Election lessons
From Viscountess Bangor
Sir: I wrote last week to Mr Patrick Cosgrave to congratulate him on expressing (without 'moderation', thank Heavens!) what so many of us feel about the election in general and Mr Heath in particular. After reading your correspondence columns on the subject 1 have to write again just to console you with the information that at the same time as the Bishop of Tonbridge is withdrawing his subscription I am renewing mine (lapsed after a change of address). Someone also must comment on the extraordinary letter from Mrs Boulden (March 16) about "jeering at a man when he is down." During the war a German officer said to my husband (then BBC war correspondent Edward Ward) that the terrifying thing about the British was that they regarded war as a sport. It seems to me even more frightening that they may think of peace — and government — in the same way. Is an attack on a Prime Minister who has endangered the future not only of his party but of his country to be regarded as "unsporting"!? God help us all if this is so.
After the election of 1970 1 wrote to the Times suggesting that the Conservative Party should do a very thorough research into the reasons why a number of people like myself, who until then had always been socialist, had changed sides and voted Tory. It doesn't seem conceivable that they didn't carry out such an inquiry. Yet in the light of the past three and a half years and the recent debacle it doesn't seem possible that they did.
My letter of 1970 was prompted by a short but inspired article by Auberon Waugh. He wrote that the Tories seemed already bent on their own destruction which was "clearly looming ahead" and gave them about three years. And I wrote despairingly. "I doubt whether the tories are going to alter the economic situation, feel certain they will not control the trades unions, don't believe they will even dare to try and stop the appalling abuses of the Welfare State (that as an ideal once seemed so splendid to me)
. and doubt if anyone in the party is ever going to be interested in or do anything about the reasons why so many of us did change sides and put them into power." I concluded: "but they really should if they want to stay there."
Now I think they should find out why many of us feel we can't help to put them into power again, much as we hate the alternatives.
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