Notebook
4 Won't she be amused,' says Prince Albert in the poster advertising the exhibition Albert, His Life and Work at the Royal College of Art. Above are printed the words 'Victoria and Albert' with 'Victoria' crossed out in red. Neither 'she' nor anybody else could possibly be amused by such a disastrous attempt at humour. The advertisers seem to have assumed that Prince Albert's reputation for boringness might put people off the exhibition. So they have tried instead to turn him into an im- probable figure of fun. But this trivialisa- tion of his considerable if unexciting achievements has had the opposite of the intended effect. The exhibition has been a flop. The sponsors, who include the Observer newspaper, stand to lose con- siderable sums because not enough people have been prepared to visit it.
II were Mrs Thatcher, I wouldn't feel remotely rattled by Mr Francis Pym's message to the nation this week. He is clear- ly out to discredit her, but for much of the time he seems to be doing the opposite. `The aim of leadership must be to inspire confidence,' he says..'llt seems to me that its surest inspirations are a preparedness to face and to tell the truth and a determina- tion to find honest answers to the pro- blems.' These are precisely the qualities which most people believe Mrs Thatcher to have, whether she has actually got them or not. They are the basis of her popularity up till now. Mr Pym's main criticisms of the Prime Minister seem to be that she is too dogmatic, too obsessed with economic theory, too indifferent to the plight of the unemployed, and too restricted in her view of the potentialities of government. 'Expec- ting the individual to do almost everything for himself is ... unjust and is immensely damaging to the nation,' he says. But what does Mr Pym want the Government to do which it is not already doing? On the ques- tion of unemployment he says it should 'be generous with those who are affected and ... demonstrate that the underlying issues are being tackled decisively and im- aginatively.' He is no more precise than that. He is, however, precise in his opposi- tion to Mr Nigel Lawson's promise of tax cuts. 'This commitment dismays me,' he says. It dismays him because he is worried about maintaining the quality of the social services. This is a perfectly reasonable view for Mr Pym to hold, but I am afraid that his address to the Oxford University Conser- vative Association — clearly intended to be powerful and devastating — merely con- firms the popular impression that he is an amiable, wooly-minded politician of very limited abilities. The passage on law and order is the most revealing. He supports the
increase in expenditure on the police, but does not believe that this will prevent the crime rate from rising. 'The root cause of increasing crime in many cases lies in the home The whole of society must take a grip on itself.'
It is difficult for an ordinary person to argue with statements put out by august professional bodies like the Royal College of Physicians. But when the Col- lege declares boldly that smoking kills more than 100,000 people a year, it is difficult not to feel sceptical. 'This figure is so large,' say the physicians, 'that it completely dwarfs the number of deaths that can be reliably attributed to any other known external fac- tors such as alcohol, road accidents or suicide.' Maybe; but there can be no doubt about the cause of death. Smoking is a bit different. Disgusting habit though it may be, nobody actually dies as a direct result of it. He dies of heart failure or lung cancer or chronic bronchitis or one of the other ap- parently endless ailments for which cigaret- tes are now blamed. But these are all diseases which non-smokers may get, and while there may be a higher incidence of them among smokers, nobody can really know for certain the extent to which smok- ing is responsible for all these premature deaths. The purpose of the Royal College of Physicians in publishing its latest report is clearly to terrify smokers and to en- courage the trend which is already turning them into social outcasts. It says, for exam- ple, that non-smoking wives may be more likely to contract lung cancer if their husbands smoke. If the public is persuaded that smokers are not merely risking their own lives but actually threatening the lives of others, the outlook for nicotine addicts will be bleak. In their campaign of terror against smokers, the health authorities seem to find all weapons acceptable. There is much public concern about 'video nasties', but nobody complains about the horror films inflicted on children by the anti- smoking campaigners. Some years ago, when my children were very young, they returned from school in tears after watching one of these 'smoking nasties'. They were persuaded that I would drop dead in front of them if I lit another cigarette. The truth is that, in comparison with other forms of addiction, smoking is an inoffensive habit. Smokers do not lose control of themselves, like alcoholics; they do not mug people to get money for drugs. They are generally as quiet and law-abiding as everybody else. But if they are squeezed too hard, this situa- tion may change. lf, for example, the Government accepts the College's advice and raises the tax on tobacco to punitive heights, many smokers may well take up mugging. At the very least, there will emerge a black market in cigarettes, pro- moting the growth of organised crime.
The other weekend we were permitted by London Weekend Television to see the Rolling Stones video-tape which has been banned by the BBC for excessive violence. It was so boring as to be practical- ly unwatchable. It portrayed Mick Jagger as a seedy journalist in a South American country who gets shot by a firing squad. And while Mr Jagger claimed that its pur- pose was `to wake people up to the terrible things that are happening the world today', it was far more likely to send them to sleep. The action was very difficult to follow, and the point of the film was not at all clear, apart from a vague implication that things are not altogether well with South American military regimes. But as far as violence was concerned, I found if very disappointing. It is true there was some shooting and that at one point one could see blood on a man's shirt, but the violence was so stylised that it made no more impact than the violence in a Walt Disney cartoon. It so happened that on the same evening the same BBC which had banned Mr Jagger's video showed a modern film version of the opera by Brecht and Weill, The Seven Deadly Sins of the Middle Class. This con- tained things that were genuinely disgusting to watch. Apart from some acutely embar- rassing scenes of love-making, there was a scene of a man injecting himself with drugs on a lavatory and a close-up of a man cut- ting his wrist with a knife. The bleeding wrist was an infinitely more horrible sight than Mr Jagger being shot, which might have given some people pleasure, but the BBC does not seem to have blinked an eyelid at it. It would doubtless justify these scenes on grounds of artisitic necessity, but I wonder if such a defence would stand up to scrutiny?
Alexander Chancellor
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