Notebook
Although Ernestine Carter worked for many years on the Sunday Times, she always said that she much preferred the Telegraph, not only because of their superior news service but also because of their nicer sense of what is right and proper, both of which judgments were confirmed this week in their respective coverages of her death. For not only did the Telegraph get in a day ahead with the news but it also showed what she would have regarded as characteristic delicacy by making no men- tion of her age, about which in life she had been a bit reticent, not only out of vanity, but out of a perfectly justifiable feeling that such private details, particularly about a lady of fashion, were nobody else's business but her own. She hated the modern custom in obituaries of telling all, as if the mere fact of death immediately lifted all obligations on friends to go on observing the polite discretions which they had upheld during the subject's lifetime, and I remember a characteristically pungent comment she Made to me about an obituarist who, on the morrow of Philip Hope-Wallace's death, saw fit to draw attention to his homosex- uality. `Surely it was a little premature to let the skeleton out of the cupboard before the body had even been laid out for burial.' Ernestine was a great stickler for correct behaviour and even on her death bed took meticulous trouble with her appearance, to the point of keeping visitors waiting downstairs while she put the finishing touches to her clothes and coiffure. And if she felt too ill to be her normally brilliant self, she would send down word for one to call back another day when she might be better company. Her standards of hospitali- tY never declined, even after years of wasting illness, and my final memory is of her meticulously instructing a nurse in the art of mixing n a dry martini. Not everybody's idea of the last sacrament, to be sure, but for Ernestine, the high priestess who had made a religion out of such exact social observances, the gesture had a certain holiness, the symbolism which I am sure the Almighty will understand.
Until Sir Keith Joseph took him up, and
persuaded Mrs Thatcher to do likewise, it had been the recently ennobled Alfred Sherman's fate to suffer the kind of social snubbing and brush-offs that before the war used to provoke pushy young Jews to take refuge in the Labour Party, and it is very much a sign of how much times have changed since the 1930s that such rejected outsiders should nowadays gravitate more naturally to the Right than the Left. The post-war progressive establishment had no time for the likes of Alfred Sherman whose waY-out views and graceless manner made him a persona non grata in consensus socie- ty, rather as the same kind of social defi- ciencies had militated against the likes of Thomas Balogh and Nicky Kaldor ever be- ing found acceptable by the reigning reac- tionary establishment of the 1930s. I remember Balogh visiting the country home of my stepfather, Montagu Norman, then Governor of the Bank of England, in about 1941, and it was quite clear, even to my schoolboy eye, that the reception he receiv- ed did not satisfy his already outsize ego. Nobody made much of a fuss of him or listened very attentively to his ideas, and he was treated as a bit of a joke. No wonder that the Jewish intellectuals of the day, most of whom had similar experiences, came to feel much more at home in left-wing circles where their reception was much more sym- pathetic. Thus the pre-war Right lost many bright new Jewish recruits, for want of a lit- tle social encouragement, and I am sure the same. experience in reverse helps to explain why so many of their post-war counterparts were repelled by the insufferable social ex- clusiveness and intellectual complacency of the Crosland-Jenkins establishment, by contrast with which Mrs Thatcher's door and mind must have seemed marvellously open and welcoming. Of course I am not suggesting that the recent generation of brilliant Jews, like Lawson and Brittan, became Tories simply because that was the ladder most easy to climb, any more than that their pre-war predecessors became socialists because in their day the Labour Party offered the best chance of getting on. But clearly these factors did and do play some part in determining which way am- bitious outsiders jump. If Lawson and Brit- tan had hitched their wagon to any other stltr but Mrs Thatcher's, there is no remote chance that they would today be respective- ly Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary, just as if Alfred Sherman had' not done likewise there is no remote chance that he would at this very moment be travelling round Central America as the British Prime Minister's personal answer to Henry Kissinger, feted and fawned upon by all the British Ambassadors in the region who a few years ago would not have given him the time of day.
rloming back from work during the heat- wave last week, I found myself on the rush-hour underground crammed between two young men both of whom were in shorts and naked down to the waist. Nor was this sweaty contamination the only disagreeable aspect of my enforced propinquity. For as well as being half-naked, my neighbours were also devouring malodorous hamburgers, the fat from which dribbled down their hairy chests. Such behaviour is not at all uncommon nowadays. More and more the young seem to make no distinction between what can properly be done in private and public, or between what is suitable behaviour for the beach, or wide open spaces, and what is suitable for crowded cities. I do not think the intention is to behave badly. They are simply ignorant, like so many red indians who have never been taught a social code proper to urban life. This is really very odd, since one might have expected civic behaviour to improve in response to the pressures of growing urban congestion which render high standards ever more ob- viously desirable. But the opposite has hap- pened. Young people get noisier instead of quieter, untidier instead of tidier, and at any rate in all these relatively minor respects, incomparably less civilised than their forebears. When I was young, there was an organisation called the Anti-Litter League, and no child would have dared throw away even a lollipop stick for fear of earning a potential rebuke. Today the young jettison piles of plastic rubbish without the slightest inhibition. Social reformers, of course have better things to do than worry about such relatively trivial matters. They are too busy teaching children to be multi-cultural, or par- ticipatory democrats and such like, For them social conscience is something that relates only to such problems as unemploy- ment and other major forms of social deprivation. Thus a generation has been bred with all the right theories about collec- tive good behaviour and not the remotest idea about individual good manners. They are desperately concerned about the plight of the old in the abstract but would not think of giving up their seat to some old granny on the bus. Doubtless the young are much more sensitive to racial suscep- tibilities than were their parents. But they are also incomparably less sensitive in a host of ways which also make life hell for other people.
Peregrine Worsthorne„.
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