Spectator's- Notebook
August for the people ... Yes, but not, ordinarily, a good month for con- noisseurs of the English scene. The landscape turns dusty and the trees hang, like metal imitations, in leaden air. Or, perhaps more frequently, monsoons scourge the patient Island Race at their pursuit of pleasure. But the August Which has just slipped from us revealed a rare, benign character, with skies of kindliest blue, With harvests of unparalleled plenty, and with distant crises and comings and goings at Down- ing Street impotent before the prevailing mood Of amiability. Or so it seemed to me, pottering With holiday indolence around a few of the re- maining undespoiled fragments of our coast and Countryside. And so, I gather since being re- engorged by the Gteat Wen, has it seemed to others variously employed in urban or bucolic surroundings. A placid, contented month. Is this really to be the winning card in the Tory hand After all? It might be represented as a bizarre aspect of our democracy, I suppose, but it is still a fact that the modest Tory boom in the °Pinion polls—modest in terms of projected majorities, that is extraordinary in its upheaval of recent history—came with the sunshine and grew stronger under the blue skies. What hap- Pens when the autumn chill is felt can scarcely be other than one of the most absorbingly uncer- tain political climaxes of a lifetime.
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