Monday's child
Sir: May I please reply through your columns to the letter of your correspondent, Mr Tim Bearsden, of Christ Church, entitled 'Mon- day's child'? Now that he has re- vealed his identity (unlike the in- effable Mercurius Oxoniensis), I am delighted to withdraw the sug- gestion in my letter to you of 20 February that at the pro-Dutschke meeting at the Oxford Union on 18 January he was representing the National Front. I gladly acknow- ledge his distinguished, and no doubt onerous, position as chair- man of the Wessex Monday Club.
Mr Bearsden's political views are clearly a pole apart from mine. But that does not mean that if he is of the extreme right, I must be of the extreme left. I am in fact an old- fashioned liberal, squeezed in the middle, like so many of my friends of the anti-fascist generation of 1933-45, by the growing pressure of polarisation between two ex- tremes. -
The first fruits of Mr Bearsden's policy of 'mobilising' a group of 'intransigently right-wing under-
graduates' appears to have been the left's demonstration on 5 March, led by Tariq Ali, against visiting diplomats from South Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia invited to Oxford by the Monday Club (see report in the Times, 6 March), Standing after dinner that evening across the High from the Tackley Restaurant, watching the demo seething round the door and the police hovering in small groups on every side, two thoughts came into my mind: first, whether the groups of the extreme left present were going to smash the Tackley (which happens to be the property of my own College), as the Garden Hotel was smashed at Cambridge last summer; and second, which of the two leading organisations involved, the extreme left or the Monday Club, should be regarded as the more responsible for the incident. Assuming that there is going to be a recurrence of such incidents, the future of student politics in Oxford bodes ill. For- • tunately the Student Representative Council is in good hands, and has already collected 2,000 junior members' signatures for a Dutschke Petition to the Home Secretary, almost identical with that for senior members which my colleague, Mr Tim Mason, and my- self initiated.
I am grateful to Mr Bearsden for one thins: his letter shows a welcome spirit of courtesy, good humour and respect for his politi- cal opponents. This is indeed a consoling contrast to the grotesque fantasies and vulgar abuse of Mer- curius Oxoniensis which you, Sir, for reasons presumably considered by yourself to be good, but inex- plicable to me, persist in publish- ing.
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