Spectator's Notebook
rrHE fight for the uncommitted centre, for the I swelling ranks of smart young men and women who have automatic allegiance to neither of the great embodiments of the coun- try's endless political argument with itself, is going to be fun while it lasts. How good it is to see the true light of battle in the eye of Francis Boyd, the Guardian's excellent political corre- spondent, who should let himself go more often, as he points with joy to the grisly possibility of the Liberals' once again holding the balance! (Does he never have nightmares about the Right- wing landslide such a calamity would set in motion?) How rousing to hear the defiant cries which rise on all sides. Labour defies the Liberals and puts the entrepreneuring Mr. Wyatt in his place. The Liberals defy everybody and promise everything. The chairman of the Conservative Party defies (and the Prime Minister, at a farther remove from the misty mountains of the Gael- tacht, does not call him a stubborn Scot for nothing) all attempts to move the course of the machine a few degrees to the right. 'It will bloody well not go right,' he is reported to have announced, 'it will go further left.' At all events, overworked as he is as he shuttles be- tween the leadership of the House and the chairmanship of the party, he was neither sur- prised nor (in spite of his protegi's crash) unduly discomfited by the electorate's displeasure. The new men who rejected Mr. Goldman at Orping- ton are the men he is after, and, beneath the con- ventional, lines of the good face which he pre- sents to ephemeral perturbations, can be dis- cerned the stubborn determination to get them. 'Remember Walter Hagen?' he says. 'Before the Open there was only one question in his mind: who was going to be second?'
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