AND ANOTHER THING
Evans above! Why not speak the truth for a change?
PAUL JOHNSON
One of the penalties I pay for no longer attending Commons debates is that many admirable MPs thus escape my atten- tion. So I had never heard of David Evans until he suddenly burst on the world last week. Everything he is reported to have said seems to be true, the only exception being his underestimation of the massive intelligence of the delectable Virginia Bot- tomley. But as he has already apologised for this solecism and been, with characteris- tic grace, forgiven, we can overlook it. All the rest was admirable and will have been endorsed by three quarters of the popula- tion, probably more. The fact that it was condemned by most of the media and rent- a-quote politicians shows how out of touch they are with the public.
Two points strike me. The first is the innocence of Mr Evans, who foolishly sup- posed that his informal remarks to a bunch of schoolkids would remain privileged. We live in a media democracy which positively rewards disloyalty, betrayal and the theft of documents. We all have to be on our guard all the time. No television presenter can risk walking into a respectable brothel with- out the fact being reported in the News of the World. No matter how intimate the din- ner party, I now resignedly assume that any remarks I make there are liable to appear (mendaciously distorted, of course) in one of the many gossip columns of the Guardian, whose chief purpose is to exploit the current climate of political and social treason. Poor Mr Evans is not sortable and therefore is used to mixing exclusively with blue-rinse Tory ladies and self-made busi- nessmen — about the only people left in our country who have a sense of honour.
The second point I noticed was that Evans's remarks were immediately dis- avowed, without qualification, by John Major. The Prime Minister made no attempt to criticise the way in which his col- league had been let down by those who invited him to talk to the children. Major had simply been told by the left-wing peo- ple who now surround him that Evans had made some politically incorrect remarks, so he denounced him, in exactly the same spir- it in which he invites sodomites for noggins at No. 10. I hasten to assure Evans that being disavowed by Major — the kind of person Bonaparte had in mind when he used the expression merde en bas de soie — is actually an honour. If he wants to put Major in his lowly place, he should resign the now totally discredited Tory whip and stand as a Conservative Refer- endum candidate, thereby ensuring he keeps his seat.
My sympathy is always with public figures accused of 'outbursts' when they speak a simple truth. I have long lost count of the number of outbursts of which I have been guilty. Actually, I am luckier than most out- bursters because my words are written, not spoken, and therefore more deliberate. And I have a long-stop in the shape of my wife, who reads everything I write before it is put on the fax machine, ostensibly to cor- rect the many spelling mistakes but in reali- ty for the purpose of marital censorship and outburst removal. In nine out of ten cases I accept her advice, and she is usually proved right. Indeed, the only time I had a blazing row with Prime Minister Thatcher occurred when Marigold was away and so unable to persuade me to remove a dis- obliging remark about the Iron Lady. (Oddly enough, Mrs T later admitted that she, not I, had been in the wrong.) Politicians, however, deal in the spoken word and therefore get into trouble more readily. There are many mediaeval instances too complicated to explain here. The first quasi-modern MP to shoot his mouth off, and in a broad Devonshire accent too, was Sir Walter Ralegh, who shocked the bien-pensants on at least two occasions: first when he admitted in the House that the 'Queen's Books' (tax assess- ments) were deliberately falsified in favour of sitting MPs; and second when he boasted he 'often' stopped an MP from going into the wrong lobby to vote by clutching at his sleeve (cries of, 'Oh, oh!'). His modern equivalent is Alan (`Bongo-Bongo') Clark, who, like Ralegh, gets away with it.
Many great men, such as Lord Chatham, have been outbursters. The Duke of `It's happening again. Evetybody's glowering at me. You're my shrink, what should I do?' Wellington indeed burst his way out of office at the end of 1830 when, without pre- meditation, he denounced parliamentary reform root and branch. Aware of the shocked silence among their ministerial lordships, he turned to his colleague Lord Aberdeen and asked, 'Have I gone too far? The dour Scot replied laconically, 'Ye'll hear aboot it.' A week later the government fell. My old friend Aneurin Bevan was a habitual outburster. His 'naked into the international council chamber' speech, though absolutely spot-on, was denounced by the Left as an unforgivable loss of rea- son. He got similar treatment by the Right for calling Hugh Gaitskell 'a desiccated cal- culating machine' (true in part, though Gaitskell was also an exceptionally randy coureur of society dames). And Nye greatly annoyed Mr Attlee by calling the Tories `lower than vermin', provoking Churchill's riposte, 'Of course, Bevan has known some high-placed rats in his time. Indeed he is one.' It also led to Nye being kicked down the steps of White's, an episode I found he was curiously reluctant to discuss. Almost by definition, what bursts out is nearly always the uncomfortably obvious. There was an occasion in the 1890s when Lord Rosebery got into grievous trouble. In discussing Anglo-Irish relations, he referred to Britain as 'the predominant partner'. Wearying of the ensuing row, he complained to Sir Henry Campbell-Ban; nerman, 'After all, what I said is correct. On which C-B, recounting the conversation in a letter, chuckled, 'It is characteristic of His Lordship's political naivety that he should consider a remark acceptable simPlY on the grounds that it is true.' It is because we have been over-inclined, in recent years, to follow the path of C-B s prudential obscurantism rather than Rose' bery's truth-telling that Britain is, in many ways, an unhappy society. The public, or most of them, are increasingly alienated from politicians precisely because it is felt that they dodge saying what they know to be true for fear of offending the tinY minorities and lobbies who draw up the, canonical parameters of discourse an o determine what words and expressions shall, or shall not, be used. So Evans, in his own innocent way, struck a blow for better communications between the people and their masters. Perhaps we ought to institute a David Evans Week, in which everyone speaks the truth.
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