DIARY
The number of South African whites trying to establish their right to British nationality has increased enormously in the last few weeks. A Middle Temple lawyer friend, who specialises in these matters, tells me that this particular part of his workload has quadrupled in one month; and this before the black revolution has really begun. When the Rhodesian whites of British stock finally abandoned hope of being able to sustain white supremacy they could retreat across the border to South Africa. If South Africa crumbles, however, a great many of its nearly two million English-speaking citizens will want to come here. Only a few of them will have any legal right to do so. But if their lives are being threatened by black violence, there will be considerable pressure on the Gov- ernment to waive immigration rules in their favour. After all, are they not our kith and kin etc? I will certainly be a passionate part of that pressure. But it is not at all difficult to imagine who will be passionately against allowing a lot of so- called white racists into this country, in preference to all those blacks and browns who are being kept out. Here is another problem building up for Mr Kinnock, just in time, very probably, for the next election. Presumably the Bernie Grants of the Labour Party will utterly oppose discrimi- nating in favour of white South Africans. But faced with the spectacle of kith and kin having their throats cut, most ordinary Labour voters may well find such an obstructionist attitude deeply repugnant. So far there has not been much speculation over here about the impact of a white collapse in South Africa on British domes- tic politics. My guess is that, one way or another, the consequences of such a col- lapse could lead to the bitterest political debate of 1986.
In all the current speculation about the prospects of the various new newspapers about to see the light of day, there is very little reference to the respective quality of the journalists involved. This was particu- larly noticeable in the reaction to the paper which Andreas Whittam Smith and two other former Daily Telegraph journalists plan to start. Its prospects, we were told, are good because of the prestigious nature of the backing, which includes some of the greatest City institutions. My own reac- tion, based on a knowledge of the writing of the three journalists concerned, is much less sanguine, since only one of them is much good. Yet this lacuna — an absence of writing talent — does not seem to worry the City backers, who carry on as if technological breakthroughs and financial backing matter far more than journalistic flair. The trouble is that so much attention has been concentrated in recent years on PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE the production problems of Fleet Street that nobody has noticed something else just as serious: the dramatic decline in the quality of new journalists, many of whom are as ignorant as they are illiterate. Economic writing seems to me to have deteriorated particularly badly compared to the days when Keynes, Lionel Robbins, Roy Harrod, Geoffrey Crowther — not to mention George Schwarz — were all writ- ing regularly in the public prints. Thanks to Eddie Shah the technological break- through in Fleet Street cannot be long delayed. But oh what an anti-climax there will be when it is discovered that there are too few journalists of talent capable of exploiting the breakthrough. Managerial muddle and trade union bloody-minded- ness have combined of late to provide a marvellous alibi for journalistic failure. Cure those ills, and the true disease will, I fear, become embarrassingly obvious.
The 22-year-old son of a friend of ours, who had been suffering for a fortnight from a persistent sore throat, went to see his doctor just before Christmas. After ex- amining the young man's throat, the doctor asked whether he was a practising homosexual or injected himself in- travenously, the unmistakable implication being that there was at least a possibility that his symptoms were those of the dreaded Aids. This young man happens to be normal; nor does he inject himself with drugs. Even so, he spent a pretty tor- mented Christmas worrying about whether he might just possibly have been unlucky enough to catch Aids in some other way. From what I gather, this young man's experience is not at all unusual, since it is now routine for GPs to ask these deeply disturbing questions of anyone with almost any persistent symptoms. So it is reason- able to suppose that there were literally thousands of people worried to death over the festive season. Perhaps doctors do have to trawl for Aids with this enormously wide net. But one cannot recall the same almost brutally indiscriminate and alarmist approach to any other disease; not even VD. Usually doctors tend to lean over backwards not to make patients think they are worse than they are. In the case of Aids, however, they seem to feel it neces- sary to do exactly the opposite. This may be medically sound, but I rather doubt whether all doctors who put these ques- tions as a matter of routine quite realise how much misery they may be uninten- tionally causing.
Afascinating book was given to me for . Christmas, and I should like to share my good fortune. The title is Destiny Obscure, by John Burnett (Allen Lane, now out of print) and the text consists of extracts from the autobiographical jottings — mostly about childhood and education — of ordin- ary people living in this country from the 1820s to the 1920s. What fascinated me is all the evidence these extracts supply of how much less awful life was in the bad old days for working-class families than left- wing historians and social critics always suggest. Mr Burnett sums up the evidence as follows: `. . . children's happiness at home bore no direct relationship to wealth or poverty, to possessions or the lack of them, to overcrowded or inadequate hous- ing conditions . . . the happiest memories of child life generally came from large working class families which, by modern standards, had no luxuries and few com- forts.' Nor has the pattern changed much in more modern times, judging by what friends and colleagues from working-class backgrounds tell me. Frank Johnson, for example, is fond of reminiscing how cushy his childhood in a working-class home was, waited upon hand and foot by his mother — breakfast in bed, shoes polished and much else besides. Compared to the rigours of an upper- or middle-class child- hood, his was incredibly easy and comfort- able. This is not to suggest that working people were not exploited; only that, for many, the experience was surprisingly agreeable.
Amost amazing document has been sent to me. It is the Saatchi and Saatchi presentation for Christie's, as a result of which Saatchi won that auction house's advertising account worth a million pounds. Here is point four: 'You believe that you have the edge over Sotheby's in personal service but this is not something tangible; it is an attitude of mind.' Reading page after page of such glimpses of the obvious, I kept on wondering what they reminded me of, until the penny dropped. The language is exactly the same as psychologists use to patients on the couch: `You believe that you had an unhappy childhood,' etc. And the reason big money passes is the same in each case: that rich corporations, no less than rich individuals, are desperate to have somebody talk about their problems in a sympathetic way.
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