke is against counting heads is that he doesn't appear to have one himself.] We are against majority' decision. We are against the concept of collective security [look, cobber, he said it; if he'd meant something else he'd have said something-else, wouldn't he?] . . . we are becoming convinced . . . that American Liberalism, with its many agents all over the world and many agents in this country, too, is depriving us, the British, of our independ- ence, manoeuvring against our Empire and against our points of military strength. . .
When the Prime Minister came to wind up, the fight was lost and he knew it. For two-thirds of his speech, therefore, he did not depart from the safe ground of clichd and platitude (though he really must beware, when someone who has read it is listening, of describing Mein Kampf as a 'very long and very dull book'; it is not very long, and if Mr. Macmillan thinks it is dull he should try reading some of his own speeches), and just as everyone thought he would coast safely home with the whole House asleep, he dropped his dog- end into the petrol-pump, with his handling of the bombs-in-planes-before-1951 issue. The Oppo- sition blew up in a suspiciously mushroom-shaped cloud. 'Cheat, cheat, cheat !' they yelled. 'Twister,' screamed Mr. Bence, looking as if he was about to have an apoplectic fit. `Gitahtovit!' bellowed Mr. Lindgren. The House had woken up with a vengeance, and the last crumb Mr. Macmillan hoped to salvage had vanished down the plug-hole with the remains of their nightly Horlicks. I sup- pose the one thing that Mr. Macmillan May pride himself upon is that when he was interrupted, as Hoylake UDC had been, from the Public Gallery, his Guards training stood him in good stead, and he neither looked up nor faltered in his delivery. The interrupters (a man for the Foreign Secre- tary, a woman for the Prime Minister) announced themselves as speaking for the League of Empire Loyalists. 'Interdependence is treason,' they piped (if this unsavoury organisation really wants to get anywhere, let it choose hecklers with less ridiculous voices), and added to the amusement they had generated by meekly trotting up the stairs and out of the Gallery before the attendants got anywhere near them. But the woman's inter- ruption of Mr. Macmillan added to the proceed- ings the final touch of bathos that his speech lacked, and he sat down to a cheer from his own side that could more• properly be described as a grunt.
And so the Labour Party went off with its collective tail well up, not to say wagging the dog. Yet will it really signify—signify in the long run? I trust not, and I trust that Mr. Gaitskell, wherever he is, also trusts not. The week's trading figures show a great profit for the Opposition in general and Mr. Bevan in particular; but the annual audit may show a very different picture: They would have gained very little on balance if they had enabled the Tory Party to go to the country on a slogan as simple as—what shall I say?—'Whose finger on the trigger?'
TAPER
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