0 THE SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
coommilowe s■witsigai IIIVI°st of the thirty-nine stalwart Tories bewho opposed the declaration in principle of Ipsupport for British entry into the Common "Market are remaining firm. Within the 11,Labour party, however, the Jenkinsites are nu crumbling and only a very small number of them are, I understand, thought likely to I ee continue to support the Tory government's Ill European adventure with their votes. I was glad to learn this, for I had thought that rid Mr Jenkins in particular had grown so careless of his long-term prospects inside the .Labour party that he was prepared Publicly to abandon them by supporting lit Mr Heath in the division lobbies if neces1ff sary. t4 Roy Jenkins has not forgotten that he was once Harold Wilson's chosen succes sor. Had Wilson won the last election, he el° would, other things being equal, have seen to it that in due course and at the approii priate moment he handed over to Jenkins. There is no insurmountable barrier between Jenkins and the leadership of the Labour party, provided of course that the deputy Leader behaves himself and works his way back into favour by toeing the party's anti-Common Market line. Otherwise, his fate will be like that of Herbert Morrison, whom Attlee saw to it would never succeed to the leadership. Eventually. Morrison went to the Lords, bitter and disappointed. At the end of his life he was to have received the Garter, as consolation prize; but he died too soon re
)1 The Queen's death It is curious how vehicles, in the eyes of many, possess lives and characteristics of their own. Cars are given nicknames; and railway engines, aircraft, ships are provided with official names. Even the meanest rowing boat has its name, and there can be very few sailors who do not call the boats and ships they sail in by some feminine name and attribute to each vessel a particular personality. I thought myself immune until I saw on television the Queen Elizabeth burning to death in Hong Kong harbour. My wife and I were both moved by this ending of the great ship. We had sailed on her last voyage to New York, when, if past her Prune, she was nevertheless the noblest thing afloat. I had al-o sailed in her in 1947 or 1948, as an inefficient member of her crew. She was my first taste of luxury, she took me to the rich splendours of New York, and she was richness herself, then, newly fitted and dolled out with pre-war furnishings and burnishings that had never been used. She had gone straight from John Brown's yard to war Now, sunk, gutted, burned out the Queen Elizabeth has become a huge nuisance in Hong Kong harbour: a miserable end. The Queen Mary is lost, too, from these shores. The QE2 is new, still, and also lovely in her fashion. Nothing like her will be built again, I suppose; and so I hope that, whenever the moment comes (which I trust will be far off) when she ends her economic life, she will find a permanent place of preservation here, in this country. Nigel Broakes and his Trafalgar Investments have taken over the QE2 along with Cunard. It would be good to think that he will bear at the back of his mind the thought that in the QE2 he possesses something unique which should not be sent to any knackers yard.
Frost's return
David Frost's return to our television screens struck me as demure, but mildly interesting. His chief guest was a very cool woman who talked a lot of sense about the differences between men and women — more sense, at any rate, than did some of the selected women in the audience. I would be more impressed by female journalists like Jill Tweedie, when they claim equality with men, if they did not write about women's problems all the time. I read Jill Tweedie in the Guardian the morning after Frost's night before, and she went on and on about getting herself analysed in a way which left me unsure whether or not she was trying to be funny. Alan Brien was sitting beside her: he is the only male journalist I can think of who writes about himself and his internal prob‘:lems the same way as female journalists do about themselves and theirs. I thought he was asking for a rather snappy reply from Frost when he uttered the criticism that Frost had introduced Kingsley Amis's wife as Mrs Amis instead of Elizabeth Jane Howard, the novelist, and wondered whether Kingsley should not have been called Elizabeth Jane Howard's husband.
"Who is that fellow with the beard?"
"Don't you know? He's Jill Tweedie's boy friend."
A thug is a thug is a thug
Doubtless Menachem Begin when boss of Irgun Zwei Leumi ("Between two rivers "), the Jewish IRA or Vietcong, felt himself morally entitled to order the hanging of British soldiers in 1947, the blowing up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem, the massacre of the Arab villagers of Deir Yassin. We need not argue about it. nor need we be soft. Begin, who is a man of violence and an extremist in anybody's language, comes to London and says "People are inclined to forget how ten of our best men in Israel were hanged in Jerusalem (Jerusalem?) between 1946 and 1947 for purely political reasons. They went to the gallows singing and they went on singing until their last breath. The fight is now over. So let us be friends."
I do not follow the argument. No more than one Auschwitz justifies another Auschwitz, does one political hanging justify another. To say this to Israelis is risky: many of them believe that history has supplied them with a large credit balance in atrocities, the creation of refugees and military conquest which they are far from having used up. I prefer Gertrude Stein's "a rose is a rose is a rose" logic for once: a thug is a thug is a thug.
False appearances
Begin's visit prodded my memory. There is a famous story about the blowing-up of the King David hotel. It was Jimmy Cameron, I think, who had just arrived in Jerusalem to write about the troubles and the crisis and who went out on to his balcony in the hotel as soon as he arrived, with a colleague who was telling him how dangerous it all was. Cameron surveyed the scene: it was peaceful and beautiful. "It looks perfectly quiet to me," he said; and at that precise moment, the hotel blew up. And about that same time in Cambridge, a research student and an undergraduate conceived a strong dislike to their college's bursar, to whom they made anonymous telephone calls saying "the Irgun Zwei Leumi are out for you." The bursar eventually called in the police and special branch who started tracing telephone calls. Eventually the couple were caught, and an angry Master of their college rusticated the undergraduate and told the research student that he would have to wait at least another year for his expected fellowship. The undergraduate is now the deputy editor of a famous newspaper and the research student the Dean of his faculty.
Previous page
