Notebook
I never met Richard Cecil, but he' was bY all accounts an extremely attractive man and someone who could command extraordinary loyalty and affection. It is a pity Lthat the most glowing tribute to him should neve come from Mr P. K. van der Byl, the Rhodesian Foreign Minister, for in these curious times such a tribute serves to diminish rather than enhance a reputation. I asked a close friend of Richard Cecil who is als° a perceptive observer of Rhodesian affairs to give us this assessment: 'The death of Richard Cecil while filming tbe war in Rhodesia should cause more than a little heart-searching among those in the world of news dissemination who were !oath to accept him when he was alive. For life, and now even in death, he was a victim of the media machine, his qualities °,,bsoured by trite clichés — the "swashbuckang nobleman", "young Winston" and so °n. Alive, he faced petty-minded obstructiveness from people in almost all the nrganisations now so quick to call him their n‘vtl. First, he could barely operate as a writer at all, until he had satisfied the holy NI-JJ of his bona fides. Then the NUJ chapel !it_ ITN held sanctimonious debates to meolde whether his partisanship could be tnierated. Highminded fellow journalists expressed horror at his habit of carrying a l'icaPon in self-defence. The Guardian ran a Eftrubby little column implying that the Cecil aindY farming interests in Rhodesia were vsoleehow at the root of Richard's modfattoo. Nothing could have been further rnto the truth.
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Of course Richard Cecil was partisan. "e Was too candid to keep his fiercely held cnnvictions a secret. He lacked the clinical kofessionalism to disguise his prejudices as ,artfullY as the more numerous corn'nen. tators of left and centre. Yet no jour11,4anst is impartial: the very choice of s'acts", let alone their description or analyts determined in the end by instinct, ‘",nwever doughtily the writer may seek for in! truth as he sees it. , Richard Cecil did focus on an aspect of Vrtodesian life which inspired him: the „avery and resourcefulness of the beleag:;ered white tribe. He tended to gloss over 1de shortcomings of the Smith camp, though tnhe never denied they existed. But he argued tnat the tribe's survival would — in global — be a force for good. It was perhaps .a. ir that editors tended to limit his reports to Ina technical, military sphere, where his n4 n skill and extraordinary courage stood 41 In fine stead. But it was less fair that, ;vett within that straitjacket, news chiefs ipere wary of his unique, raw material for 'Sr of offending the "objective" lobby.' I don't know much about Malvern where Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice went to school, but his recollections of his schooldays are rather different from my own. Explaining his dissenting view from that of the other European Court judges that the birching of a fifteen-year-old boy in the Isle of Man did not amount to a 'degrading punishment', Sir Gerald said that beatings at Malvern 'not infrequently took place under conditions of far greater intrinsic humiliation than in this case. Yet I cannot remember that any boy felt degraded or debased.' According to Sir Gerald, beatings were often seen by the victims as matters of 'pride and congratulation'. Well, that seems to me to be a bit naive. At Eton, where in my youth beatings were commonplace and administered in a bewildering variety of ritualistic forms, I do not remember anybody looking forward to a beating as a matter for pride and congratulation. Most boys were terrified of being beaten. Not only did they find it most painful, but some victims are
known to have harboured life-long feelings of hatred towards the wielder of the cane, so debased, degraded and humiliated did they feel. If any pride appeared to be attached to the event, it was merely a form of retaliation against the humiliation which the beating was intended to produce.
It is difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the European Democratic Union, the new alliance of anti-Marxist parties which started life in Austria this week with Mrs Thatcher as its star. The only obvious merit of this organisation is that it forges a new link between the British Conservative Party
and the West German Christian Democrats, but it already looks as if a much more important alliance between these two parties will be established in due course within the European Parliament. In other respects, the foundation meeting of the EDU served once again to emphasise the incompatibility between the major right-of-centre parties in Europe., The French Gaullists, who could never work closely with the British Conservatives, were there only as observers, while the Italian Christian Democrats — busy oiling up to rather than standing up against the Marxists in their own country — were predictably absent. Mrs Thatcher's objective of 'an effective working alliance' between the anti-left parties of Europe may be praiseworthy, but it seems hardly attainable.
Mr Anthony Howard, whom we mourn, claimed with justifiable pride last month in his last Diary as its Editor that the New Statesman 'still manages to survive without benefit of outside subsidy — either private (the Spectator) or public (the Listener).' This is the situation in which all papers would like to find themselves, and long may it last in the case of the New Statesman. But I wish he had drawn a moral distinction between private and public subsidy. One thing is to receive voluntary and enthusiastic support; another is to extract it by subterfuge from the over-taxed public. This reflection is prompted first by a recent visit I paid to the United States where the evidence abounds that private wealth, if it is allowed to exist, is not used only for unworthy purposes but is also channelled in vast quantities into support for
the arts, education and worthwhile pub lications; secondly, by the news that in
this country the New Review, although
obliged to change from being a monthly to a quarterly, will receive yet another increase in its subsidy from the Arts Council to a spectacular (for the size .cif its readership) £30,000 a year. We have argued before that such a subsidy is not easy to justify. How much better it would
be it the New Review were able to call on support from the private Sector. But in a
society Which so doggedly discourages the accumulation of private wealth, they are unlikely to have much luck.
Our literary editor recently received a review copy of The Visual Dictionary o fSex, edited by Dr Eric Trimmer (Macmillan £9.95). Visual is almost an understatement: it is a remarkably graphic compendium of everything on the subject from oral sex to venereal disease . . . it is also unusually free of humbug about educational value, etc . . . just a jolly good load of filth. What I wonder is, what is the view taken of the book by its publisher, the Rt Hon Harold Macmillan OM?
Alexander Chancellor
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