Another voice

Valuable woggle mystery

Auberon Waugh

On Friday of last week I received a letter asking me whether I would be prepared to repeat my subscription of last

• year to the Combe Florey branch of the Taunton Constituency Conservative Party. After long and earnest deliberation, I decid- ed to send £9.50 this year, keeping back 50p in protest against the various unsatisfactory aspects of the present administration. Chief among these, as nobody will be surprised to hear, was my sorrow at Mrs Thatcher's in- creasingly pointed refusal to grant Sir Peregrine Worsthorne the knighthood which is already his by popular acclaim. No doubt many, if not most, Conservative sup- porters will feel tempted to do the same. But even if the Conservative Party finds its income seriously reduced can we be sure that Mrs Thatcher's admirers will draw the right conclusion, or that Mrs Thatcher will act on it if they do?

When 1 mentioned to someone who is high in Conservative councils a few weeks ago that I rather admired Mrs Thatcher for the way she was able to withstand the burn- ing hatred of such a large part of the population — almost anywhere one goes north of the Trent she is seen as an ogress — he replied that he doubted whether she was even aware of their feelings.

She can scarcely be completely unaware of them after her recent tour of the North, when she and her husband were pelted with 'eggs, flour and paint in nearly every 'borough and market town of Lancashire. Perhaps she attributed it to the activities of a small group of unrepresentative extremists. If so, she is quite simply wrong. Those eggs represented the gut feeling of the entire in- dustrial and post-industrial north about Mrs Thatcher. Anybody who doubts it should go there and find out for himself. The people up there attribute all their misfortunes and shortcomings to Mrs That- cher's malice. One can waste hours of time, as I have done, trying to persuade them that they are unemployable, or pointing out that they are unbelievably well off, their unemployment benefits and other social security hand-outs more valuable than the wages of a fully employed skilled worker 30 years ago. They remain convinced that they are the victims of unfair discrimination, and they accordingly hate Mrs Thatcher with the sort of passion which Poles reserve for whoever is the top man in Russia.

Quite possibly no one could convince her of this. But she must worry a little about her reception in Lancashire. More than any other part of the country — more even, I should say, than Bermondsey — Lancashire

is Worsthorne territory. Is she aware, for instance, that the Lord Lieutenant of Lan- cashire, Mr Simon Towneley, who has been a Justice of the Peace in the country for over 25 years, is also the brother of the slighted Sir Peregrine Worsthorne? Or that, in the words of that admirable book, Debrett's Handbook of Distinguished Peo- ple in British Life: 'It is from the Worsthorne portion of the estates of the old recusant Towneley family that the subject of this entry derives his surname.'

I am not, of course, suggesting that Mr Towneley set the Lancashire mobs on Mrs Thatcher and her consort during their ill- advised journey into the heart of Worsthorne territory. But local loyalties run deep and fierce in those parts. Around Burnley, where Mr Towneley has his seat, and the neighbouring village of Worsthorne, there may well be a feeling of 'Bless the Squire and his relations', but it would be no exaggeration to say that there is strong pro-Worsthorne feeling throughout the whole of the north-east. From the village of Worsthorne (whose name Sir Peregrine's father, Colonel Alex- ander Koch de Gooreynd, himself assumed in 1923, reassuming his original one in 1937) it is but a jog up the Al to Darl- ington, scene of next month's by-election.

It will be a crucial by-election, I suggest, not only for Worzel Gummidge but also for Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative Party. Various explanations have been put for- ward for the Conservatives' lamentable per- formance in Bermondsey. Where Labour retained 44 per cent of its vote in the 1979 election (over 51 per cent if you count both Labour candidates), the Tory score was considerably under a quarter. It has been suggested that since the Conservative and Liberal candidates looked exactly the same, had the same name and made much the same sort of nondescript noises, there may have been confusion in the minds of the electors, as well as tactical vote-switching. But to be a Conservative in Bermondsey, I would imagine, involves a more full- blooded commitment to Conservative philosophy than that, and I would not be at all surprised to learn that the defection of so many Conservative voters is explained by disenchantment with certain aspects of Mrs Thatcher's administration ...

Like many people, I had supposed that Mrs Thatcher's obstinate refusal to honour this wise and good man might be explained by a suspicion of intellectuals generally, or violent disagreement with his ideas. Even I do not always find myself in complete agreement with everything he writes. But I do not think that opposition to Sir Peregrine's beautiful thoughts explains Mrs Thatcher's scurvy treatment of him.

Another explanation for Mrs Thatcher's extraordinary behaviour — and the field is getting thinner now — is that she knows something about him which we do not know. I confess that although I used to think I knew all that could reasonably or decently be known about this most unsecretive of men, I began to have doubts last week when he finished his interesting Notebook with a curious story about a friend of his:

'A friend of mine has just had a valuable tie ring stolen from the changing room of the Turf Club,' he wrote. 'Not for a mo- ment does he suspect any of the old ser- vants, all of whom are totally trustworthY ... Surely it is a sign of something or other when the members of a gentlemen's club are thought to be less honest than the staff?'

A few people who read those words idly may have decided that a 'valuable tie ring' was a normal sort of thing for a gentleman to leave in the changing room of his club. But what on earth is it? When I was a BOY Scout, we wore a curious leather ring which kept a scarf or kerchief in place. It was call- ed a 'woggle'. But these were objects of no value. What would a valuable woggle Idok like? Presumably it would be made of gold or platinum with diamonds or other precious stones encrusted in its surface, but I have never seen such a thing on any human neck, and very much doubt whether it would be of any use for keeping a tie in place.

Although not a member of the Turf Club. myself — and with no ambitions to become one — I rather resent the suggestion by Sir Peregrine's friend that this valuable tie ring must have been stolen by one of the 'suspiciously raffish' new young members' It seems to say much more about the times in which we live that a gentlemen's club is prepared to let people wear jewelled wog- gles than that a member, finding such an object in the changing room, should decide to confiscate it. But the big question re- mains: what sort of people does Sir Peregrine choose as his friends? After the Orpington by-election of 1962 many attributed the Liberal landslide to the fact that the Conservative candidate,

Peter

Goldman, was a Jew, just as Peter Tatchell attributes his failure as Labour candidate in Bermondsey to rumours about his sexual proclivities. In Bermondsey, as I say, the Conservative and Liberal candidates were indistinguishable. I prefer to explain the Ord- pington debacle by the fact that Harol Macmillan was one of a long line of Conser- vative prime ministers who neglected to honour Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne. They all come to sticky ends, sooner or later. Darlington will tell us if 1 am right unless, of course, Mrs Thatcher is prepared to tell us what she knows about this man.