POLITICAL COMMENTARY
Bridgwater's last chance
AUBERON WAUGH
Closely as one tries to follow the events of political life, I must confess that the death on 31 October 1968 of Sir Gerald Wills, Conservative Member for Bridgwater, passed unnoticed in this column. Your political correspondent's visits to the House of Commons had never seemed to coincide with any of his major pronouncements on world affairs. But one missed Sir Gerald a little when his successor-designate, a thoroughly loyal young fellow called Tom King, rose to move a motion at the Brighton conference: 'that this Conference congratu- lates the Tory leadership for refusing to be lured into easy promises and looks to it by its concentration on the real problems of the nation without regard to electoral fear or favour to re-establish the integrity of and subsequent respect for democratic govern- ment which have been so seriously devalued by the present socialist government.'
No doubt Sir Gerald Wills would have applauded this sentiment, but he at least preserved a decent reticence about such things at conference time. Nor was Mr King's speech quite enough by itself, to re- establish the integrity of and subsequent respect for democratic government in the minds of the political correspondents who had to listen to it. Rather, it was depressing confirmation for us, on our return to West- minster and the benches of nodding, som- nolent Tory knights, that there are plenty more where they came from.
There the matter might have rested if I had not happened to notice among my corre- spondence a letter from the secretary of the Political Freedom Movement, Mr Anthony Kerr. This was a newly formed organisation dedicated to re-establishing the integrity of and subsequent respect for democratic government which had been so seriously devalued etc; and would have followed many other cris de coeur into the wastepaper basket if I had not seen a postscript at the end. Would I like to stand as Independent candidate at Bridgwater on the Biafra issue?
Obviously. Having bored the patient readers of SPECTATOR on this subject for eighteen months, what else could one honourably do?
But a simple meeting with Mr Kerr clinched the matter. Nobody could have resisted the moustache, even if he was pre- pared to harden his heart to the devil-may- care optimism. Mr Kerr told me that he had once set off to bicycle from London to Cape- town. At Chamonix, he discovered for the first time that his bicycle had gears. Bicycling through the heat of the Sahara desert, he had never let the side down by wearing short trousers. 'As a matter of fact, I usually wear longs,' he explained with quiet dignity. His trip had taken him briefly into Northern Nigeria, which convinced him of the justice of the Biafran cause. Then he returned to England to be an assistant master at Mill- field (teaching history) and an Independent Scottish Nationalist candidate at the Rox- burgh by-election of 1965, where heopolled 411 votes. He seemed reasonably confident of raising five hundred volunteers with motor cars to drive Independent voters to the polls in Bridgwater.
It is, of course, a tradition in the corn- mimications media to treat Independent candidates—and, indeed, any political activity outside the two main parties—with a certain mild derision. My only criticism of the derision which greeted this enterprise was that as a professional derider oneself, one could have done it so much better.
Mr Anthony Shrimsley solemnly assured readers of the Sun that if all members of the House of Commons had a free vote (this is one of the admirable suggestions put for- ward by the Political Freedom Movement), the present system would not work. Wretched Peter Paterson, of the Sunday Telegraph, thought that if elected the In- dependent candidate for Bridgwater would not be Independent at all, but would be mysteriously influenced by the earlier political associations of those members of the Political Freedom Movement who had helped in his campaign. Apart from its general ineptitude, this suggestion missed the central joke of the Independent's predica- ment, which is that they are never elected.
But the worst tribulation from my kennel mates came after lunch with an almost un- believably beautiful lady of oriental extrac- tion representing 'Pendennis' of the Ob- server. Over the spaghetti I enlarged on the need for parliamentary reform at consider- able length, spicing my account with amus- ing anecdotes and interesting pieces of gossip. She seemed little interested, but told me instead about her husband, who had recently changed jobs, and now had to be kept by her wages. Wretched man, has he no pride? To help her along, I poured into her lovely inscrutable head enough gossip to keep 'Pendennis' humming for a month. The only thing she remembered, apparently, was that I planned to substitute old age pen- sions by presents of port wine to pensioners. If she had wanted to invent some story to hold the enterprise—or the candidate—in derision, surely she could have invented something better than that? I solemnly assure the old age pensioners of Bridgwater that I had no intention to give them port wine, and would not even promise to do so unless I thought it would win an enormous number of votes. It was only then that I began to understand the pedantic insistence on accuracy which I have noticed among various politicians whom one quite rightly abuses from time to time.
The first meeting of the campaign, at Bridgwater town hall, attracted an.audience of fifteen. Three of these were my own retinue, four were representatives of the press, and there was one old man who fell asleep at a very early stage of the proceed- ings. After an hour of impassioned oratory from myself and from Air Vice Marshal Donald Bennett, the heroic figure who leads the Political Freedom Movement, we moved to Burnham-on-Sea, where the town hall was packed with lively, idealistic-looking young people. I counted nearly eighty. Un- fortunately, they proved to be members of the Burnham-on-Sea amateur operatic society. My meeting was to be held at the Clarence Hotel, where only nine people were assembled. Two of these were from the press, three were later revealed as young Conservatives out for a lark. One was a former colonial servant from Ibadan, in the Western Region of Nigeria, who had come to express misgivings. Perhaps the re- maining three were feminine enthusiasts, but when at the end of an hour's passionate oratory I asked those intending to support the campaign to leave their names, only one did so. We drove away with Mr Kerr, who had had the misfortune to crash his motor car, but who seemed confident, on the day's showing, of at least 10,000 votes.
My own assessment was slightly different. An enthusiastic anti-Common Market cam- paign might have pulled in 2,000 votes. Strong support of hanging might have been worth another 500, if there was an interest- ing enough murder in the run-up to the by- election. Support Rhodesia and Keep Britain White, perhaps 200—there are no im- migrants in Bridgwater. Abolish private pro- perty, stop fluoridation, teenage power and higher pensions—perhaps 100 each. If one ruled out all these worthy causes on grounds of general boredom, one was• left with a possible maximum of 200 on Biafra, and 500 on general disenchantment with poli- ticians; but this last would have meant wooing those who by inclination would pre- fer to abstain, which is an expensive and time-consuming enterprise.
Then, of course, Biafra was finally starved into defeat, on Saturday 10 January. Per- haps the publicity accruing to Parliament's great success might have been worth another 800 votes, but by then there was nothing left to fight for. A vote of 1,700 would merely have vindicated Mr Stewart once again. And, of course, he has been completely vindicated in his political judgment—the British people do not care, and probably never will. Parlia- ment perfectly represents the general public on this, if not on the Common Market, hanging, or immigration. And on those mat- ters, as usual, the general public is wrong.
The tale had an appropriate ending. On the Sunday after Biafra's surrender, my telephone rang in Wiltshire. It was a Group Captain Humble, from Aldershot, who re- presented himself as having once been the father-in-law of someone active in the Political Freedom Movement. There were certain rather beastly things he thought I should know about his former son-in-law. As I listened to the long catalogue of the sufferings of the Group Captain's daughter, my heart warmed once again to the noble individuals who comprise the Political Free- dom Movement. If the apathy of the public and the derision of the press are not enough, there is always an angry Group Captain somewhere at the end of a telephone waiting to deliver the coup de grace.
Pedestrians may be in charge of the country at present, but so long as someone is prepared to bicycle through the Sahara desert in longs there will always be an England. One day perhaps, the bicyclists will come into their own, and the blood of two and a half million dead Biafrans will be avenged. Until then, it is rather more fun to remain a spectator.
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