A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE March of Progress has in many ways facilitated the pursuit of power by the individual. Microphones, tear-gas and automatic weapons have had on the career of the modern dictator an effect scarcely less decisive than the invention of the stirrup (without which the Mongol cavalry would soon have given up capturing mantel-pieces to eat their breakfasts off) had on the career of Ghenghis Khan. Of all the miracles of science, of all the major improve- ments in methods of mass-communication, television is the first to lay across the path of ambition a minefield, passage across which can, if successful, provide a short cut to victory or, if not successful, produce a shambles of unpredictable propor- tions. Poverty, as Mr. Wodehouse in a more affluent era opined, is the banana-skin on the threshold of romance; tele- vision, perhaps, is the log upon which the explorer must place his foot in order to cross the stream without any means of knowing, until it is too late, whether or not he has stepped on an alligator.
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