Westminster Commentary
'Is it not the custom of this House,' cried a voice amid the screaming and yelling in which the debate on the Parker Tribunal Report ended, 'when a right honourable Gentleman is named and mis- represented . . .' For a moment I thought that Mr. Oliver Poole had so far forgot himself as to make a dramatic and highly improper intervention from the Public Gallery. But in fact the remark was made by Mr. Harold Wilson, Marshal Bigmouth, no less, and he was talking, God save the mark, about himself. He was actually sheltering from attack (and indeed had done so more than once on the first day of the debate) behind the rules of order, as he had sheltered behind the rules of privilege when he smeared Mr. Poole. And nobody bunged the Mace at him.
This was, indeed, an appropriate end for a debate in which the facts had been stood on their heads with such meticulous thoroughness that I seriously began to wonder whether it was the honour of the Opposition that the Report had vindicated, rather than that of the people they had attacked. 'The Government,' said Mr. Gait- skell, 'come out of this inquiry with nothing but further discredit to their already tarnished reputa- tion.' The Labour benches (I really must take a moment here to say that the Opposition behaved at times like a colony of imperfectly house- trained orang-utans) howled and roared their approval of these sentiments; during the noise it somehow escaped attention that it is the Labour Party's reputation that must be tarnished in the eyes of anyone who has read the Report. This alas, is a comparatively small proportion of the population, a fact on which Marshal Bigmouth and Mr. Gaitskell implicitly rested the whole of their case. And the Government cannot complain that Taper didn't warn them it would. happen.. The clumsy and incompetent way in which the affair was handled by Mr. Macmillan virtually ensured that millions of citizens would go to their graves believing that there had been a leak, whatever the Tribunal might say to the contrary. And, indeed, the Parliamentary Labour Party clearly believes it. Over and over again during the debate some- body on the Opposition side would hint that some figure cleared by the Tribunal was not in fact blameless, and at the end of the debate they actually voted against acceptance of the Report's findings. It is a remarkable illustration of the power of the human mind—and even, in one or two instances, of the sub-human mind—to sup- press all thought of the facts in favour of the theory adopted before the facts came to light.
Let us, by way of illustration, take one or two of Marshal Bigmouth's remarks during the colos- sally long speech with which he opened the Opposition's side of the debate. The Marshal declared that Mr. Peter Thorneycroft had 'gravely misled the House' by saying that 'there was no brief about the Bank rate.' And the Marshal went on to say that 'the Tribunal evidence and the Report, which reproduces the brief, show that there was one.' I know that many persons have by now been rendered virtually incapable of believ- ing that that statement is wholly untrue, but in fact it is. The Report and the evidence show quite clearly that there was no brief on Bank rate.
There was a brief on the other financial measures to be taken, and at the bottom of this there .were the words 'Paragraph to be added' (it was the part including this sentence that was cut off the docu- ment). But the paragraph was never in fact added to the brief, only to the Chancellor's own copy of his statement. In other words—well, in other words, there was no brief on Bank rate, and any- body who says there was must be made to realise that the truth is a fragile object, and if you drop it it is likely to break.
Because we are not done with the Marshal yet. He also said that 'There are in this country 11,000 public companies. Only four of them sold in ad- vance on any considerable scale, all four of them being closely associated with one or other of two Bank of England directors."This, too, is quite untrue. In addition to the companies indicated by the Marshal', there were sales by. L. Messel & Co., the Union Discount Co., the Swiss Bank Corporation, B. W. Blydenstein & Co., Guinness, Mahon & Co., and Govett Sons & Co. What is more, the Swiss Bank's sale amounted to over £1,000,000, and that of the Union Discount Com- pany to £500,000 on the 1.8th and £3,500,000 over the whole previous week. None of these firms is 'associated in some way with two Bank of England directors,' and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that in implying that they did not sell Marshal Bigmouth was, as he would say, 'gravely mislead- ing' the House.
Nor are we done with him yet. More than once during the debate he said : 'We never said there was a leak.' He also said it before the Tribunal. But on October 4 he wrote to the Prime Minister saying that 'prima facie evidence has been brought to my attention suggesting that the leak emanated from a political source.' (It depends what you mean by evidence; the Opposition's assertion that the Tribunal justified their demands for an inquiry is another bit of crookedness, as the only evidence that did justify the inquiry was the evidence that Mr. Wilson admitted he had not dreamed existed before he read about it in the proceedings of the Tribunal. The Pumphrey rub- bish was dismissed out of hand, and the volume of sales was not larger than usual; it was not until the details of sales were examined by the Tribunal that there was any real prima fade evidence.) In other words, the Marshal asserted that there was a leak, and went on to suggest a possible source of it. Then he denied that he had said anything of the kind, and, as I have already pointed out, nobody bunged the Mace at him.
And so, broadly speaking, the Opposition was allowed to get away with it. Mr. Butler's opening speech was in his most civilised and thoughtful manner; it was a good speech, but it was not what was required at that point. What was wanted was somebody to roll the Labour Party in its own mire and make sure that some of it stuck to them. The Tory Party is indeed in a lamentable state when it cannot put up one front-bench speaker to hammer the Opposition on a motion of this kind. They do in fact have two who might have done it. But the Prime Minister is in the Antipodes and the muffin-man's dad said yes to Mr. Baldwin. So Mr. Butler was civilised, the Chancellor was flabby and Mr. Maudling, who once or twice looked likely to score heavily, was deliberately shouted into inaudibility by the Opposition, who were not going to risk, at that late hour, a com- plete reversal of the debate's general trend. (It is noteworthy that although Mr. Gaitskell and Mr. Maudling spoke for the same length of time and at the same speed of delivery, Mr. Gaitskell's speech occupies eleven columns of Hansard and Mr. Maudling's well under seven.) So brazen was their impudence, in fact, that it was the alleged besmirching of Marshal Bigmouth's honour (a sweet-smelling lily for them to gild, I must say) that for a goodly part of the debate formed the staple of discussion, and Mr. Sydney Silverman, after the divisions, actually attempted to reprove Mr. Maudling for the suggestion that the motion was in reality a vote of censure on Mr. Wilson.
