Anniversary Thoughts for Orpington

By.HENRY FAIRLIE

TN none of their speeches do Sir Alec Douglas- Home and Mr. Harold Wilson bother even to mention, far less to attack, the Liberals; from the press, it is hard to know whether Mr. Jo Grimond is making any speeches at all. This is the astonishing position exactly two years after the Liberal candidate at Orpington—now the Liberal Whip: no one can complain that there is not rapid promotion in the Liberal Party—won 52.9 per cent of the votes. 'Orpington,' it may be added, is not one of the new words included in the revised edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

All the scorn which some of us poured on the Liberal pretensions in that hour of victory now seems justified; and, if one pours more scorn on them, one can hardly be accused of kicking a man only when he is down. The Liberal pretensions have, in fact, been based on mis- conceptions and illusions all along.

Of all the illusions—and I would like to be frank—perhaps the most serious has been the idea that Mr. Grimond is a leader, or even a potential leader. Indeed, the same may be said of most of his colleagues. Only Mr. Mark Bonham Carter has emerged from the past two years with added credit. For the rest, the Liberals, looking at their team, must hear Kipling's words sound harshly in their ears: Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls

With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.

All, indeed, they can console their souls with today are the trinkets of small electoral gains.

Mr. Grimond, in his speeches and television addresses, falls back, again and again, on the kind of generalised, phoney-sociological crit- icisms of the `State of Britain' which were fash- ionable in some disgruntled circles last summer. There was never very much in those criticisms: there certainly was not enough to sustain a serious, and general, political appeal. Although Mr. Wilson was inclined to make the same crit- icisms last summer, he has, as the serious

business of persuading the country has become more pressing, addressed himself to the more practical concerns of the nation.

As Mr. Wilson makes speech after speech, it becomes clear how far he is ready to go in using the powers of the State in order to solve the country's problems; as Sir Alec Douglas- Home makes speech after speech, he makes clear the limits he would observe in.using the power of the State. Between the two, the country will choose, and will be able to choose intelligently, because two quite distinct attitudes are being presented to them.

The Liberals may say that, in their policy statements, there are clear enough proposals: so there may be. But, in fact, the actual proposals of all the parties are so similar that it is the language which the party leaders choose, and the way in which this language betrays certain attitudes, that in the end influences, and rightly influences, the electors. To put it in a popular idiom, the electors get a general but perfectly clear picture of what the parties 'stand for.'

It is impossible, by this standard of judgment, to tell from Mr. Grimond's speeches what the Liberal Party 'stands for.' He, his Parliamentary colleagues and the Liberal candidates waver enough in their advocacy of particular policies. But not even this dismal record is as serious as the inability of Mr. Grimond ever to convey a consistent emphasis in his attacks on the two major parties. At one moment he appears to emphasise the Liberals' determination to use the powers of the State; at others he seems to emphasise their determination to preserve free- dom and private enterprise.

What is more, this inconsistent emphasis is inevitable because the Liberal Party `stands for' nothing, which is why so few of its candidates ever sit for any constituency. It is worth examin- ing the claim of the Liberal Party that its policies are stolen by the other two parties. The claim is, in fact, a severe self-condemnation. It means that there is nothing in the Liberal policies which the other parties can find objectionable. There is plenty in the policies of the Labour Party which the Conservatives could never adopt; and there is much in the policies of the Conservatives which the Labour Party could not adopt.

But, on this mournful occasion when Orping- ton man is being buried, it is as well to return to him. Almost the first thing, necessary to say about him is that, in this year of Shakespeare's quatercentenary, Shakespeare would not have understood him or, if he had understood him, would have made him a half-comic, half-tragic category. (It has been pointed out to me, since last week, that Shakespeare will be added to the Beatles and the Royal Babies as an excuse for the Labour Party's defeat.) Hamlet niay have havered and wavered, but he had a dignity which it is hard to recognise in Mr. Grimond. • I have a feeling that the Porter in Macbeth is the nearest that Shakespeare came to Orping- ton man : here was a man who had not come to terms with his position in the world, or with himself, and who, when he woke up next morn- ing, would certainly have blamed society for his hangover, for his failure, for his unhappiness.

Still, Orpington man—to say nothing of Orpington woman—has eventually to face reality. It seems fairly obvious that both of these unhappy characters will, when the day comes, vote for reality and not for their own disgruntle- ment. No one, in spite of all the investigations, really knows what Orpington man and woman voted for two years ago, but it is becoming in- creasingly clear that they themselves now know that, if they voted for the Liberal Party, they, would be voting for the vacuousness of their own lives, and that is precisely, at general elections, what the majority of people will not do.

In a way, there must be some sadness that the Liberal tradition should be identified with a party whose leaders appeal so consistently to the least side of men—though they may use eloquent language to disguise the fact, and, in the end, there is no reminder more worth making than that there are liberals in the Labour Party, and liberals in the Conservative Party, and that it is these who perform the valuable function of helping to civilise the political life of this country.

`Now all you have to do is to stop it going out again.'