Another voice
Is Calvocoressi mad?
Auberon Waugh
It must be a horrible job to edit an intelli- gent weekly magazine at this particular moment. Polite convention requires that one should listen to all sides of the political debate, attribute wholesome motives to all major parties (except, perhaps, in the case of Labour supporters, to the Tories) and assume some measure of integrity and in- telligence even among those who disagree with one's own conclusions. Whatever hap- pens, at least ten million people are going to vote Labour on Thursday week. Well, anyway at least nine million people. Some, no doubt, would vote for a horse if it were the official Labour Party candidate; others would still vote Labour if the party manifesto promised to poison the water supply with botulinus toxin. Some are in- curably stupid, or ignorant, or perverse. Some again are so eaten up by hatred of the Tories, or envy of the rich, that they will do anything to spite them. Others, through defective moral training, imagine that there must be something admirable in casting their democratic votes against their own sectional interest.
But the vast majority of those nine or ten million voters must be clinically sane, of at any rate near-average intelligence and near- average understanding. They feel that the Labour Party, even through the voice of its extraordinary Mickey Mouse manifesto, best represents their own interests, or at very least their own aspirations: towards a more equal society, perhaps, but at any rate towards a society where they will be better off than they are or might be under the Tories. They are suspicious of attempts to persuade them to the contrary, imagining ulterior motives. Above all, perhaps, they feel that within the Labour Party there is a greater desire to help them, a greater sym- pathy with their unequal status, than is to be found among the Tories. Who is to say they are wrong?
In other words, there are two emotions which make up Labour's intellectual (as op- posed to temporal) appeal — a sense of grievance and a sense of guilt. The first is admirably catered for by the Daily Mirror, the second by the Guardian. The New Statesman caters for those whose heightened sense of grievance has resolved itself into either a misanthropic desire to attack socie- ty or a fixed determination to control it. How can a conscientious editor of the Spec- tator, inspired by the gentlemanly desire to present all points of view, hope to explain an intelligent person's decision to vote Labour without poaching on any of these over-keepered preserves?
As those who read last week's Spectator will know, the lot fell upon Peter Calvocoressi, the 70-year-old former Eto- nian scholar who stood unsuccessfully as Liberal candidate for Nuneaton in the 1945 election but now tells us that he has voted Labour from 1950 and will do so this time `with more conviction than ever before'.
Conviction suggests intellectual choice rather than emotional commitment. There is no hint in anything he writes of a personal advantage,, or personal grievance, although I suppose the blackest cynics might query the paragraph which appears as the second of his 'two big reasons' for voting Labour, where he accuses Mrs Thatcher of respon- sibility 'for giving political flavour to non- political appointments ... for which can- didates have to pass political vetting at No. 10. All this is a corruption of public life.' If she is guilty of this we must agree that it is reprehensible, although I do not sup- pose that many of us would list it among the 'two big reasons' for our electoral choice. On the more general charge of en- couraging toadyism, I agree that I was mild- ly appalled by her choice of chief press ad- viser in Mr Anthony (`Tony') Shrimsley, formerly attached to Cudlipp on the Mir- ror, Murdoch on the Sun and Goldsmith on Now! But even this appointment would be unlikely, of itself, to persuade me to vote Labour, if only through a fear that Mr Shrimsley might easily turn up again as chief press adviser to Mr Foot.
• Mr Calvocoressi's first big reason for voting Labour is that the Conservatives have 'not even tried to tackle' the vexed problem of industrial relations. Most peo- ple would agree with this, I fancy, from whichever side of the political fence they view the matter. But is that a good reason for voting Labour, whose proposals are en- tirely based on the adversarial posture, and calculated to ensure only that the unions are unchallengeable? Mr Calvocoressi does not address himself to Labour's proposals, or explain how they will bring about a Japanese-style harmony between workers, management and investors. It is enough that Mrs Thatcher has failed to please him.
His second 'big reason' embraces the whole 'tone of politics' into which, he says, two very nasty notes have crept — hatred and toadyism. I do not think either have ever been absent from politics — has Mr Calvocoressi never attended a Labour Party conference, or heard Mr Gerald Kauffman talking about Harold Wilson in the good old days? But it honestly seems to me that anyone is blinding himself who fails to see that 99 per cent of all the hatred in politics comes from the Left, where class hatred is counted a virtue. Such peevish resentments as the Tories occasionally reveal are the palest shadow of a response to that massive presence.
'We need three qualities above all in our politics: Integrity, Intelligence and Im- agination,' writes Mr Calvocoressi, before explaining how he judges the Tories defi- cient in the last two. Many of us would agree, possibly going further to suggest that such integrity as Mrs Thatcher undoubtedly possesses is no more than the measurement of her deficiency in the other two. But has he applied these stern criteria to the party of his choice? Has he seen Mr Healey on television's Face the Press explaining, as the Chancellor who presided over the 1976 sur- render to the IMF, how Mr Shore's pro- posals to print an extra £11,000 billion and devalue the pound will have no noticeable effect on inflation? Is he not aware, as most Labour men of intelligence and imagination are aware, that the Mickey Mouse manifesto on which the party of his choice is facing the electorate was accepted by moderates within the party only as a means of discrediting the Left?
'1 do not agree with the whole of Labour policy, or expect to,' he writes grandly. `Nobody with a mind of his own will accept any party manifesto in toto.' Toto, one suspects, is another mouse who has just wandered on the scene. He says he has hesitations about Labour's defence policy, but what parts of the Labour policy does he accept? The commitment to leave the Com- mon Market? To nationalise huge chunks of what industry remains? To impose cur- rency and import controls? To hand over most economic and social policy-making to trade union leaders without any firm assurances in exchange, or any certainty that they would be able to honour such assurances if they were given? To ban hun- ting, to print new money and devalue the currency? He does not mention any of this.
But the main feature of Labour's pro- gramme is that it will be unable to imple- ment any of it. Within days rather than weeks of there being the slightest likelihood of a Labour victory there would be such a flight of foreign savings from the pound as would put it inexorably once again under the control of the IMF. The whole manifesto, as I say, is a sort of Mickey Mouse fantasy and the only rational — as opposed to neurotic — reason for voting Labour is on the calculation that the IMF would make a better job of running our economy than Sir Geoffrey Howe.
I do not suppose there would be much difference, and for my own part I rather welcome the idea of all these Mickey Mouses and Dave Sparts in charge of Westminster as well as County Hall, Liver- pool Town Hall and the rest. Except for the damage to hunting. Somewhere, it seems to me, one must draw the line between good jokes and bad ones. I can think of hundreds of reasons for those ten million-odd votes for Labour, but I still cannot understand Mr Calvocoressi's.
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