4 JUNE 1983, Page 6

The Election

Sitting on serpents' eggs

Colin Welch

Mr Foot's old white head bobs about among the jostling crowds of Lan- cashire and Yorkshire like flotsam dashed hither and thither by the swirling tides of some rocky coast. How can he survive? He grapples to himself in a prolonged iron em- brace a pleasing girl at his side, who has no idea who he is. Is it paternal affection, or is it to support himself? Enormous barrel-like women, inspired by Miss Hot-pants, hug and kiss him, like Hattie Jacques falling on Kenneth Williams. Will they bear him helpless to the cobbles?

Nor are all the crowds friendly, though most are very. At Holmfirth he is assailed by more than 100 bawling working-class hunters, terrier men, long dog men, fer- reters , some drunk, with baying hounds and blasting horns. Fists fly. I half expect Mr Foot to be torn to pieces like Actaeon, and hardly dare look at him as he is pulled and pushed, shaken, from the scene. What thoughts flit through his startled intellect? That hunting makes men beasts? Or perhaps belatedly that men are beasts anyway, and should be given harmless outlets for their beastliness? He manages a little joke: `Dizzie'd have seen that lot off.'

According to the excellent 'portrait' of him by Simon Hoggart and David Leigh (Hodder £5.95), his favourite quotation from his beloved Hazlitt is: 'Happy are they who live in the dream of their own ex- istence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; ... to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered. They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them.' At Holmfirth as later at Bradford my eyes prick as the archers intrude cruelly on this idyll.

On the trail we hacks turn quacks, and study Mr Foot's physical and mental condi- tion with a not unfriendly concern. His walk may since that dreadful accident be rather like a crippled crab (or paraplegic pole vaulter, as some mad mot-maker dared not write), but how he covers the ground — too fast perhaps for any good this daft walkabout electioneering may do! One mo- ment he is grey, drawn, drained; a cup of tea and he is back in the pink, his complex smoke-deflector specs sparkling intellec- tually again, his grin back in place.

As he rants and raves, we listen for plugs misfiring, gear changes muffed. Is his voice going? At Bradford his pauses, always in the wrong place, multiply and grow longer. Is the thread lost? He hymns Bevan's hallowed National `Self-Service', corrects himself: his powers of recovery are marvellous. Some local Labour parties look

after and cherish him no better than they would a whelk stall. He is forced to sit through boring speeches, even through col- lections, denied at times a microphone. After a week of this, 13-odd hours a day, on Sunday he chirpily refuses to stand down and answers questions amiably for two hours on radio and TV. 'Blather and waffle', comments the Daily Telegraph: not bad all the same for an old trouper of 70! On to Brixton.

It is impossible to deny him respect for his fortitude, affection for his good humour and — what may vex him — a cer- tain pity in tribulations from which even his dream may not shield him. I feel at times that I am in the wake of a lovable old gentleman who, by his own fault and by the folly and malice of others, finds himself like Lear in a dreadful and undignified plight. His own natural, traditional and homely Englishness shines forth repeatedly. At a stall in Lancashire he heedlessly accepts a biscuit. His face lights up: 'Delicious! Are they all home-made?' Home-made, indeed? Surely he should have refused the delicacy unless satisfied it were produced by something like Nabucco, the National Association of Biscuit and Uneatable Cream Cracker Operatives, and that the stall-holder was a member of NOSH. (Mr Foot's repeated calls for Britain to join In- dia, Mexico, Sweden and other UN wind- bags in non-aligned, non-nuclear innocence suggests another acronym for the resultant Organisation of Non-Aligned Nations — let that pass.) An amiable old buffer; but he presides over the birth of monsters — a broody hen sitting on serpents' eggs. He bewails, as we all do, the unemployment of youth. Around, as if to mock his sympathy, surge

and yell punk rockers, leather jackets in- fested with abusive obscenities, hair luridly multi-coloured and/or twisted into spikes a foot long, defying employment perhaps even by the Labour party itself. He pro- mises hundreds of thousands more jobs as home helps, National Health ancilliaries and so on. Heaven help homes helped by such degenerates, the bitter fruit of the comprehensives and Labour's brutal hedonism, Foot's children as surely as Dostoyevski's Devils were those of poor old 'liberal' Verkhovensky!

