A Spectator's Notebook

When the-shadows of doom darken and hope seems futile, men react in a variety of ways. A leW take to their beds, with real or imaginary ailments. Some, whether courageous or unimaginative, simply carry on regardless. Others start to snap at their wives and secretaries.

The best recourse is to play the 'Dies irae' from the Bernstein recording of the Verdi Requiem, as loudly as may be managed Without upsetting the neighbours. This gets the adrenalin, or whatever it is, moving briskly. It never fails to cheer me up enormously.

There are those who claim to achieve the same result with Beethoven or even benzedrine, not to mention Wagner. But if the aim is to make doom seem exciting, then the Verdi has it every time.

It would, I think, be imprudent in present circumstances to rely on the device of trying to comfort ourselves with the reflection that things might be much worse than they are. They may, after all, actually become much worse, catching us with our mental defences already gravely weakened. It may be encouraging to reflect that one is not a fourteenth-century peasant who has just heard that the Black Death has reached the next village, or an eastern European watching the horse-tail standards of the Mongol hordes appear over the horizon. But the commonsense reaction to either of these predicaments Would clearly have been to run away, and that is not an attitude of mind to be encouraged at the present moment.

From all this you will no doubt have deduced that I am writing before anyone knows whether or not there will be a coalminers' strike, but that I fear there will be one and am sure it will be extremely unpleasant for everybody.

It is not easy to predict what will be the reactions of the general public, politically volatile as much of it is now said to be. But certainly Mr Mick McGahey and some of his friends have worked very hard to awaken People's fears and suspicions, which may well have the effect of hardening their resolution. Someone once said that the British people are never so happy as when you tell them they are ruined, and this may still be true. The majority of people certainly recognised More than a year ago that the inflationary leapfrogging of wages had to be halted. I think they have also realised for the last six months that a confrontation with militant trade unionism had to come sooner or later and was best got over and done with. They Would no doubt have preferred to confront a Eroup other than the coal-miners, but Mr mcGahey has made the present situation easier to live,with.

,Despite the understandable denials of poor

r Whitelaw, who has been given the t,nankless task of trying to reconcile the Lrreconcilable, a confrontation it plainly is. Moreover, if the popular mood is as I think, any attempt to blur the issues would be a serious mistake. I am well aware that both

logic and economic calculation seem to deny the wisdom of a duel which the Government, on the face of it, cannot win. Yet to withdraw

„."\v, denying the validity of its own case, n'ould surely be fatal as well as unpopular. It !s probably still true that tne only solution lies In an early general election, which would Produce an entirely new situation with much more room for manoeuvre on both sides.

Polls and swings

The apparent political volatility of the electorate seems to have convinced many observers that it is now virtually impossible to predict the results of elections. I do not agree. Mid-term by-elections have been chancy any time these last fifty years or more, and there is nothing very new about big swings in general elections. All that has changed is that sample groups of voters are now asked for their views much more frequently through the opinion polls. That they appear to be reacting to this in an increasingly unconsidered way, giving snap answers according to how the latest news has struck them on the day of the interview, only suggests to me that they do not take opinion polls very seriously. They are altogether more careful about voting in general elections. I suspect that they make up their minds earlier, and are less prone to be swayed during the actual campaign, than the experts would have us believe.

In 1970 the pollsters decided to save their faces by agreeing that there had been a massive swing to the Conservatives during the last week of the campaign. Some late swing there certainly was, but the election was won when the campaign started, despite the errors of the polls. I was able to identify clearly a swing of at least 4 per cent in my constituency during the first week, and several of my neighbouring colleagues confirmed this from their own experience. And that was all that was needed for victory.

However, canvassing does need to be done by pretty experienced people if it is to be reliable as a guide. It is easy to misjudge responses, and even easier to be misled. I had an instructive encounter on a doorstep in Ealing during the 1955 election. The deplorable state of the front garden (a traditionally sound guide to voting intentions) had prepared me for the worst, and I was not surprised when a young woman with brightly dyed hair and a cigarette stuck to her lower lip assured me that she and her mother 'always voted Labour.' At this point an aged crone shuffled down the passage and started muttering at her. "Oh no, that's right," said the daughter with an air of discovery. "It's Conservative we always vote, ain't it, Ma?"

It was the 'always' that got me.

Behind the headlines

Careful study of the newspapers, however boring, does reveal some extraordinary — not to say baffling — events. For example, 500 workers in Hull have recently been (and, for all I know, still are) on strike in support of a branch official of the AUEW, whose firm dismissed him for sawing two legs off a canteen chair "in the heat of the moment" to stop his colleagues squabbling over who should sit in it.

Had he hurled the chair against a wall, or torn the legs off with his bare hands, or even crowned his quarrelsome colleagues with it, the incident would not have seemed remarkable. But, even if he just happened to have a power-saw with him in the canteen, the heated moment must have been unusually prolonged to carry him through such a deliberate exercise as the amputation of two legs. I should like to think that he made a proper craftsman's job of it, measuring up and squaring off his marks before making the first cut. This seems to me the most satisfactory kind of news story, providing just enough facts while still leaving plenty of room for the imagination to play around them. One is not always so fortunate. Many years ago a friend of mine glimpsed in an underground train a headline in someone else's newspaper which read simply, 'WRONG MAN JUMPS OUT OF WINDOW.' It upset my friend at the time and it has haunted me ever since. Just try writing a news story to go under that.

'Now, this Irishman.'

I am a little puzzled by the recent spate of Irish anecdotes. In the last couple of months I have heard half a dozen or more stories with the same basic theme: and this is not, as was once the norm, the engaging lightheartedness and inconsequence of the individual Irishman. The current crop seems designed to show that the southern Irish are stupid almost to the point of subnormality. They range from the assertion that every milk bottle in Eire has embossed on the bottom the words, "Open at other end," to a slightly involved story about an Irish shopsteward in a near-bankrupt firm who announces with pride to his workers that after a long argument he has persuaded the management to backdate a pay cut four months.

Could this, I wonder, be part of a subtle propaganda campaign by Ulster Protestants to discredit the Council of Ireland? It is not, certainly the kind of thing one would associate with Bill Craig or even Harry West; but I have found myself lately looking at Ian Paisley with a speculative eye. I should like to think that he is perhaps the only person I have ever met who actually invented a popular anecdote. But probably the stories were all evolved by a computer at Harland and Wolff.

Angus Maude