Another voice

Too many Churchills

Auberon Waugh

At quite an early stage this week I decided not to write about riots or rioters, since everyone would be fed up with hearing explanations and solutions by the time the Spectator came out. Instead I could write about the Spectator's annual summer party, an altogether more pleasant subject. Then my eye was caught by the leading page article called 'Comment' in Sunday's News of the World: 'Where is the Churchill?

'Let us make no mistake, the crisis facing our country this summer Sunday morning is every bit as dangerous as during the dark days of 1940.

'This is our Battle of Britain, 40 years on. Tut where the hell is Churchill?

'Where is the man who used to stamp his memos with the dramatic, dynamic instruction: "Action this day"?

'Our bleeding country is crying out for Leadership, bold, courageous, inspiring Leadership . . .

'We have just witnessed the bloodiest and most biutal week on the English mainland since World War Two.

'Last week we said that people were frightened.

'They were, They are. And they are going to be until someone blows the dust off that Churchillian rubber stamp.'

Not many people at the Spectator's party looked very frightened, I thought, even if several were game to blow dust off the Churchillian rubber stamp. Perhaps Spectator parties are not typical of what is happening in the country, but the most remarkable thing about the crowd of perspiring males and beautiful, miraculously unperspiring females was how many of them were drunk on the excellent Moselle being served. Of course Churchill himself was not above the occasional beaker or two, whatever his wretched little grandson may now say, and it occurs to me that if indeed there is another Churchill lurking among the ruins of our devastated, riot-torn cities he was almost certainly at the Spectator party.

But which was he? Enoch is already 69 and notoriously sober. Possibly the new Churchill was to be found among the journalists rather than among the politicians, most of whom are constantly trying to be taken for the new Churchill, and always failing. Was it George Gale or Paul Johnson or Richard West or Sir Robin Day? Was it Mr Harold Creighton, a former proprietor of the Spectator, or Mr Henry Keswick or even its present proprietor, the hospitable, slightly mysterious Mr Algy Cluff?

The more one examines the proposition — that all this country needs is Leadership — the more preposterous it becomes. However many Churchills there are around — and I fear there are many more than I counted — the conditions simply do not exist for them to exercise Leadership. Churchill took over at a time when the country was united — or at any rate waiting to be united — against a common, external enemy. The enemy nowadays is within. Although most people of reasonable intelligence can see quite clearly what needs to be done, there is powerful and entrenched opposition to anyone's doing it, quite apart from the powerful and entrenched voices of those who say it can't be done, or shouldn't be done. There is nobody on God's earth who could lead the unions willingly into making a success of capitalism, or find the capital to underwrite a worker-state. The Government, despite all its protestations of good housekeeping, is already printing as much money as it possibly can without provoking a dramatic collapse of the currency — about £10,000 million on public expenditure deficit alone — and the only alternative policy on offer from people who covet the job — Foot, Benn, Heath and Walker — is to print more and more. To this we must add the chorus of disastrous advice pouring from The Times, Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer, Mirror and '600 Economists', as well as every government department except the Treasury, and one can see that the measure of agreement required for the useful exercise of Leadership — even bold, courageous, inspiring Leadership — simply does not exist. I should doubt whether there is even enough agreement on what needs to be done to support an imposed dictatorship, whether of left or right. Dictatorships, even more than democracies, require a huge apparatus of committed supporters.

The chief problem in Britain, I would maintain, is not that people are frightened but that they are not frightened enough. That is to say, the politicians are clearly frightened out of their wits and so, apparently, is the great army of opinionformers which was not invited to the Spectator party, but in the country as a whole, as at the Spectator party, there is a kind of despairing recklessness from which the element of dread is almost entirely missing.

The most shocking aspect of the current riots is how few rioters are injured. The first and most obvious deterrent to throwing a brick through somebody's window is that the person concerned will punch you on the nose. If anybody in Britain was starving, or seriously deprived of warmth or alcohol or anything else, there might be reason for the Government's terror of rioters. But they are not. Riots are an expression of boredom — whether provoked by white skinheads or hooligans of any colour — and as such they are a luxury. The correct response is not to fine them more money, but to fine them less. We are not suffering from too little leadership, but from too much. So far as a single woman might be blamed for the current disturbance, it is not Mrs Thatcher but Shirley Williams who, by pigheadedly forcing through Labour's educational reforms long after everybody could see they were a disaster, has created nearly a whole generation of young Britons who are not only spectacularly ignorant and ill-educated but also, in many cases, idle, undisciplined, violent and more or less unemployable in any capacity.

A major problem looming on the horizon for my own newspaper industry is that more and more newsagents are unable to find anyone prepared to undertake deliveries even at rates of between £3 and £5 for a morning round. The hours are a little unsocial, you see. A first step the Government might take — if it were not terrified of rioters — would be to reduce the dole in real terms so that unemployment genuinely became something to dread. Of course it wouldn't dare, but this and the more active deterrence of riot by offensive weaponry might, just conceivably, be an option available to democratic leadership which was a touch more bold, courageous and inspiring than our own.

But what no democratic government can do is to relieve the unions' death-throttle on industrial investment. Strikes make life too unpleasant for the ordinary citizen — even without the chorus of wets assuring us that alternatives are available. Cooperation is the best policy — for any democratic government to contemplate such a policy ever again. Nothing can be done to tackle the real problem, and in that sense democracy has failed, as we shall see when Warrington returns a left-wing Labour candidate this week. The country may think it wants a new Churchill, but what it is eventually going to get is a new Napoleon. No doubt there are nearly as many Britons who indulge private Napoleonic fantasies as Churchillian ones, but these people tend to forget that Napoleon was not a counter-revolutionary but a development from the revolution — in fact its Saviour, until he went mad. The only obvious Napoleon figures around — like Sir James Goldsmith — seem to have gone mad before achieving supreme power. Which is why, looking around the Spectator party, I can see that new Churchills are two a penny, but for the new Napoleon one will probably have to go and drink beer at the New Statesman.