Notebook
The only way in which the Daily Mail's gullibility over the Leyland forgeries can be explained is that David English, Stewart Stevens and others' suffered a willing suspension of disbelief. Their trouble was that they desperately wanted a scoop. Any hse°013 would do. They wanted it desperately because they saw the Evening Standard i.sliPPing away from their grasp, and they "eW that if they failed to get the Standard then the squeeze which Associated newsPapers has been exerting on Beaverbrook would itself fail. The squeeze would march across Fleet Street and Beaverbrook, teinforced by Goldsmith and possibly Rowlands also, would be pressing Lkssociated. Put otherwise, the knife would °_,e in the other back. The Express, too, had 'one well with its 'How to make your own at°In'homb' package scare. When a bloke n ?Irles along to the Mail with a marvellous who wants to look too closely? Obviously not English and Co. Stevens says ,fle spotted the obvious mistakes in the 1°rged Ryder letter. He also says he was Convinced by the explanation offered. What Could such an explanation have been? Fleet street racks its brains and comes up with no 13:3ssible explanation, except the obvious: that English and Stevens and the rest desperately wanted the letter to be genuine. The 1.1„1,ao who is conned is always a greedy man. ine editor who is fooled is hungry and thirsty.
But for what?
RUC chiefs, I hear, are reconciling themselves, with different degrees of success, hope and fear, to the idea that the licence tee will not be increased very much. At Present the combined colour TV and radio long costs £18. It has been no secret for a tong time that the BBC wanted something financial 'to meet', as the sloppy-minded urlancial controllers would always say, 'the rise in costs' (as if rises in costs could be met no other way than by rises in revenue or Prices). The word now floating around Broadcasting House is that the BBC will get around 12 per cent; and this can be , ,,ranslated into a licence increase of £2 from '-18 to £20. Such an increase will be for the that year only. This does notexactly mean ta ,,at the BBC will be put on probation, following Annan. Rather, it is supposed to suggest that the BBC will be expected to Take do with an extra two quid for the forthcoming twelve months, but that thereafter the national economy providing Of Course, more might be in the offing.
Sensible people at the Beeb are already welcoming such auguries of economy. The Selfsame people are also looking forward to Ian Trethowan's advent as DirectorGeneral, in place of the administrator and bureaucrat Charles Curran. It will be both enlivening and decorous to have a professional broadcaster running the outfit, instead of a secretary. If the economies, which will be unavoidable, should the Government limit the BBC's bonus to £2, can be concentrated upon trimming the BBC's enormous fat belly, then a better as well as a cheaper service will be produced.
It is obvious, to anyone who knows the Beeb that its largely unnecessary and very expensive administrative staff could be .fired tomorrow, to the great advantage of the outfit. What is also obvious, although chiefly to insiders, is that even within the essential programme-producing part of the Beeb, the room for cutting off excess fat is very considerable indeed. There are fourteen producers working on Today and an editor, deputy editor and nine producers on Woman's Hour, to give a couple of examples from Radio Four.
I am not suggesting that the BBC should run itself on a commercial shoe-string. All I am saying is that, if the Government decides (as well it might) that there is nothing politically in it for hoisting up the licence fee above £20, then that need no mean that, the quality of the output of the BBC must suffer. If the BBC economises sensibly with its programmes and ruthlessly with its administrative tail, the output could actually improve.
Full marks to the Government for not wasting public money on Mentmore. The prices paid, for what was often rubbish suggests to me that we, as a nation, are well off, shot of that ugly pile's collection of astonishingly vulgar extravagances. Lord Rosebery, too, should be well satisfied, having made more out of the sale than he would out of a deal with the state. Most Of the junk is going back abroad, where it first came from. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Sotheby's, having disposed of Mentmore, might care to consider another piece of foreign junk. I refer to Swedenborg's cranium. This, now residing, I gather, in a margarine box in Swansea, is of considerable interest to Sweden, collectors of craniums (or should it be crania?) and followers of the daft Swedish philosopher-mystic whose ideas once rattled around this now empty piece of bone.
Emanuel Swedenborg died in London in 1772 and was buried in a coffin in the vaults of the Swedish Church in the East End. A long story now follows, involving openings of the coffin and very probably pilferings of the tomb. At the time phrenology was fashionable and people collected famous heads. It is virtually certain that one head was substituted for another in Swedenborg's tomb. Thus, when his coffin was translated back to his native Sweden and his remains given a final resting place at Uppsala, the wrong cranium travelled across the sea. The right cranium, having been filched from the London tomb back in July 1816 and other substituted, and having passed through various hands, now belongs to a Swansea family. It was recently taken to Sotheby's, for valuation. It was not a work of art; nor silver; nor porcelain. It fitted into no expert category, but at length someone from books and manuscripts declared that it might well have. some commercial worth. What offers for a cranium which once contained more nonsense than any other proven cranium extant and currently on sale?
I saw last week that we — you and I, that is — have paid over £8 million since 1956 to finance a Poultry Research Centre. Shirley Williams, the indefatigible Education Minister, tells us that one of the things this Centre has been doing has been to spend £35,000 in the past five years finding out why eggs break. The Centre's staff is now 210, having risen from seventy over the past thirteen years. One small way in which public expenditure could effortlessly be reduced would be by dismissing these 210 people. If what they are doing is worthwhile, then they could all ask to be engaged by the egg producers, or the egg sellers, or whoever it is who benefits, apart from themselves, from their work.
Eggs, in my experience„break because they are thin-skinned. Shirley Williams is also thin-skinned, else she would herself have fired these thick-skinned 210 employees of the Poultry Research Centre.
George Gale
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