Notebook
Brighton Max Beerbohm once began a review of Hamlet, 'And so once again the battlements of Elsinore loom into view. Heigh ho: And so once again the platform at Brighton Centre looms into view. The Party Conferences have returned. Heigh ho. Nowadays the political season is like the football season, both of them following Byron's English winter which ends in July and recommences in August. Need it be so? The Party Conferences precede the re-opening of Parliament, a date that has steadily crept backwards. A century ago the Commons gathered in February and rose in August for the harvest and shooting, which don't, I suppose, concern most Labour MPs. Lord Rawlinson is right (ink freezes in my pen as I write those ‘vords) to recommend a return to that timetable. There is too much of everything nowadays. Political life is no exception. The parliamentary session is too lnng, MPs spend too much time in the Commons, passing too much legislation. Labour bears, marginally, the greater part of the blame for this. Is it too much to hope that the Conservatives will put this particular clock back, or rather the calendar forward, so the conferences could take place after Christmas? Perhaps it is.
Mr Frank AlLinn is a very poor Chairman of the Conference, though not quite the worst in living memory. That honour goes to Mr Tony Benn, whose performance a few years ago should comfort those who see him as the Bristol Robespierre: nobody as incompetent as that could be a successful revolutionary. Mr Allaun cannot strike the balance between the soft answer and the Stalinist iron fist. rn sorry, brother, will you stand down? [Nod Please leave the rostrum. Please leave the rostrum. Please leave the rostrum.' To be sure, it is not easy to deal at one moment with the vain oafs who rush 1113 td make a point of order, a moment they will never forget, and at the next with a distinguished veteran such as Mr philIp Noel-Baker, whose remarkable Speech on Tuesday was too long for Mr Allaun, though not for me. How do you Politely tell the Nobel Peace Prize-winner to shut up when he has just, in the course Of a speech, notionally on the election of the Leader, told us that 'the mushroom Cloud was the writing on the wall' or Mentioned the League of Nations for the fourth time? Mr Eric Heffer described it as i a 'very relevant speech', which rather Missed the point. What is certainly true s that there is no other gathering in any other political party, anywhere, where such a speech could have been made.
Last Saturday in Naples a Socialist Deputy was shot dead. The bourgeois press fudged the story, merely hinting that there had not been a political motive. The excellent Communist Paese Sera came straight out with it. The miscreant (no nonsense about contempt of court in Italy) was described as being led away from the bullet-riddled corpse with the words, `L'ho ammazzato perche era l'amante di mia moglie'. el killed him because he was my wife's loveeo I looked round the bar of the Grand Hotel in Brighton to see if there was a Socialist Deputy in like danger. Most of those present were too preoccupied, or too tired, for that sort of Latin nonsense. The nearest thing to scandal this week was Mr Tom Skeffington-Lodge describing at length how he had once, through the libel laws, suppressed a novel by Mr Francis King, our distinguished fiction reviewer. Mr Lodge affected to have forgotten the name of the book ('Brighton Shlock'?) and he was vague, too, about the n‘ture of the alleged defamation. I should like to know more if Mr King or anyone else can supply me with a copy of the novel; it will find an honoured place on my shelf of Banned Books.
If anything in life is certain, the Webers vote Labour though Wendy perhaps hesitated at the last election. Now that large chunks of the working class have deserted the Peoples' Party, the Webers — representing the more-or-less educated, progressive middle class — are the last faithful Labour supporters. If you do not know what I am talking about, you do not see the Guardian every Monday with Posy Simmonds's wonderfully funny strip cartoon 'The Silent Three'. A selection is published next Thursday as Mrs Weber's Diary (Cape £3.95). For Guardian readers the cartoon must be a very exercise in masochism. How many of them must recognise themselves in the awful, but lovable, George Weber, a polytechnic lecturer with a zapata moustache and an unpublished book on Buckminster Fuller? I tend myself, like Miss Simmonds's colleague, the great Ian Aitken, to identify with Edmund Heep, the bottle-nosed whisky salesman. Academic social historians — though maybe not Polytechnic lecturers — disdain to look at such vulgar evidence as comic strips, preferring high art. (Here is a Pseuds' Corner question for the Webers' next party: 'Name an opera, and a musical comedy, both based on strip cartoons'.) But if any historian of the future wants to know what life was like in the Seventies among a certain section of English society, Mrs Weber will provide him with a better guide than most contemporary novels.
Wendy Weber goes 'to bed early with Graham Greene', as we all do from time to time. Greene is, of course, the presiding genius of Brighton. Indeed, jokes about Pinkie and Neil Kinnock (Ian Mikardo would be apter) are de rigueur for conference sketch writers. I have myself worn out most possible jokes on the theme, and will do no more than send our fondest wishes to our great novelist — at the Spectator our former colleague and our friend — on his 75th birthday. He is still leading a ferociously active life, aside from novels, writing better journalism than the rest of us. Why does not some enterprising editor give him a break from Latin America, and bring him back to Brighton for next year's Tory conference?
'Stalin's dead, mate', a heckler shouted at Mr Frank Chapple during his speech on Tuesday. A nice touch for students of the Labour party. Other good moments: a lady speaker from Hampstead CLP who spoke with the purest accents of North London Collegiate, except for the Sixtiesish affectation of the Irish-Liverpool-John Peel, 'Every wan of you knows ... '; the speaker who said 'You are the custidomans of tradition ... '; someone's interesting conceit of 'raging Thatcherite monetarism'. Do I sneer? Not really. If it is hard not to smile at the Labour Conference when a speaker says that 'The British working class is enormously intelligent', it's wrong to laugh at him. He added, 'Our working class is the one guarantee that we won't have a totalitarian regime'. Despite the doommerchants, I'm not sure that he is entirely wrong.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Previous page
