Political commentary
Important Ishoozh .
Colin Welch
Seen in quick succession recently interro- gated on the box, which seemed the more profoundly disturbing — Tony Benn or Roy Hattersley? Apart from all that is known of him, Mr Benn carries inscribed on his person his own health warning: 'This man may cost you more than money'. We can all see his eyes, protruding as if he were actually being strangled, round, staring, il- luminated like the unwinking lights of a computer. We think, as Bagehot said of Brougham, that 'if he were a horse, no one would buy him'. Then there is his un- concealed arrogance, his impatient refusal to answer any questions except about what he calls, with lips pursed and smacking like those of a gourmet about to sip some ex- quisite consommé, 'the Ishoozh' or sometimes 'the Polishizh'. No other ques- tions can be 'shenshible'; they are all brush- ed aside as unimportant, 'hypothetical', just gossip or 'court gossip', of interest to base persons like his interrogator Fred Emery but leaving 'the people at home bored shtiff'.
It is an odd and evasive politician nonetheless who affects to be interested on- ly in policies and not at all in his own chances of carrying them out. Indeed, since we have all heard ad nauseam what he would like to do, it is his chance of doing it which is for us 'people at home' the greatest Ishoo of them all.
With Mr Benn at least we know where we stand, or where we probably would stand if with Boris Godounov supreme power were his. But with Mr Hattersley? Interrogated on the following night, why did his friendly, unaffected and unassuming manner fail to reassure, his frankness fail to convince, his blunt vehemence, with b's and p's popping forth like bubbles bursting in thick boiling porridge, seem artful, his second-hand car remain unsold?
Perhaps it is partly his folksiness, which other northerners like Sir Harold Wilson have devalued. Some people regard Mr Hattersley as totally insincere and unprin- cipled, just ambitious. I doubt this greatly. I guess him to be a man of great loyalty, af- fection and sincerity: otherwise how could he be so likeable? But are not his loyalty and affections rooted in a vanished place and past? I fancy him owing allegiance above all to a Yorkshire in which Sutcliffe and Holmes were forever opening at Headingley, in which tuppeny trams took you to pubs where Tetley's and Rose's of Malton were still at their best, in which choirs, cloth caps, comradeship and a cer- tain taciturn humour flourished together, in which pudding with thick gravy went before the beef and in which Clarion cycling clubs and Blatchford's Merrie England and friendly Labour politics mixed as naturally with homespun idealistic socialism as Wensleydale with apple pie. My point is that surely Mr Hattersley has roots all right, but can he bear fruit?
The passing of Labour leaves him devoid of present substance. Has he any sticking point left anywhere? None emerged on the box. No unilateralist, would he fight on a unilateralist manifesto? I couldn't make out. He expected that somehow by some fudging the manifesto would be rendered tolerable to him and his like. Pro-European to some extent, would he ever stick on that? No, he preferred rather to hope that the Europeans would never chuck us out, no matter how appallingly we behaved. No principle did he anywhere enunciate, only vague dreams that the forbearance or manoeuvrings of others would somehow spare him the agony of finally standing up for this, that or anything else.
He made much of his devotion to law and order, of his fitness to establish and main- tain them by 'visible policemen ... walking slowly down the streets'. He favoured sub- jecting the police to local government con- trol. What, someone interjected, in Lambeth? Apparently so: in which case those visible policemen might walk rather more rapidly off down the street and disap- pear altogether. He further favoured sub- jecting the security services to Commons control, whereby 'the right MPs' asking 'the right questions' would 'keep them on their toes'. Adam Raphael put the right question to him: how on earth could the voters be expected to entrust public order to a party which cannot even keep itself in order, which in particular has made such a hash of getting rid of its militants? Mr Hat- tersley was as quickly on his toes as a cat on hot bricks. So far as Labour's own law- and-order problems were concerned, a very little discipline, the weeniest pogrom, a mere purgette, would satisfy him. Five of the ringleaders, say. But more than that are actually candidates? Yes, but they needn't be ringleaders, need they? The ringleaders alone, should be expelled, leaving unscath- ed the innumerable young innocents they had 'seduced', the dupes they had 'appall- ingly tricked'.
How dares he take such a view, at once low, insulting and sentimental, of young socialists, who are and look likely to remain influential members of his own party, and in whose hands rather than his own its future rests? It would be bad enough if I did, though I don't. I can conceive, what
The Spectator 27 November 1982 seems to elude him, that young socialist! want what they say they want and wills' their leaders want; that their leaders have not seduced or tricked them at all; and that their detestation of Mr Hattersley, as of the rest of us, is engendered not by veils at blinkers of misunderstanding which call readily be torn away, but based on an ac: curate perception of what we stand for e" as in his case, are thought to stand for.
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The real trickery and seduction are Pra. victory is for him still all-important.c' W', tised by him on himself and us. A Labour sort of Labour? He doesn't know; an if he cares, he doesn't seem to care much as about the victory itself. He is thin reduced to a fig-leaf, covering he knots not what. He and Mr Benn both ask us for blaill‘ cheques. Mr Benn offers us in return a ill to an all-too-well-known destination, out °. the western world into the east, a world in which democracy and prosperity will be destroyed by 'participation', which il. destroy itself, leaving behind a sort of he,' Mr Hattersley offers us no such certaT;• ties, but a mystery cruise. It will end ilp,Pri knows not where. Of precise information he is as innocent as the dimmest staiitili staff at Clapham Junction. The cruise face dangers he cannot promise to avert. be The mutinous crew is too formidable to disciplined or ignored. It is kept iMPerfect„; below hatches, from which continline the meanderings blasts of Marxist rhetoric drown he meanderings of the aged skipPer, the blustering roars of first mate Healey' pedantic devaluationary ravings of 11,11;;g, Shore and the feeble protests and whe,wcie
v requests of the 'moderate' officers. c, us sional armed sorties from below realist' that at any moment the crew could st°r
the bridge and seize the wheel. ICY So far as he is aware of it, Mr Hatters es seems to attribute the chaos which I'll beneath and around him to the young bel A 'seduced' and 'tricked' by pied PiPersa'bly millstone round their necks and Prestlip-ge all would be remedied. I suspect thatyiil, other Labour 'moderates', he has fallen log ly to understand the revolution which Who place roughly in the late Sixties. Mail gimp, were shaken by it at the time now take c'er, fort in the delusion that it is now °yi, spent. On the contrary, it will surelYn fluence our destinies more and more as 10 generation it uprooted and inflamed Palo right through our institutions, transforming it them as well as our manners and mores ben goes. Prof. Samuel H. Beer, the 5°Dor American student of our affairs and atit9e of Modern British Politics, calls it ow romantic revolt', its fruit 'the !ideal populism'. He is not, perhaps, the I of chronicler of its excesses and ravages °r of its political consequences. He is earn tat prolix, difficult, a shade complacent. 1101.1 se, least he sees there have been some °lido cent underrated I hope to discuss on anotherret underrated or ignored parts of his rec book, Britain Against Itself (Faber Faber, £9.50).
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