THE SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

Strange noises, which to some will sound frightening and to others comforting, are coming out of exalted places. These noises spell out that possibly Mr Ian Paisley would not be utterly unthinkable as some future Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. It is not so many months ago that such noises would have been dismissed as the wailings of banshees, shrieking their lament upon the death of religious tolerance and the birth of a new bigotry. Certainly earlier this year there was every reason to suppose that the Home Secretary, Mr Maudling, would choose to impose direct rule upon Ulster rather than permit Mr Paisley, supposing that reverend gentleman to have won a general election, to rule the Stormont roost. An election must take place by February 1974, and in effect this means an election no later than autumn 1973. Under present arrangements no one gives Mr Faulkner much chance against the Paisleyites. This partly explains the readiness of Mr Faulkner to consider new constitutional arrangements — further tinkering with the constitution and the crisis — so as to allow the more moderate people to gerrymander against the traditionally gerrymandering old guard right-wingers. Who'll cry " fire " ?

Whether enough tinkering — or gerrymandering — will be possible to avert a Paisleyite success is doubtful. But Whitehall remains very reluctant to administer Northern Ireland directly. Hence the strange noises, that Mr Paisley might after all be just about acceptable.

The absentee member

Breaking all my own rules, I addressed an anti-Common Market meeting in Salisbury early this week. The gathering was chaired by John Creasey, thriller-writer, democrat, political reformer. We — that is to say, the anti-Common Market conservatives and liberals and socialists — easy trounced the opposition. Several people in the audience echoed the feeling of one lady, who publicly wondered why the local member, Mr Michael Hamilton, was conspicuously absent, and why he had studiously avoided to the best of his limited ability all contact with the anti-Market conservatives in his constituency. Why, she wanted to know, was the local member, who was supposed to be discovering the feeling of his constituents on this supreme matter, not present at what may well have been the best attended political gathering in Salisbury since the last election? A good question.

The answer was all too obvious. By at least two to one, the gathering in Salisbury declared itself opposed to entry. The Conservative party sent along a young and junior chap from London to promote the European cause and, as hecklers go, he was none too bad. But the MP, Michael Hamilton, did not want to know. Poor fellow, to fear so much the views not only of his constituents, but of his supporters, as to flinch from hearing them. Is keeping away what Mr Heath intended by consulting? I presume so.

Fatty degeneration

I was surprised to find that I did not know that the European Movement people receive £7,500 a year from the Foreign Office — to arrange educational trips for children to Europe. It would be very interesting to know precisely how much public money, one way and another, is being spent on persuading the public of the allegedly self-evident advantages of entry. I had always understood that the use of public money to tell the public what it ought to think about something was conventionally prohibited until after the main parliamentary vote — a view reinforced, incidentally, by the recent, and I would have thought authoritative, book on the Central Office of Information by its director, Sir Fife Clark. New, and lax, views are now current. Not only British, but German (and I dare say other foreign) money is now readily available to advance the Common Market cause. It is pretty disgusting: the Market issue has certainly brought about a fatty degeneration of political probity. People shrug. They say — as a woman said at Salisbury — "but what is it that we can do. Tell us, what should we do to stop this thing? How can we stop our MP? How can we stop the Party? How can we stop the Government? What can we do?"

All I could say was, "You must say no.' You must say it is wrong. You must say to everybody it is wrong."

Infuriated innocents

I hear that several Tory party agents, to whom have been sent bundles of antiMarket literature, including Enoch Powell's book — his collected speeches — on the subject, for passing on to local Presidents, Chairmen, Treasurers and so forth, have been flinging the bundles straight into their wastepaper baskets. This, naturally, has infuriated the anti-Marketeers who preserve, in such matters, a strange innocence. They imagine that local agents are invariably men with minds of their own, capable of withstanding Central Office pressures.

6.6 million is not enough

Those who, considering last week's newspaper stoppages, may naturally enough have concluded that Fleet Street was off its head (as indeed it largely is), are entitled to enjoy some schadenfreude at American expense. The UK Press Gazette, on the same page which carries details of Fleet Street's week of crisis, reports, without batting an eyelid : "After 34 years of continuous publication Look, the American news magazine, ceases publication on October 19. The reasons, according to Cowles Communications, are declining revenue and increasing production costs. The first issue, in January 1937, cost 10 cents and sold 700,000 copies. Ten months later the circulation was 1.7 millions. Sales figures for the first six months of 1971 averaged 6.6 million an issue; but rising costs absorbed the revenue."

Money and morality

I see that Michael Grylls, the Tory MP for Chertsey, has been fined £250 after admitting offences under the Exchange Control Act involving more than £15,000. I do not suppose that he will be applying for the Chiltern Hundreds.

Nor do I suppose that Jeffery Archer will be seeking the Stewardship of the Manor of Northstead (or any other office of profit under the Crown) following John Gordon's piece in the Sunday Express reporting Private Eye's accusations that Archer fiddled his expenses while working for the United Nations Association. It is always fun when journalists attack people about their expense accounts.

Naturally I would not dream of suggesting that John Gordon, who is celebrated throughout Fleet Street and beyond, even to Croydon, as a prudent and God-fearing Presbyterian, has ever fiddled one of his own expense accounts. He is beyond and above such practices. What .other column' ist, for instance, has ever been given 8 brand new Rolls-Royce to mark the occasion of his eightieth birthday? When John Gordon praised, after his • fashion, the late Godfrey Winn and the fortune he left behind him, it was indeen, de€ p calling unto deep, it not precisely like unto like.