DIARY
WOODROW WYATT Denis Healey was a Communist at Oxford because he was fascinated by pow- er. Like Kingsley Martin he thought that a Communist takeover in Europe was inevit- able. In 1940 he joined the Army and had a good war record ending as a Major in the Royal Engineers. After the War he de- cided the route to power was through the Labour Party. As Secretary of its Interna- tional Department he developed strong anti-Communist views, upbraiding Hugh Gaitskell and myself at the Labour Party Conference after the defeat of the Attlee government for not more vigorously de- fending Labour's rearmament programme though we thought we had made ourselves Pretty unpopular over it. From being a staunch believer in the nuclear deterrent and Nato he has now descended into accepting Mr Kinnock's CND policy of abolishing not only the British nuclear deterrent but the American bases in these islands. He is too intelligent not to know that this would mean the end of Nato but toeing the party line is his last chance of being Foreign Secretary if there is a Labour government. So he pretends that Mr Gorbachev's offer to reduce Russian nuclear arms by the same amount as would be involved in our having none is a good one and apparently accepts Mr Gor- bachev's promise not then to target nuclear weapons on Britain as bankable. His South African jaunt was in line with his ambition to ensure a last shot at power as Labour's Foreign Secretary. It was bad luck on him that Mrs Thatcher in the Commons read passages in the Crossman diaries revealing his anxiety to sell arms to South Africa when he was Minister of Defence. If anyone doubts Dick Crossman's words he should read page 336 of The Castle Diaries /964-70. She recounts Healey's fight, back- ed by Jim Callaghan, against Harold Wil- son to lift the arms embargo against South Africa. It is strange to develop a sudden public passion for opposing apartheid in its dying days after wanting to support the South African government with arms when apartheid was getting worse and looked fixed for ever. Poor, likeable Denis Healey. It is not money but the love of money which St Paul said was the root of all evil. The same applies to power.
rri he latest issue of the London Maga- zine carries a picture of Baron Gottfried von Cramm wearing long white trousers and a plain white shirt in the 1935 Wimble- don Final. In 1951 he was the last player at Wimbledon to dress that way. The partly white top now carries advertisements still limited in size by regulation. As nothing ever stands still, what more can we expect In the dress of Wimbledon players? Perhaps an advertising sign automatically illuminated on the players' chests by the electronic bleep signalling a service fault. Meanwhile why do they clench their fists, jump about and register extreme physical emotion when a point is won? Surely this must use up a lot of energy better con- served against the possibility of a long and exhausting match?
0 n 3 July 1961 Mr Justice Winn (brother of the journalist Godfrey Winn) declared that 'the purported election of the Defendant Frank Haxell as the General Secretary of the ETU . . . was void, and was brought about by fraudulent and un- lawful devices . . . .' Thus, 25 years ago, the long struggle to expose the ballot-rigging by Communists in the interests of the Communist Party which had falsely given them control of the union ended. The ETU (now the EETPU) and Lawford & Co., the solicitors who acted for the plaintiffs Chap- ple and Byrne (declared by the judge as the truly elected General Secretary) gave a dinner at Grays Inn to celebrate the anniversary. I was there because in 1956 I had started the media exposure of the ETU Communists in a magazine article. I fol- lowed it with two Panorama programmes which with today's BBC left-wing bias would not now be allowed. The still open- minded New Statesman published a long piece in which I gave tables showing how certain branches reported votes for Com- munist candidates in excess of their mem- bership. The battle was won by the dedica- tion of Les Cannon and Frank Chapple and of those brave ordinary members and branch secretaries willing to give evidence of the chicanery of the Communist lead- ership. They were brave because if the case had not been won they would have been expelled from the union with the loss of their closed shop jobs. It was moving to see
`Would you care to pay for my view?' some of those branch secretaries, now quite old, at the dinner. The Tories have never understood how hard it is for ordin- ary members to stand up against corrupt Communist and extremist trade union leaders. The EETPU is not hated by other union leaders because of its insistence on taking government money to conduct post- al ballots or because of Wapping. The enmity is because the Electricians' Union turned out its unlawfully elected Commun- ist leaders against the wishes of the Gener- al Council of the TUC. Many of the TUC leaders even today would not survive truly democratic elections in their unions.
Isit on a Jockey Club working party on Sunday racing. It is not a forlorn hope despite the loss of the Sunday Trading bill. The churches might not oppose it if betting were confined to the racecourses which by their nature are not in the centre of shopping areas so their use on a Sunday would no more disturb the nature of Sunday than Sunday cricket matches or Sunday Finals Day at Wimbledon. How- ever some churchmen may be deceived by the Customs and Excise returns into be- lieving that the £3,600 million annually bet on horse-racing is all lost. In practice 78 to 79 per cent free of tax goes back to the punters as winnings. Actually, betting is a very moral occupation. Suppose a punter allows himself £10 a week in bets. Over a year he will lose about £100. He will have had the intellectual pursuit of deciding after intense study which horses are likely to win. While he is spending hours on this task, more exacting than doing the Times crossword puzzle, he cannot be getting drunk or misbehaving. He is too busy making a democratic choice usually denied to him at his workplace. He will have some remarkable coups to console him for his mistakes. I have been chairman of the Tote since 1976 and no one has yet written me to complain that their family is starving because of excessive gambling in the household. No doubt some do gamble too much, as others drink too much. But for millions betting on horses is an innocent pleasure keeping the brain lively.
I am against capital punishment but I am also against racial discrimination. That is what the Malaysian authorities would have been accused of if the execution of the two young Australians for heroin smuggling had not taken place. The dreadful warning may save lives by diminishing the peddling of heroin to those who become addicts. World-wide, including in Britain, the penalties for those caught trafficking in drugs should be much more severe.
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