A Spectator's Notebook

The first ballot for the selection of the Tory leader was predictably preceded by many excited-schoolboy gatherings and little dinners given by the pudgy young acolytes that Ted Heath gathered around himself during the last few years. Peter Walker, to whom Heath's defeat has been a very nasty wound indeed, rushed protestingly to the Evening Standard When they teasingly said that he'd only just beaten Kenneth Baker in running to congratulate Margaret Thatcher. It was Walker, too, Who wrote a most injudicious and spiteful letter in the tone of a scorned she-cat to a former MP Who dared to suggest in print that Walker was ambitious'. Walker's letter will one day, no doubt, help the sales of some private political memorabilia when they come to be offered to one of the Sunday reviews. _.Walker was not alone in backing Heath. Nigel Lawson, to the shame of this paper of Which he was at one time editor, arranged many little intimate suppers and meetings at is house, 47 Hyde Park Gate, where fruitless Plans were laid to dish Margaret Thatcher. The fun for the rest of us in all this has been to witness how a truly secret and free ballot 1-1Pset all the confident calculations based on On secassurances.

rossman's Diaries

Richard Crossman's Diaries go on to the profit of the Sunday Times. They came just in time for rise in price to 15p. If Crossman had not been a socialist politician and journalist, it is evident from the Diaries that he would have r‘tieen equally adaptable to membership of the Lixford Group movement or the Radio Church of God or an advocate of haybox cookery. The Diaries show, whatever we may have 'nought privately, that in Harold Wilson the untrY was favoured with a strong, Roosevel'an Prime Minister. Crossman thought Wilson ;Is Only happy drinking with his social eriors, though it is transparent that, however ',lard he tried, he was too kind to cut `rue-believing bores like Crossman.

sioCrossman certainly did not give the impres

il to any of us who met him that he was in any waY socially invulnerable. There is Something pathetic in his fawning support of ,,wilson. It is somehow difficult to imagine the Jdnling Harold hanging around Clem Attlee's oorstep hoping to be asked in for a drink.

is beautiful

V1Year my wife bought a Morris Maxi for ond £1,600, though I now see that the price by4s reached E2,000. The Maxi is mass produced overBritish Leyland and sells well against be se , competition. It must, to some extent, d t!etallee las culmination of sophisticated design, d ?time-and-motion studies, and the ending of huge sums in flow-line and nr.totnation technology. Llring the past few days I have seen a short ....in'i on television about a small firm in Hereford hatvhe renowned Morgan motor company. They c 'table profe. been in business for fifty years and are still .aotunder's fa

and owned by a descendant of the __work on mily. Less than 100 skilled men are a full order book, (coming from all

ner the world), producing five or six cars a t0 00 for which customers are ready to wait up flan tWo years. You do not have to be, like me, a s_11 of .Professor Schumacher, the author o. f itirnt all IS Beautiful, or to have an interest in haearinediate technology to guess the rest. The then—nlade Morgan sells for the same price as

Mass-produced Maxi, just £2,000.

Jewish merchant banks

It is ironic in a week in which British Jews are grumbling that the Treasury only lets them repatriate £24 million a year to Zionist causes — a figure which they are having difficulty in raising just now — that Jewish merchant banks are complaining that they are being blacklisted from participation in international Eurodollar loans involving Arab funds. It is ironic particularly inasmuch as Kleinwort Benson— some of whose partners are of Sephardic Jewish extraction — is one of the banks admitting to knuckling to Arab pressures. Hill Samuel, hardly a Jewish bank in spite of its name, though for all I know there may be some Jewish partners, is apparently unacceptable to the Arabs, yet Hambros — in the eighteenth century a Jewish bank — is okay. Guinness Mahon, which sounds as Irish as the Liffey, is a Jewish bank with a first-generation Ashkenazian Jew, Lord Kissin, as its chairman. Is Guinness Mahon acceptable to the Arabs?

Jews and Jewish banks should not trouble themselves with these blacklistings, though it is probably deposits more than loans that concern them most. They have merely to work through one or other of the non-kosher banks that the Arabs like.

Sandringham

Notwithstanding the uproar about her salary, the Queen's decision to postpone the restoration, and to reduce the the size, of Sandringham House, because of the state of the economy, shows the royal family still have a greater grasp and understanding of public attitudes than ministers.

Stanley Baldwin gave a large amount of his private capital to the Treasury in 1917. Winston Churchill did not collect his salary as Leader of the Opposition after the second world war. It is so easily and sneeringly said that these were comparatively rich men, who were making political gestures. So they were, and so much easier it was for them to advocate unpleasant restrictive measures. But how different from 1975 when, with the exception of Michael Foot, there has not been a single meaningful gesture in the way of a voluntary forgoing of salary by anyone at all in public life. Rather the reverse — grabbing what's going and persuasively arguing a case for more

Lobby Lyrics-14

John Brutus wasn't what you'd call The noblest Tory of them all, For shortly after Suez, he, Rebelled against Sir Anthony; And next he shifted his attack To try and oust old Super-Mac, And, this achieved, he planned the doom Of his successor, Alec Home, And lately, all he's done and said Has been designed to topple Ted. Last Tuesday, when they took a poll On who should fill the vital role, While most MPs were giving thought To which contender to support,

John had a different aim in mind,

He scanned the list to try to find The one who had the greatest chance And plot his downfall in advance. Ogilvy Lane Ogilvy Lane is the pseudonym of a member of the House of Lords.