Spectator's Notebook

Really, Dr Waldheim, the Secretary General of the United Nations, is getting out of hand, and badly needs to be slapped down. There has always been a tendency on the part of UN Secretaries General to imagine that the international political reality they prefer is not merely superior to the existing reality but susceptible of achievement by their absurd gestures — gestures which at their worst (as in the case of Hammarsjkold) cause suffering and death, and at their most irritating (as in the case of Waldheim) cause embarrassment. Waldheim's refusal to cover his head in Israel, when commemorating the German slaughter of Jews, was offensive to his hosts, and absurd in itself, especially when one considers his idiotic explanation — to the effect that his position dictated that he made obeisance in his own way. The end result was, of course, that when he went on to Cairo he had either to offend the Jews and their supporters further by taking off his shoes in a Moslem mosque, or to compound his boorishness by declining to do so. In either case his highest impact would be to increase tension, and his lowest to cause offence.

Embarrassing office boy

It must sooner or later be grasped by these international clerks that they are the instruments of international politics, not its masters. A UN Secretary General can occasionally achieve a certain amount of good by pottering about the world on messages for the powers — he is a sort of superior and well-paid office boy, who may occasionally help to save a statesman's face by a well-placed word, drink or missive. He cannot, by definition, have any useful political identity; and nothing but harm comes from supposing he can. Dr Waldheim had better be confined to UN HQ and confine himself to making sure that everybody has enough paper clips, typewriter ribbons and such-like: but don't, please, let us have him on the international stage any longer.

Feather's weight

I shall greatly miss Vic Feather when he retires as TUC General Secretary at the end of this week. Trade union leaders, of whom we see so much on television and hear so much on the radio, are by and large bores in the business of communication. But not Vic Feather, with that fascinating Lancashire voice, the steady outpouring of reason wrapped up in whimsy, and the eternal striving for the good of his members, even against their own recalcitrance as well as the moves of hostile interests. I remember hearing Feather speak once at a dinner just after he had succeeded George Woodcock: it was perhaps the only time I have ever heard him sound sharp or bitchy, but then, by the end, Woodcock (who ran the Industrial Relations Commission for a time) was widely disliked in the trade union movement for his intellectual arrogance and impatience with the old ways, He may have been, nonetheless, a better portent for the future than Feather himself: increasingly the affairs of the TUC must fall into the hands of the intellectualist managers: the adroit diplomacy and reconciliatory chumminess of the Vic Feathers of this world are becoming things of the past — more's the pity.

The.old days

I felt this even more strongly the other night when I watched a fascinating Harlech TV programme about James. Griffiths, now eighty-two, once deputy leader of the Labour Party (he defeated Nye Bevan in the election) and Harold Wilson's first Secretary of State for Wales. Griffiths, as he said himself, came into Parliament too late (he was forty-five) to aspire to the very highest job (even as deputy leader he was, like Ted Short, a temporary cover for embarrassment). He lamented, on the programme, the fact that at the next general election not a single miner would be standing as a Labour candidate in Wales, and went so far as to suggest that the party should set aside some special seats for that mining heartland: At the same time he observed that his favourite toast was to the day when the last miner left the last pit, safe and well. The implicit contradiction between the two positions is a sad one, suggesting as it does a terrible emotional tug of war in the hearts of the older Labour men between the solidarity and brotherhood of the old days of crusade, and the desire to have done with the necessity for crusade which success, or even social development, brings about, destroying the spirit of the past as well as some of its problems. The passing is, I suppose, inevitable, but it should not be met merely with nostalgia: after all, Jim Griffiths, asked to comment on a comparison between the Attlee government and that of Harold Wilson, rightly argued that the achievements of the first were incomparably superior to those of the latter, even though Wilson had at his service so many more of the new, post-war socialist intellectuals who think they have not just inherited, but also deserve, the future.

Bondmen

I have an incorrigible inability (coming, ho doubt, from some puritan strain) not to finish books I start to read and not to walk out of plays, films etc, which I detest. If not puritanical, the impulse must be optimistic — always hope for something round the corner. I was therefore astonished at the bravura with which Philip Ziegler told me the other day that he had walked out of about 50 per cent of all the theatrical performances he had ever seen, "I simply think," said Philip, "and wonder whether I would not be happier with a good book. If I conclude that I would be, I leave." There was, however, an exception. He recently took some children (including his own) to see Live and Let Die, protesting the while how bored he would be, but realising that the mites could not be left to find their various ways home alone. In fact, he enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly, and found shaken his earlier judgment that Sean Connery could not be replaced as James Bond. Myself, I have always favoured Roger Moore for the role; and was reconciled to Connery only because the films had already placed so great a distance between themselves and the books that one had to consider them as separate fantasies. The only odd man (or odd woman) out in this struggle between devotees of Conner)' and of Moore is my niece (going on thirteen, and having a lousy taste in men) who thinks that George Lazenby is best of all: mind you, she hasn't read the books, being confined (at least officially), to literature more proper to her age — like, as I discovered with horror the other day, Jean Plaidy. Still, out of the, mouths of babes comes something or other.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The death at the weekend of Tolkien, the creator of the hobbits and chronicler of the Ring, leaves a deep sadness, not because he did not have a full life — he was a very great philological scholar, who among other things transformed the Oxford English school but because the saga remains unfinished. His work on the Ring cycle began with the creation of a new language — one which, by the way, is a real language and not a pretence — but the inspiration for The Hobbit came in a moment of boredom when, correcting School Certificate papers, he wrote, "There once was a hobbit. who lived in a hole in the ground." "Having written that," Tolkien observed drily, " I had to find out what hobbits were like." Since the completion of The Lord of the Rings Tolkien has been working on Silmariilion, which was to carry the story further back into the great age of Aragorn's ancestors: since he was a compulsive reviser. who left manuscripts by the thousand, it seems unlikely that this work was ever finished. Still, Tolkien left much; indeed, he left a whole world of his own making, deep, rich. realised, heroic and grand. It is appropriate that he should be sent on his way with the words of the Lady Galadriel to Aragorn as he set out on his fateful journey:

Where now are the Daneadain, Elessar. Elessar?

Why do thy kinfolk wander afar? Near is the hour when the Lost should come forth.

And the Grey Company ride from the North.

But dark is the path appointed for thee: The Dead watch the road that leads to the Sea.

Cato