Another Spectator's Notebook
Whatever criticisms can be levelled — justly or unjustly — against Ted Heath, nobody could deny that he knows how to entertain. His Downing Street garden party for the press last week — designed to celebrate the third anniversary of his general election victory — was a case in point. The cocktail sausages were the best I have tasted in a long
• time (and I am a connoisseur of such matters), and the champagne was pretty good. I was the envy of (at least) Hugh Macpherson of Tribune and David Wood of the Times because of my ability to spear three sausages at a time, while smoking a cigarette and controlling my glass. None of these activities prevented me, however, from looking around the party and seeing, among other things, Margaret Thatcher in a stunning (that is the only word for it) creation (also the only word) of floor length summer print. Mrs Thatcher gave the party a great deal of its necessarily festive air; and it was a very jolly, and very justified, celebration of a famous triumph.
Having said all that, I hope I won't sound unfairly curmudgeonly when I add that there was a mite too much self-congratulation and pleasure around the party. However, the tendency to relax and enjoy office is, among British politicians, partly to be explained by their superb physical surroundings. Standing in the garden of No 10, looking down at the geraniums and up at the high walls that spoke of the past and shut out the present, one must be tempted simply to ignore problems; and, curmudgeon that I am I felt that those ministers enjoying the sunshine were shutting out of their minds the problems that will come with the Autumn.
Fourth in hand
Those paragraphs were composed in my mind as I walked back the other day from a Bow Group lunch. I walked through Trafalgar Square and realised how beautiful London is, even allowing for the petrol fumes and the astonishing presence of cars and absence of taxis. The lunch was, incidentally, about two Bow Group papers on the future of broadcasting, and, more particularly, the possible organisation of a fourth television channel. Julian Critchley, the Tory member for Aldershot, and Pam Dyas (about to be a Research Director of PEST) were the authors. The discussion was lively and, within its limits,. very interesting. But I was struck particularly by a remark of Critchley's. He said that, given the announced determination of Sir • John Eden to make a decision about the fourth channel before Christmas we had "a choice between ITV 2 and nothing." I, rather mildly, suggested that nothing was probably preferable. But I then found that the internal dynamic of policital discussion in such bodies as the Bow Group dictates that debate is about things rather than fundamentals: the technical potential for a fourth channel exists; therefore we must discuss what kind Of fourth channel we have; rather than whether we should have one or not. I wonder, therefore, if all the intellectual energy concentrated in the Group's Standing Committee on Broadcasting is not running to seed. The very generosity and openness to ideas which has characterised the Group's history may well blunt the cutting edge of potential argument.
Help and hindrance
One debt I do, however, owe the Bow Group. At that same lunch I met for the first time Professor Peter Bauer whose Dissent on Development I reviewed in these columns about a year ago. Bauer believes — to put it simply, if crudely — that aid inhibits rather than encourages the economic development of African and Asian countries in receipt of monies from Britain, the United States and others. In Dissent on Development he argued merely that aid did not fulfill the purposes it was designed for: he is now — several arguments and television programmes later — revising the first half of the book, preparatory to paperback publication, with the object of stating more clearly that government to government aid actually does harm to the recipients. As it happens I agree with Bauer: but it remains nonetheless true that the kind of logical argument he offers on such emotive subjects meets a particular resistance on the part of the well-meaning folk who, because they put their penny in an Oxfam box, believe that the usefulness of governments putting many pennies in a box represents merely a magnification of individual effort. It does, of course, not. The difference between the state and the individual is'a difference of kind; and what the latter does that is good may not be good when done by the former. Anyway, the dreadful fact that has to be faced, with however much reluctance on the part of those who like to help our ex-colonial brethren, is that aid has done more harm than good. There is at least enough evidence for this proposition to make it a matter of debate; and to stop governments — and British and French governments in particular — engaging in increasingly absurd league table competitions about how much in money or resources we give away to Africa and Asia.
Departure and arrival
Another party I went to last week was a farewell binge for the London correspondent of Le Monde, Henri Pierre, and his wife, given, in the most delightful way, by friends of the Pierres at the French Embassy, Samuel and Claude de Beauvais. (Pierre, it will be remembered by readers of this page, has a delightful wife — originally from Ireland — who explained Harold Wilson's reference to Henry VI at the last Labour conference to George Gale.) The Pierres are going to Washington, and that city's gain is London's loss. However, with that kind of social programme on my hands last week it was understandable that I didn't feel energetic enough to get to a press conference given by Kate Millett (a Women's Lib philosopher who was taken apart by Norman Mailer a few years ago). Our new man, Peter Ackroyd, nobly shouldered the burden of a first press conference and reports: I had heard, of course, of Michael X and had read of his trial and conviction for the murder of a poor black in Trinidad. And I should have guessed that half a dozen liberation movements would become involved. But it was still something of a surprise when Kate Millett, American authoress of Sexual Politics, breezed into town and claimed that she had evidence that Michael X was framed. So I pulled myself together in time for her morning press conference and, in the company of six haggard journalists, listened to her statement. But it was all assertion and no evidence. When I pieced together my slender knowledge, and questioned her about the pathologist's crucial evidence, she accused me of using 'Perry Mason' tactics. I asked her what actual fresh evidence she had, and she replied that she was here to combat racism. I asked her if she thought it had been a political trial, and she said that John and Yoko thought so. Which brought her to the subject of women's prisons and, later, gaY liberation. Fortunately, I liberated myself at this stage and left the room.
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