DIARY
CHARLES MOORE In Belfast last week, I met the leading figures of the North Down Conservative Association. The association already has 300 members and they are perfectly se- nous. They intend to put up a Conserva- tive candidate at the next General Elec- tion. They have supporters in other Ulster constituencies and aim to set up across the province. They want, naturally, to affiliate to the Conservative National Union. No Party is as ruthless as the Conservatives in their desire to win seats, and one might have thought that Central Office would have welcomed the newcomers with open arms. Not a bit of it. The party Chairman, Mr Peter Brooke, has expressed courteous but firm disapproval. The Conservative Party, he said in a speech in Durham, is a unionist party; in Northern Ireland, he went on, politics centres round the ques- tion of the Union; therefore, he concluded, With a logic which would normally be described as Irish, the Conservatives must not stand in Northern Ireland. Mr Brooke is worried, he says, that the unionist vote Will split. So there we have it. The Con- servative Party, which for years has casti- gated sectarian politics in Ulster, is now Offered the setting up of a bona fide non-sectarian party — a branch of itself — in Ulster, and it hurries to support the much more sectarian Ulster Unionist par- ties. Not surprisingly, Mr Ian Paisley's press officer in North Down wrote to the County Down Spectator (no relation) and said, 'Mr Brooke is really a friend of the Union.' Since Mr Brooke's stated reasons are flatly self-contradictory, there must be Other, hidden ones. These are, I think, that the Irish Republic would be furious and that Conservative representation in Ulster would force the Government to treat the Province day-to-day as part of the United Kingdom rather than, as it prefers, as an unruly colony. By the time you read this, the National Union will have decided about North Down, probably following Mr Brooke's wishes. But the Conservatives of Northern Ireland will not go away.
Iwas in Northern Ireland to address the TB. A's quinquennial conference on reli- gious broadcasting, held at Newcastle, Co. Down, where the Mountains of Mourne go down to the sea. My role was to be what the BBC used to call the `right-wing twit'. This I dutifully performed, saying that most existing religious broadcasting was irreligious, and criticising the mainstream churches for not taking advantage of the coming revolution in broadcasting by establishing their own channels and pro- duction companies. I was heard with polite hostility, which is the worst sort of hostility to deal with, so I was very relieved when a Young Jewess, who lacked the inhibitions of the churchy, came up to me and said, 'Did you mean to be so insulting? I found what you said really offensive.' In the course of the conference, I found my own views hardening. I do not honestly look forward to the broadcasting revolution since the prospect of more channels seems tedious: I am simply in favour of the changes as allowing greater freedom than the present duopoly. But the defeatism of the liberal clerics and producers round me was so deep, and their attitude to the future so querulous that I found myself almost longing for 24-hour Jimmy Swag- gart. Yeats's oft-quoted line about the best lacking all conviction and the worst being filled with passionate intensity came to mind, with an addition: when the best lack all conviction they are no longer the best.
The political crisis in Israel, in which no stable government can be formed and the balance of power is held by the extreme religious parties, has a simple cause. It is not the result of Israel's emotional agony and division, strong though these may be, but of the electoral system. Israel has a proportional representation which gives seats to any party getting more than one per cent of the vote. One per cent of the vote in Israel is a little over 20,000 votes. This very low threshold allows the present baker's dozen of minor parties to be represented. If Israel adopted the German threshold of five per cent, only one of these parties, on last week's figures, would have reached the Knesset. Israel's extremity of democracy is dangerous to herself and the rest of the world.
We have all had a good laugh about the bigotry of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland (not the 'Wee Frees' by the way, as was wrongly reported, but a breakaway church upset by their 'liberal- ism') in censuring the Lord Chancellor for attending a Roman Catholic requiem mass. Less noticed in the same week has been a fine example of a new phenomenon ecumenical bigotry. The Bishop of Liver- pool, Dr David Sheppard, was invited to preach the Remembrance Sunday sermon at Enniskillen this Sunday, a year after the bombing there. Dr Sheppard has refused on the grounds that he could not go unless the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Liver- pool were also asked: 'I felt that it would not have been understood in Liverpool if I had gone alone.' By which the bishop must mean, I guess, that to show sympathy with the Protestant people of Enniskillen would upset the Irish Roman Catholics of Liver- pool. Surely such an anxiety, in such circumstances, is contemptible. Lord Mackay is not allowed to show respect for a dead colleague: the Bishop of Liverpool does not allow himself to show respect for the dead of Enniskillen.
he Spectator recently sponsored a debate at the Cambridge Union, as we also do at Oxford at the beginning of the academic year. In my experience, these are usually rather dreadful occasions. There are interminable paper speeches, very little debate from the floor and jokes that make one cry. The recent Cambridge debate was quite different. There were only four out- side speakers (Lord Deedes, Michael Ho- ward, James Naughtie and myself), and the structure of debates has now been changed so that the entire floor debate takes place in the middle of the evening instead of beginning late at night after the visitors and paper speakers have all disappeared. As a result, there is a real debate. You actually feel that people care about what is being said. In this case, the motion was, 'The British press is too important to be left to right-wing capital.' We, its opposers, were heavily defeated, and I noticed that, for the first time in my memory, the Left was taking debate at the Union seriously and making the best speeches. Since the mid- Sixties, the Left has dismissed the Union as bourgeois and elitist. Now its supporters are back as they would have been in the 1950s, full of political passion, but no longer disdainful of the accepted forms. If this is a real trend there might arise a left-wing party fit to govern the country.
Many thanks to all those readers who defied Mr Neal Ascherson and sent us Spectator subscriptions to Poland. We are just short of a hundred subscriptions. We shall feed everything into the computer on Tuesday, so please do send a few last- minute ones to get us into three figures. Cheques (£30.25 per subscription) should be sent to The Spectator for Poland, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL. Next week's Diarist is Nicholas Garland.
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