The press
More war casualties
Paul Johnson
urely nobody', wailed the Daily Tele- 'graph, 'wants to debate the statistics of Thursday's by-election'. Yes they did, ac- tually; it's what people like David Butler are for, and he was at it in The Times, the same morning, though to be sure he did not have much to say (` . in this volatile world Mit- cham tells us little. „ '). Labour apologists tried desperately to blame the disaster on the Falklands, but the truth is the fighting may have helped Labour in the sense it spared the party much harrowing publicity. Expert opinion agreed the Falklands were not the cause of the Labour debacle. The Guardian expert totted up the Labour vote in the last six by-elections, comparing it with the 1979 figures: 'Labour's vote in the 1979 general election was its worst since 1931, yet in these six by-elections, Labour has polled only 51 per cent of the vote it took in May 1979.' That, said the Guar- dian, 'is a record of electoral failure which rto modern opposition can match.' The Falklands didn't start the trend: 'it has merely made a grim predicament even worse.'
The Sunday Express made the same point in terms of the Tory recovery. Polls 'show- ed the Tories at their lowest ebb last December at 22 per cent public support compared with 51.5 for the Alliance'. From the end of the year the Tories began to climb 'until, just before the invasion of the Falklands, they moved ahead in popularity with 34 per cent support'. Tory strategy, it reported, far from favouring a snap elec- tion, was to stay the full five-year course, in the belief that 'the longer the government goes, the better the story will become'. The Daily Mirror took the same view: 'The trend towards the
government has been evi- dent for months now, long before the voters had ever heard of Goose Green or Mount Kent.'
The sinister point for Labour was the drift of its own votes, rather than the Tories', to the SDP. 'For the Alliance,' said a Times leader, 'the lesson of the by- elections is that Labour has now become the more inviting target'. For the long term, it thought, it has become 'easier to imagine that Labour may be in a terminal condition'. In the Sunday Mirror, Woodrow Wyatt argued that the results confirmed the view that 'the SDP is more of a threat to the Labour Party than to the Conservatives'. Its role 'must be to provide an alternative to the increasingly discredited Labour Party', with such tactics they would be 'seriously in business' in five years. The corollary was an increase in David Owen's chances of snatching the SDP leadership from the right-wing Roy Jenkins, who con- fessedly never uses the word 'socialism' nowadays and thinks in terms of competing with moderate Tories. 'Is it all slipping away from Roy now?' was the heading on a Daily Mail interview with Roy by Ann Leslie, who caught Clarety in an elegiac mood: 'I've always believed it's a terrible mistake to live, breathe and eat politics . In ten years time I do not see myself being engaged in active politics . .. I've no inten- tion of hanging around indefinitely, doing a Gladstone or a Churchill.' Not much risk of that, I'd say. The Sunday Times gave four reasons to suggest. 'Why Roy might lose SDP crown': the fact that Shirley Williams had swung behind Owen; the 'valuable media coverage' for the little Doctor's views on the Falklands; Owen's known opposi- tion to a too-close relationship with the Liberals; and the need for 'positive and dynamic leadership' in the face of the Tory revival.
The man who was really in trouble, however, was the Old Bibliophile. 'Foot must go, Labour right and left agree', was the headline on a Times story last Saturday. The 'common scenario' was that Foot would be obliged to 'produce a doctor's let- ter after the party conference in October'. The timing would depend, according to one source, on 'whether Michael really ap- preciates the true calamity of his leadership or, perhaps more importantly, whether Mrs Foot accepts it'. Commentators were unclear about the precise nature of Foot's failings, other than an evident inability to deliver the goods in terms of votes. Alan Watkins in the Observer thought the trou- ble was that his virtues, 'acknowledged even by his political opponents', were in- visible to electors: `To them he is a long- haired old ranter who looks as if has just come off the site at McAlpines, where he is employed as an elderly tea-boy'. Watkins guessed Foot would stay on, but many papers, both Tory and Labour, thought a lot would depend on the line he takes on 23 June when the party's National Executive meets to discuss an internal report on the Militant Tendency. The Daily Express reported that 'Labour moderates' were 'privately admitting that only a thorough public purge of the hardline Left can put an end to Labour's agony'. 'The final fight for the soul of the Labour Party . . is about to begin' was the theme of a leader in the pro- Labour Sunday People. It dismissed Foot as 'an erudite philosopher, a humane anti- nuclear campaigner and socially charming'. His handling of the Militant report raised the question: 'When it comes to politics, is he really a leader? Labour's supporters de- mand an answer before they reaffirm their allegiance at the ballot box.' The Sunday Telegraph predicted the report would show
that membership of Militant was constitu- tionally incompatible with belonging to the Labour Party. Nevertheless, though 'the issue is now regarded as a crucial test for Mr Foot's leadership', it thought he 'will hold back from decisive action for fear of pro- voking a backlash from the Bennites'.
Contenders for Foot's crown of thorns were already active. Peter Shore was beating the patriotic Falklands drum in the News of the World: 'The freedom of the Falkland Islands will depend upon the early warning and rapid reinforcement facilities that we now install and the maintenance in the decades ahead of effective British sea and air power.' As for Roy Hattersley, he was still smarting from the exposure of his little ways in Susan Crosland's entertaining memoirs of her husband in the Sunday Times. These had placed Hat in a less than heroic light. It was wrong, he huffed, that Mrs Crosland should publish 'once-private conversations'. 'Whether the dialogue is to the credit or discredit of the participants hardly matters', continued Hat; 'People ought not to feel a need to speak with cau- tion when they go out to supper.' To which the Mail on Sunday's rude columnist, Willie Donaldson, added: 'This needed say- ing. It is outrageous that a man like Hat- tersley, who never stops talking, should have to be thinking at the same time.'
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