Mr Heath and the disorderly house
Patrick Cosgrave
Macaulay — "We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its Periodic fits of morality" — has, again, been Much quoted in the last few days, though to singularly little point. For the British public, Whatever it may feel in its heart of hearts, and whatever significant sections of it may think of l'affaire Lambton and Jellicoe, has Shown remarkably little propensity to moralise about the fate of the fallen ministers: acCording to a poll conducted for the Sunday Express, only 50 per cent of the electorate believe that the Lord Privy Seal and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the RAF should have been compelled to resign because they consorted with prostitutes. Even the tribunes of the public conscience have been silent, or muted: the Bishop of Southwark has not risen (as he did in 1963) to thunder that " The time has come to clean the national stables;" and the Times, which bellowed in 1963, "It is a moral issue," ten years later muttered sotto voce, something or other about "The Changing British Ethic." Finally, Mr Bernard Levin has so far hazarded his reputation as a prophet as to predict that, if another decade should elapse before the next depit amoureux, " the compromised minister Will stay in office." Why, then, if nobody was Prepared to demand their resignation — and the House of Commons was notably kindly in discussing the matter last week — did Lords Jellicoe and I.,ambton have to go? One very' important person did feel that resignation necessarily followed exposure. That was the Prime Minister; and in that feeling he seems to me to have demonst rated a finer judgement, a superior sense of What was necessary, than any number of
!hose journalists and commentators who nave been telling us how much better the cliMate of the country is now than it was in
1963; and how much better — how much
More tolerant of what we are being taught to Call peccadilloes — it will be in the future. For
the Prime Minister, unlike the media, has Concentrated, not on a comparison with the
Profumo affair, but on the demerits of the case before him.
There are two specific and practical points about the behaviour of the two ministers which have been glossed over in much pious press commentary, and buried in the mush of Lord Lambton's television interview. These are, first, the precise kind of sexual shenanigans got up to by clients of the more expensive kind of prostitute; and, second, the definite and undeniable fact that there was a security risk involved in both cases. There probably was no actual security leak; and Lord Lambton's friends were probably right in saying that he would contemptuously have rebuffed any blackmail attempt. But the pressures that can be brought to bear on a minister behaving in a way — to put it at its lowest — that might distress his family are many and various; and in the case of a less strong and less self-centred man might be decisive as to his future conduct. A security risk is not, contrary to Lord Lambton's assertion, a matter of a prostitute saying to a minister in bed with her, " Darling, do tell me about the laser thing:" it is a running blend of small compromises, small pressures and smaIl betrayals, all the product of ministerial indiscretion.
The curious thing I found talking to Tory backbenchers last week was that they seemed notably revolted by Lord Lambton's behaviour, and steadfastly convinced that any such behaviour did, ultimately, involve a danger to national security. But every backbencher who felt like this was also afraid to say so openly, for fear the press and the other media might regard them as sanctimonious. "All I pray," one man said to me, " is that we can keep this thing confined to the decadent aristocracy." I remarked mildly that, since the Opposition and the commentators alike were conspiring to be nice to the errant pair and sympathetic to the Prime Minister in his travail, no great danger to the Party or Government needed be feared.
"Nonsense," said the man I was talking to, "anybody who wants to go to bed with two whores is sick, and his judgement must be warped. There he infects the Government of which he is a member." And 'a senior exminister in the same conversation suggested that " it should not be impossible to find eighty or so men to fill a government, none of whom feel the need to resort to prostitutes." The genuine, raw, open indignation Tory members showed in private was, however, nowhere reflected, neither in the House nor outside it, because, to a man, they felt it would be indiscreet to show it. Nonetheless, it was that indignation, shared in full by Mr Heath himself, which was the motive force behind the two resignations; and it would be silly to deny the fact. All the hypocrisy in this affair was employed on the side of tolerance: the British public exerted itself to have a fit of amorality, rather than morality.
Nor were those who were angered, revolted or otherwise distressed by what Lord Jellicoe and Lord Lambton did in any way blinkered moralisers. The tolerance our political society shows for sexual indiscretion, and for extramarital involvement, is high. Lord Jellicoe, certainly, enjoyed enormous sympathy and regard earlier in his career when he was separated from his first wife and prevented by her enwillingness to give him a divorce, from marrying the present Lady Jellicoe. "All London knows I want to marry her," he said then, defiantly; all London did, and all London sympathised. Nobody suggested (this was in 1966) that he should leave the Tory front bench; nobody imagined that his career was, or should be, damaged by his involvement. There is, then, a conviction that the present is a different kind of business. Lord Jellicoe himself seems to feel this; unlike Lord Lambton, he has not sought to explain what he has done by any reference to a jaded man's need for 'variety;' nor has he — again unlike Lord Lambton — suggested that, though he has felt obliged to abide by the somewhat obscure rules governing ministerial behaviour this time, some more fortunate minister will benefit from laxer rules in the future. The agreed, if unspoken, judgement of their peers on these two men is that to resort to highly paid prostitutes willing to specialise in more than ordinary sex is to do something unclean, something which unfits one for high office. And even if the climate of opinion were to change in such a way that it came to be believed that such activities were not unclean, not unfitting, the possibility of blackmail, the possibility of a security risk, would remain. We are not, even in the fairly distant future, likely to develop a society in which men's families are impervious to hurt whatever the
men get up to; and as long as we do not have such a society, the sexual indiscretions of a minister of the Crown leave him open to pressure from the malicious, the criminal, and the subsersive. All this, so far as I can see, is strongly and deeply felt within the Conserva tive Party, and among the Prime Minister's advisers. It is nonetheless palpable for being unspoken. Without an understanding of it, there is no logic to the departure of Lord Lambton or Lord Jellicoe; and no general awareness of the standards by which this Prime Minister is willing to judge his colleagues.
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