The very hecklers who make hideous his meetings with their bawled demands for

easy instant solutions are in this last sense his kin. They yell rudely for what he urges with more civility, roar back at him the bar- ren envy this scholar has taught them. Yet, to be fair, he has not yet ratted on Ulster nor on our alliances, should anyone want to be allied with a footling, Foot-led Britain.

His children too are the Militants and

their like, many slier and more sinister, whose pre-eminence in his party can no longer be denied. Like Ledru-Rollin, he is their leader: he must follow them. He has called them 'a pestilential nuisance'. Yet now he must sit with them, speak for them, endorse them, lend them his faltering authority, like some luckless candidate forced to kiss the most horrific baby ever, as drawn, say, by Alfred Kubin. The Militant Tendency's Pat Wall at Bradford (N) apparently presents to him a peculiar problem — why, I cannot tell, since he has already spoken for all eight Liverpool candidates, four of them Militants. Having swallowed four bad eggs, why gag on the fifth? Wall sits with com- placency on the platform, affably greeting his raucous rout; he has arrived. A col- league describes his eyes as gleaming, cruel, mad-looking; they stare out from under a Roman fringe; a sinister smile reveals big spaced-out teeth, as if a peculiarly juicy Christian were being consumed bythe lions. He speaks before Mr Foot arrives, moderately enough for him, abjuring the one-party state, discreetly avoiding the necessity to abolish the Queen, generals, admirals, air marshals, 'judges and people of that character', which, if not immediate- ly accomplished, will engender violence, civil war, 'terrible deaths and destruction and bloodshed'. He makes ritual reference to 'lies, distortions and dirty tricks', .in- cluding Churchill's judgment that socialism to be efficient would need a Gestapo — judgment on which the irresistible rise of

IS the Left confers ever more prescience. riotously received, as is Mr Foot advancing to bite the bullet.

Does he shake the Wall hand? Opinions differ. I am unsighted by the rostrum. Do.es _ he endorse Wall, or not? Certainly he

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spares him the encomia lavished on all other candidates throughout the day, each one Demosthenes or Lincoln or, in the case of the attractive Mss Frances Done and Ann Holmes, an Indira or Golda. He mentiMI,s, past 'differences'. I think of his old coi league Ben Ford, absent, ruthlessly

deselected and Walled out. He soaks Wall in the magic detergent of the Labour party constitution, which apparently removes all unsightly stains, all blood of past battles, back-stabbings and hatreds, and unites all in radiant whiteness.

He thinks it 'insufferable' that Mrs That- cher should go to Williamsburg. Think of him there, a real pork chop in a synagogue! He refers to wiser people than Mr Heseltine (rhymed with brilliantine), notably Eins- tein, an interesting possibility for Labour defence secretary had he survived. He disarms, disarms and disarms again, today here, tomorrow the world. I recall Bevin's harsh quip about Lansbury trailing about in martyr's clothes — 'all I did was set fire to the faggots'. Has Denis Healey a match, I wonder?

After Mr Foot has swiftly departed, Mr Scargill delivers what the Times calls 'some aggressive knockabout rhetoric' which sends 'the audience home happy'. It does not send me home happy. The most fren- zied applause of all greets Scargill's pro- posal, as first priority, to nationalise the press; to stop 'the vile propaganda of the Jackals and hyenas of Fleet Street' who, 'like concentration camp guards', slavishly obey the orders of their proprietors Cat once, Mr Cluff!'); to be replaced by one lively and bright national paper (like Prav- da?) which tells the truth (like Izvestia?), and is owned, like everything else, by 'or- dinary men and women' (like Scargill?).

Well do I know what a good view some of the Press gives us of its arse, not least at election time. But I do not need to rehearse to readers of the Spectator the whole case for press freedom, and how it dwarfs every abuse and mistake, every error of taste and judgment in this commentary as in this paper, as in every other? I understand too that, as Labour gets worse, most of the press, even the Guardian, distances itself from it, thus rendering itself even more hateful.

The palms of the faithful sting as they clap Scargill; the floor shakes and thunders; eyes blaze with fury; through parted lips, foam-flecked at the corners, pour screams, roars, shrieks, cheers of demented ap- proval. A terrifying spectacle. Are these people sheep, longing for slavery? Some, perhaps, poor fools. More look like wolves, greedy for power.