Political commentary

A night at the play

Ferdinand Mount

My dear young friend, Your invitation to compose a 'profile' of Mr Michael Foot discomposed me to an extent which was scarcely lessened by the rude intelligence that 'we can't afford to pay Fleet Street rates for features.' My prose, alas, is so innocently featureless. Its bland undulations are unbroken by the banal exactitudes of the profile. I aim, in short, for the grand blur. I confess, moreover, with what passes for a blush mantling my withered cheek, that at first I doubted your carefree claim that these days letters were — ah what embracing phase — 'the In thing.' To my antique nostrils, the epistolary mode still exhales the dust and lavender of those bundles menacingly gripped by pink ribbon. Besides, to place uncompromisingly upon the London stage letters so freshly issued from Downing Street, the ink barely dry, the butler's thumb as yet warm upon the envelope, would in my day have been an inconceivable exploit.

I am, as you know, no fine judge of what will `go over', But if Guy Dornville was too thin a wine to travel those few agonising inches beyond the Acheron of the orchestra pit, then the letters of Denis Thatcher would hardly seem a more durable vintage. And yet I am unflinchingly informed that if I wish to incise my profile 'in depth', that feat of excavation can be performed only by an, as it were, public shouldering of the chisel. I must, in brief, attend Anyone for Denis? in order to observe my quarry at play.

Your injunction so gaily flung at my retreating form — 'don't tread on Bill's toes' — compounded my bewilderment. That the Editor of the Daily Telegraph should be reviewing such a production for the Spectator — one respectable washerwoman, so to speak, taking in another's dirty washing — left me breathless. I struggled in vain to imagine Morley or Asquith noticing a public reading from Mrs Gladstone's private correspondence, although I could not but tremulously concede that wild horses would not have kept Dizzy away.

But such fusty musings were incontinently broken in upon, as the performance bared itself to my astonished gaze. I never witnessed such a farrago of indecent emanations, of malodorous explosions, of un tethered nether garments, of jests that might have matured into double entendres had they not been so rudely plucked from the vine. My view of these ambiguous proceedings was, however, interrupted by the curious behaviour of an elderly whitehaired gentleman seated in front of us.

In repose, the hoary mane and hornrimmed spectacles imbued this character with a bookish mien. But as soon as the salacities were broached, he threw himself about in his seat, so that his snowy locks shook with prophetic passion. No convulsive Dickensian ancient could have outdone the frenzy of his mirth nor the emphatic thumping of the walking-stick which he held at his side.

'Jenkins won't survive this,' he flung out with a careless chortle.

'Surely that cannot be Mr Foot,' I said to my companion — the most genially nodding of acquaintances, I hasten to add, for I am told that 'my companion' now bears a more intimate sense being frequently understood to carry the prefix `live-in', suggesting that permanence formerly confined to domestic servants of the resident sort.

'Indeed it is,' my companion returned, 'and the old boy seems to be loving it' — he appended, as another eruption of laughter struck the elderly gentleman with almost Vesuvian force. Upon the stage, the butler, who went by the name of Jenkins, had lost his trousers again.

'Where is the ranting radical you promised me?' I whispered to my mentor. 'This is surely a good-humoured old fellow?'

'He is much changed. You should have seen him before.'

'Surely he must still rant when he enlarges upon the Irish question,' I vaguely hazarded.

'Not a bit of it. On the Irish question, he is a sound old-fashioned Unionist. He gives not an inch to the Fenians.'

'Is it then your domestic discontents that he prefers to foment?' I venturesomely cast about. 'An old friend may be permitted to remark that there appears to be some shortage of employment in the workshops and that the negroes throng more insistently than upon my last visit.'

'No, Mr Foot stands firm behind the constabulary. He gives neither aid nor comfort to riot. At most, he indicates in the most genteel manner that unemployment may be one cause of the late disturbances.'

'Does he conciliate the Russians instead?' I desperately offered.

'No, he sits by as mild as milk while Mr Healey vows to defy the Russian bear.'

'We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do?'

'Exactly so, except that we haven't got the money to,' my companion returned.

'Then why do the newspapers say that the Labour Party has fallen into the hands of Bolsheviks?'

`So it has. But Mr Foot dare not say so.

Nor can he throw them out, because they put him in. All he can do is to propound a sound patriotic policy on his own account to persuade the public that things have not gone as far downhill as they have.'

'And are they so persuaded?' fear not.'

'But surely they must give Mr Foot credit for this unwavering patriotism. A man of his age must find it an exhausting business.'

'Politics is a cruel profession. And it is unjustly suspected that Mr Foot is only interested in votes and that his patriotic principles are merely a temporary cloak for his real bolshevik intentions.'

'Unjustly?' I threw out hesitantly.

'Yes, he has long ago stopped believing in radical reform. The only thing he now believes in is doing as the trade unions bid him.'

But here our intercourse was shattered by another thunderclap of mirth from the elderly gentleman. Upon the stage, two heavy-whiskered men identically dressed en travesti were imbroiled in some farcical contrivance with a lady attired in a similar gown and all too dreadfully to be recognised as the first of Her Majesty's Ministers.

This scene de malentendu furnished an opportunity to make my escape. But to my chagrin as I stumbled over the unyielding feet of my neighbours, I was assaulted by a harsh injunction from two rows back: 'Sit down, haldie!'

Having fled from this palace of gimcrack jocosity, I hailed a cab to take me to Charing Cross whence I might be transported to my derelict haunts at Rye. The driver thus accosted, however, merely reined in his conveyance to a crawling pace and expectorated through the window: 'Sorry, squire, I'm just off home to Stanmore.'

Bereft of this phaethon, I trudged per force over pavements of the most dismally mouille sort, lulled into cerebration by the sodden squeaking of my pumps. Something, I mused, might yet be made of what I must learn to call this 'scenario': a bitter, bright young orator seduced in late middle age by the comforts of office and the warming power of fame. His old sourness leaves him. His private good-nature is now publicly pettered. He is in clover. He is, oh let us say, even loved. And yet the ghosts of his younger self begin to press around him. Now it is he whom the unforgiving voice of youth will not forgive. He flees to the bosom of belles-lettres. Yet even there he cannot escape the rasping whine of the Kens and Teds. The denouement bears the bleak stage direction: 'Exit pursued by Trots'. Ah my dear young friend, I can promise you not so much a profile as a parable. Meanwhile, I remain ever your affectionate 'feature', Henry James