Notebook
Mrs Thatcher has asked T. E. (Peter) Utley to write speeches for her between now and the general election. This is an inspired aPPointment, and I am delighted to hear that the Daily Telegraph has very generously granted him leave of absence from his leader-writing job so that he can give all his time to this new -appointment. The Telegraph's loss will be the Tory Party's gain, since Utley writes with a light, ironical touch very different from the more aggressively polemical approach of her present ghosts. Nobody is better able than he to give resonance to politcal argument. Instead of harassing readers with harsh invective, he tempts them towards the truth with wit and erudition. The trouble with Mrs Thatcher's Speeches to date has had more to do with tone than content. She says the right things but in the wrong way. Utley should supply Just that extra bit of class which can transform a hatchet job into a coup de grace. Another sign that Mrs Thatcher has taken recent criticisms about her abrasive style to heart is that Mr Alfred Sherman has been Instructed to adopt a lower profile. As a hackroom boy, this splendidly iconoclastic Marxist has much to commend him, since he has a mind as tough as old boots. But old boots are best kept in the background, for fear of giving offence.
I have just finished reviewing the Nixon memoirs for the American Spectator, whose editor kindly sent me photostats of what the 'LlS press has said about the book. Over there, the reviews were almost universally dismissive, damning the book as nothing more than a piece of third-rate special Pleading. It is, in fact, very much more than that. Over and over again, American intellectuals have underestimated this man, as I have more cause to remember than most, having once suffered personally from paying too much attention to their strictures. This happened in 1952, when I was a young foreign correspondent for The Times travelling on one of the presidential election camPaign trains, along with a crowd of other reporters, including the great Walter Lippmano, who then held undisputed sway over the American conscience. Nixon, who Was running as Eisenhower's VicePresidential candidate, had just delivered his famous, or notorious, Check:rs speech in which he had defended himself against the charge of having benefited from an illegal slush fund, ending his plea with the tearful admission that he did receive one gift after the nomination — 'a cocker spaniel dog, Checkers, and whatever they say we are going to keep her.' Naturally enough, as a young reporter on
his first foreign assignment, I was anxious to hear what the great pundit had thought of the performance. His judgment, delivered oracularly, was 'Even Eisenhower won't be able to swallow so much half-baked corn'.
Trustingly, I rushed to my typewriter and informed the British public that informed opinion expected General Eisenhower to drop Mr Nixon from the ticket. In the event, of course, he did no such thing. The Checkers speech was a stupendous success, and I was left having to explain to London how it was that I had come to make such an appalling error of judgment. Although this was very embarrassing at the time, it taught me a useful lesson — never to trust received opinion about Richard Nixon, whose political skill has always been much greater than his American detractors were prepared to recognise. So, judging by his memoirs, is his literary skill. I must confess, incidentally, to having been more relieved than disappointed not to find my own name in the index, unlike that of Bernard Levin who gets honourable mention. At the height of the Vietnam war, Nixon wrote to me from the White House suggesting that I let him have my views, and I was rather dreading that there might be some reference to the blood-curdling nature of our subsequent epistolary exchanges, which culminated eventually in a personal meeting, presumably bugged. I cannot now remember quite what I wrote, or said, and am very happy not to be reminded.
Society lavishes much sympathy on the problems of the old and of the young, but very little on those of the middle-aged. No organisation exists to console them. Yet in many ways middle age is the most difficult period of all, since by then one has lost the confidence of youth without finding the resignation of age. It is too late to hope, but also too early to despair. One is neither wise enough to be fatalistic nor foolish enough to be sanguine. No wonder there are more nervous breakdowns in this age group than in any other. When one is very young, everything seems possible, and when one is very old, nothing. But in middle age there is still enough ambition left to make one dread failure but not enough to force one to avoid it. Illusions have evaporated about the likelihood of victory but not so completely as to make way for acceptance of defeat. After listening to me moaning like this recently my doctor prescribed some antidepressant pills called Stelladex. These worked wonders until I looked them up in a medical dictionary, only to find that they were usually given to pregnant women suffering from obesity. At first, I thought there must be some mistake. But on second thoughts, the connection between that female condition and a middle-aged male author struggling to give birth to a difficult article seemed rather too close for comfort.
My French wife, who has lived in this country for thirty years without entirely losing her Yvonne Arnaud accent, recently asked her way some where from an elderly newsvendor in Oxford Street. His reply was: 'The only way I'm going to f***ing well tell you is the way to go home to where you f***ing well came from'. If this is the treatment meted out even to white foreigners with only a light trace of an accent in Central London, one dreads to imagine what happens to black or brown immigrants in the East End!
After reading my last Spectator Notebook, my wife suggested that Alastair Forbes was quite justified to complain about it being too much like Jennifer's Diary. So this time I dare not tell you about a meeting I had last week with Prince Charles, or what it was like to dine at Apsley House. But this enforced reticence goes very much against the grain, since half the fun of the grand social round is to be able to boast about it afterwards. In any case people enjoy reading that kind of thing, and it is not at all clear to me why they should be denied such harmless pleasure. Recounting gossip, and describing salon life, seems to me far more socially relevant than much so-called investigative journalism — and not one whit more malicious either. Arse-crawling, which is Jennifer's besetting sin, or biting the hand that feeds him, which is Nigel Dempster's, are far less to be deplored than the constant knocking of the body politic which Bruce Page goes in for in the increasingly dreary columns of the new New Statesman. Surely even Alastair Forbes could not disagree with that.
Peregrine Worsthorne
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