DIARY ALAN WATKINS
There are few political fates more harrowing than to be a candidate fighting a by-election. You are on constant display, as you are not at a general election. You are supervised by functionaries from party headquarters whom the journalists call 'minders' or 'heavies'. Worst of all, these journalists have the licence to insult and harass you at the morning press confer- ences. It is considered pusillanimous, any- way unsporting, for the parties not to lay on these daily sessions, but instead they make the press come to their man at their own rather than at the press's convenience. This is what Labour are doing with Mr Richard Wiley at Brecon. I cannot say I altogether blame them. I have seen numer- ous candidates reduced to wrecks by their experiences at these morning conferences at the hands of such practitioners as Mr George Gale, Mr Anthony Bevins, and, above all, Mr Vincent Hanna. These candi- dates include the late Robin McEwen for the Conservatives at Roxburgh, Mr John Butcher for the Conservatives at Crosby and Mr Tony Cook for the Social Demo- crats at Darlington. They all lost. But candidates who impress the journalists can lose too. Examples are the Labour candi- date at Crosby and the Independent at Hull. If I were a candidate I should compromise and hold three press confer- ences a week, no more.
Returning to Islington after a hard afternoon and early evening at Westmin- ster and intermediate staging posts, I tend to switch on the television in the hope of hearing the end of Channel 4 News. What I always seem — or seemed — to get, at any rate in the middle of the week, was the smug visage of Mr Jeremy Hanley, Con- servative MP for Richmond, delivering a party political broadcast in ingratiating tones. This struck me as not only tedious but also scandalous, in view of Mr Hanley's tiny majority over the Liberal in his consti- tuency — which was presumably the reason for his being foisted on the show in the first place. When I next ran into Mr Jeremy Isaacs, the head of Channel 4, I raised the matter with him. He told me that this was a clever wheeze of his to remove from him the obligation to carry party political broadcasts. I refrained from ex- pressing my view that the bartering of PPBs for regular doses of Mr Hanley was scarcely a fair exchange for the poor helpless viewer — quite apart from the inequity to the Liberal in Richmond, Mr Alan Watson. I then mentioned the matter to one of Mr Isaacs's subordinates. He averred that 'they' were led up' with Mr Hanley. But the replacement of Mr Hanley by, say, Mrs Edwina Currie, as has been suggested (only half in jest), leaves us even worse off. And why should there be a
politician on a regular basis? Why should there be a politician at all, come to that? Mr Isaacs's intentions are of the best. But he has been too clever by half.
Mr Hanley may be smug, and he may be ingratiating, but at least he is not positively ugly. This Cabinet must be one of the ugliest within living memory, cer- tainly within my own. To be sure, we are none of us oil paintings (and try parsing that sentence if you fancy yourself as a grammarian). But George Orwell said that at 50 everyone deserved the face he or she had. I remain unconvinced of the truth of this, never mind its justice. Still, there are no votes to be had in looking horrible.
Among my friends are several homosexuals. I do not think that Aids is a divinely inflicted punishment (though several victims seem rather to ask for it). And I possess the standard Millite libert- arian views about public and private be- haviour. But today many formerly agree- able places of public resort are being ruined by homosexuals, whom I refuse to call 'gays'. Recently I was due to meet one of my family in a St Martin's Lane cinema. Arriving early, I crossed the road to have a drink at the Salisbury pub. It has never, I confess, been at the top of my list. Theat- rical company I can take or leave. Still, I did once see Miss Margaret Lockwood there. She is as much a link with my early adolescence as the Mills Brothers singing 'Paper Doll'. It was more a nice place than a nasty one. When I last went in it was undoubtedly nasty. Half a dozen or so characters in the uniform of 'training' shoes, jeans, sweatshirt and leather jacket, with long drooping moustaches and surly expressions, were standing in a line, not speaking to one another or to anybody, but eyeing the customers as they entered. Unlike the reporter from the People, I did not make my excuses and leave but eyed them back in what I trusted was an unwelcoming manner. If anyone says that heterosexuals standing in a line in a pub behave in exactly the same way towards women, I reply that no, they do not — any more than they try to pick up girls in public
lavatories or claim some right to use the cubicles of those lavatories for purposes of sexual gratification.
An accountant bearing the poetical name of Andrew Spenser has been writing in the Times about what he alleges is the unhelpful and suspicious attitude of tax' inspectors towards taxpayers. For myself, 1 have usually (though not invariably) found the Inland Revenue people quite gentle- manly: more so, certainly, than the Cus- toms and Excise people, who seem to be under the impression that they are still chasing bad hats down the Portsmouth Road, or discovering barrels of contraband brandy in remote coves on the coast of Dorset. The Revenue are all right on the whole provided they think you are being reasonably honest. Nevertheless, in the last year they have been troublesome with journalists, not only over trying to tax freelances as if they were staff members, but over querying income and legitimate expenses. My own accountant tells me that, when he visited a tax inspector previously unknown to him on behalf of another client, he was surprised to discover a young man in an open-neck shirt and a leather jacket. He deduced from this that the Revenue had been infiltrated by aveng- ing Trotskyists. It is just as likely, I should have thought, that they have been infil- trated by the characters who have also taken over the Salisbury.
0 nce again, the reviewers have been playing their game of Who now reads? Last year it was over Mr A. N. Wilson's biography of Hilaire Belloc; this year, over Mr P. J. Kavanagh's anthology of G. K. Chesterton. Even such a normally astute and perceptive reviewer — nay, in the fullest sense, critic — as Mr John Gross in the Observer is not immune to this journa- listic device. Indeed Mr Gross not only treats Chesterton as if he were some obscure figure from a remote age, he also asserts that his books are difficult to obtain. This is simply not so. My own shelves contain, in post-war Penguin, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Maisie Ward's biography, and all the Father Brown stor- ies; in post-war Grey Arrow, Chesterton's autobiography; in pre-war Penguin, The Man Who Was Thursday; in Everyman, an anthology; and, in various usually cheap pre-war editions, works too numerous con- veniently to list, which may still be ac- quired cheaply at secondhand shops. Did you know, by the way, that Chesterton was the first writer to use 'image' in its modern sense? The distinction is usually accorded Graham Wallas in 1908. Chesterton used it two years before that in an essay on the worship of the rich.
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