THE SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

A beautiful clear morning this week and the river brimming over with a flood tide, my train startled a bevy of swans which by chance had congregated on the floodwater of the river's bend nearest to the railway line. Suddenly alarmed, they all at once began their cumbersome and splashy process into flight. Beyond them, along the quays, were the attractive Baltic traders which come up this river where the Romans first entered. There is a certain laboured elegance about the flight of a couple of dozen swans, but nothing but confusion about their taking off. Boats are not dissimilar.

Bouquets for Tony

I think Anthony Crosland emerged with much distinction from his exchange of pleas- antries with myself and his admission that he has little time for small talk. My wife tells me she likes small talk, and I suppose in general women's talk is smaller than men's. A more delicate way of putting it was contrived by Michael Oakeshott in his elegant but difficult essay 'The Voice of Poetry in the Conserva- tion of Mankind': 'A girl, in order to escape a conclusion, may utter what appears to be an outrageously irrelevant remark, but what in fact she is doing is turning an argument she finds tiresome into a conversation she is more at home in'.

The following anecdote was lately told to me: Years ago, Mr Crosland was at a drinks party. He was holding forth, as was and is his wont. A girl, who some say was the hostess and others say was not, ap- proached him, saying, May I join you?' He replied, 'No, go away. This is man's talk.' She, so the apocrypha has it, said, 'If you say that again, I will punch you'. He said it again. She punched him. Before Mr Crosland jumps in with another denial, may I say that I have spoken to several of the witnesses; and they all deny it too, but all of them say, in their denials, that something of the sort took place.

Certainly, if it did not happen, it ought to have done so. For, to my mind, Tony Cros- land emerges with much credit from such anecdotage. I recall, in those strangely heady days immediately before we all went to the Polls and voted in Ted Heath, when every- body, Harold Wilson and the Tory brass and myself included, thought Wilson was about to win. several discussions about who would lead the Labour party supposing Harold Wilson fell under the proverbial bus. Dull and grey men were of course ex- cluded. So was Crossman, too flighty and unserious by half not to mention his highly suspect Platonic deviationism. Barbara Castle wouldn't do, not after her trouble with the unions. Denis Healey was too much like an overlord, and anyway he was that strange combination of ex-Communist turned game- keeping Minister of Defence: an intellectual who wasn't all that intellectual. Jim Callag- han was a policeman, so he wouldn't do. And Roy Jenkins, although everybody's second choice, inspired little affection except among those journalists with whom he chose, doubt- less deliberately, to talk. Faced with such a lot, my own personal choice was, and is (come to that) Tony Crosland, who has the great virtue, to my mind, of saying what he thinks less infrequently than his colleagues. and who anyway is cleverer than the rest of them. Whenever I said that Crosland was the best of the lot, a curious thing happened. Everybody first started laughing. Then, as they thought about it, they stopped laughing, and said, 'What a good idea', or words to such effect.

Out of the blacks

As a result of doctrinal problems connected, I seem to recall, with the operations in South Africa of Barclays nco, lots of students at Essex University decided some time ago to remove their accounts from Barclays Bank, which has a branch in the university's premi- ses, to the Post Office Giro. Last week's issue of Wyvern, the university's student journal has a sad paragraph saying there will be only three issues this term, three the next and only one in the summer term. Wyvern explains: 'Each edition is produced at a loss which is covered by the union subsidy: no credit or overdraft facilities are available from Post Office Giro, with whom we now bank—as they were with Barclays ...' Elsewhere in the issue they carry a report from Courier, New- castle University's newspaper: 'Despite tak- ing a policy decision to move their account from Barclays to Lloyds, the Newcastle SRC have not only not moved any accounts from Barclays, but have actually opened two new ones'.

If Wyvern is accurate, then it seems that the students of Newcastle are politically much more sophisticated than those at Essex, in that they pass resolutions, but do not actually act upon them. At Essex they like

'Btu mi 100 young 10 die'

to cut off their noses to spite their faces, which is something a genuine revolutionary like, say, Lenin, would never have been fool enough to do.

But the ladies slept on

The Yippies, giving a press conference ap- propriately at the ICA museum of lost cultural causes, were in plaintive mood after their outbreak on the Frost programme. They pointed out that they wanted total revolution but they also wanted respect, good housing and enough free food to go round. Under the bland chairmanship of Richard Neville, they announced the inauguration of the first British chapter of the Youth International party dedicated to supporting the IRA and the Palestinian revolutionaries and fighting op- pression all over the world. It was a time for consolidating and facing the future, but also of looking back nostalgically towards the past. Stu Albert recalled meeting Eldridge Cleaver in Europe and the Yippie-Panther pact made so long ago; and Jerry Rubin spoke of visiting Karl Marx's grave in Highgate the day before and honouring his memory.

The meeting closed on an elegiac note. Tom Love spoke movingly of the dustmen's strike—`a blow struck for freedom'—and Richard Neville announced that the Women's Liberation Front had been sup- posed to turn up but had overslept and been - delayed.

Clarion call

When some historian undertakes the great task of writing the history of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, the dirty jobs strike should get a chapter all to itself. Not only did the solid Labour burghers of what I suspect was once called Stepney or Whitechapel resist the just and righteous demands of their own brothers in the trade union movement, they also appealed to the Tory government to send in troops to clear up the rubbish accumulated during the strike—the only local council in the country to do so.

Now it happens that among the Tower Hamlets councillors are three full-time officials of the Transport and General Workers' Union—which, of course, represents the dustmen. When the news reached the horrified ears of Transport House the three were swiftly carpeted. The upshot? Not only no more troops, but the council smartly reversed its decision to resist the dustmen's pay claim and-gave them the full 55s increase they were asking for. Then, of course, the strike was settled for fifty bob. Who, I wonder, will pick up the bill for the troops, and who will pay the extra five bob a week? Not Transport House, I bet.

Mutatis mutandis

I remark that the Nederlands Dans Theater now performing at Sadler's Wells includes a ballet called Mutations, in which the nude bit is done by four men and a girl. The pro- portion I would have thought was just about exactly right for a balletic audience. They'd have to reverse the sex balance for the Palladium, or for Blackpool. come to that; although I dare say the likes of Brighton wouldn't object to the Anglo-Dutch propor- tional arrangement. There's nowt so queer as ballet folk.

THE SPECTATOR