Alas, it was not only in front-bench artillery that the Tories were seen to be so woefully lack- ing. The army was short of mid-bench infantry and back-bench cavalry, too. Of all the speakers from the body of the party, only Sir Herbert Butcher really thrust home, and as for the lone rangers who might have been expected to do some effective heckling, even Fearless Fraser was re- duced to a tame acceptance of the Marshal's own estimate of himself.
And that was no low estimate. For an hour and a quarter he stood at the box, quivering from head to foot (no great distance, to be sure) with self-admiration. And, to do him justice, he never hauled down his grubby chameleon's colours for the whole length of his speech. Indeed, only once did he falter, when he said that his primary con- cern at the beginning of the affair had been to protect Miss Chataway from victimisation by the Tory Central Office. For a full five minutes the House rocked with laughter at this incredible re- mark, and the Marshal, when he resumed, sounded distinctly unsteady. But it was the only occasion on which he stumbled; he had made up his mind from the start that he was going down the line for his shabby and twisted' case, and right thoroughly he did it. There was no apology for his remarks about Mr. Oliver Poole, 'with his vast City interests,' which the Spectator charac- terised as a 'silly and disreputable smear.' There was no admission of the grievous wrong he and his plummer's mate had done to men more honourable than themselves (as, indeed, un- expectedly and sadly, there was not from Mr. Gaitskell, who has clouded an honourable record by allowing himself to be pulled through- out this business behind the Marshal's slimy chariot-wheels). For an hour and a quarter he dodged and feinted and struck (generally side- ways), and when he sat down the Opposition awoke with a delighted roar to the fact that they were not simply still in the fight but well on top of it. Immediately, it went to their heads; Mr. Thorneycroft spoke next and made a trivial slip of the tongue, saying that he had seen the mem- bers of the TUC, whereas in fact it was Mr. Macleod who had done so. Somebody explained the point to Mr. Bevan, who had been shouting a good deal already, and for some obscure reason he promptly went berserk and sat there shrieking 'Who saw the TUC?' over and over again. Mr. Thorneycroft plainly could not hear him; the one acoustical fault of the chamber is that the man who is on his feet cannot hear chanted interruptions from the other side. No Matter; the Opposition's blood had rushed to Mr. Bevan's head, and he went on screaming uncon- trollably until Dame Flo, sitting next to Mr. Thorneycroft, plucked the ex-Chancellor by the sleeve and explained what the row was about, Whereat Mr. Thorneycroft corrected his slip and carried on.
But from then on, with only the briefest inter- vals, the Tories were on the defensive. Sir Lionel Heald, for instance, reached heights of absurdity that can seldom have been equalled. A dozen times and more in his prolegomenon he warned Marshal Bigmouth that something pretty stern Was coming. When he finally got to it it was nothing more than an assertion that the Marshal's remarks about Mr. Poole had been slanderous! None of the really rough boys was called, apart from Mr. Fraser and Mr. Ted Leather, and neither of them raised a bruise. Indeed, by Tues- day afternoon the debate had deteriorated to a Point where even Sir Leslie Plummer was allowed to get away with murder. Sir Leslie, in fact, did a very rash thing; he was rude to your humble servant, calling me 'the most literate writer of dirty words on walls we have in the country.' I Willingly bow to Sir Leslie's no doubt vast know- ledge of writings on walls—indeed, I would be fascinated to read a dissertation from his pen en- titled 'The Leicester Square graffiti and their in- terpretation,' just as soon as he finishes his long- awaited monograph 'Groundnuts: their cause and cure.' But it should not be forgotten that it Was, after all, Sir Leslie who was the first to chalk on the wall in this case; the message he chalked, 'after discussion' (you're telling us there was dis- cussion) with Mr. Harold Wilson, was 'Oliver Poole passed this way,' and I for one caught no hint of regret in his speech for the daub.
And so to bed, after final scenes unprecedented in their teary rowdiness since Suez. The House of Commons has not, in this matter, enhanced its collective reputation, and the Opposition has virtually destroyed its own. Indeed, I shall remem- ber only two speeches from the entire two days with genuine pleasure; Mr. Leslie Hale's uproar- iously funny performance on Tuesday afternoon, and Sir Herbert Butcher's noble and perceptive address later that evening. He alone treated Mar- shal Bigmouth with the dismissive contempt the little greaser had so richly earned. '1 was in the House,' said Sir Herbert quietly, 'with people like the late George Lansbury and the late Ernest Bevin. I am bound to say that had there been an investigation in the days of those giants, those great- men for England, those great men for the Socialist Party, their opening words in a debate such as this would have been of Pleasure at the complete vindication of some of their fellow human beings. Now we are in a race of pygmies. The right honourable Gentleman is one of their leaders.' Sir Herbert spoke for a dying tradition—the tradition that dishonourable conduct is worthy of scorn—and his speech was like a silver trumpet amid a chorus of screech- owls. Up and down the country, the Labour Party may have gained on balance more than it lost over this affair, if we reckon in no less debased coinage than votes. But there are other, finer, currencies; and Mr. Gaitskell at least will one
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