ANOTHER VOICE

Roy Buggins waits for the chance to see himself all right

AUBERON WAUGH

Am I alone in being seriously alarmed by the Roy Hattersley phenomenon? What alarms me is not so much that his public utterances reveal the level of intelligence, profundity and intellectual honesty which one might expect from a mad dog on the burning plans of Peshawar, but that so many people take him seriously. Among many whose judgment I respect he is not regarded as a mad dog at all, but as a serious, constructive thinker, someone in whose hands the Labour Party and country at large would be comparatively safe.

It may be another indication of the nation's declining intellectual vitality, or it may merely be the measure of how little interested we are in politics that whenever this man opens his mouth and releases another load of confused catch-phrases and populist garbage, the newspaper treat it as if he has said something relevant, valid and new. Because his noises are recognisably different from those of the loony Left, it is assumed that he represents some sort of responsible opposition, a credible alterna- tive government. It is only partly for this reason that I regard him as more danger- ous than Ken Livingstone, the unpleasant Dennis Skinner or mad, bad Tony Benn. Having studied him now for 20 years — he was the first Labour politician I met after being appointed political correspondent of this magazine in 1967 — I believe him to be more ambitious, more unscrupulous and more dangerous than any of them.

And he is a survivor. Since last month, it seems less likely than ever that any David Owen in shining armour will replace Labour in the responsible opposition, credible alternative government slot. The previous Conservative government (if one disregards the Heatho-Walkerian fiasco) lasted 13 years before being overtaken by Profumo, prostate and general exhaustion; even that effort required four prime minis- ters and it seems unlikely that Mrs Thatch- er can keep the Conservatives going for 13 years as a one-man band. Certainly there are no Edens or Macmillans waiting in the wings, nor any Tory politician I can see who is remotely capable of winning a general election. And even if she keeps going for 13 years, that will take us only to 1992, with Hattersley a mere 59 years old. The Hattersley terror seems unavoidable, unless some zealous KGB officer can be persuaded to slip him a little lupus fungus between now and then. In case I am thought to be exaggerating my anxieties at the prospect of Hattersley in power, let us examine his remarks on Channel 4's A Week in Politics programme last Friday night, when he was objecting to sugges- tions that the Labour Party should find other policies now that a majority of the electorate has demonstrated fairly conclu- sively that it does not want socialism: I think we ought not to talk about selling our policies using the language of soap powders and dog food. A political party can only succeed, perhaps only survive, if it has a clear ideological position.

How the wise old heads nodded! But what does it mean? We none of us approve of advertising or salesmanship, of course; soap powder and dog-food are thoroughly discreditable substances. But at least they have a use. Nobody would vote Labour if told that Labour was guaranteed to remove biological stains or give us a shiny nose, glossy coat and an energetic wag to our tails, because nobody would believe it.

Clearly, Labour needs a different selling point entirely. Political parties, unlike dog food have no use in a domocracy except to act as vehicle for the power-urges of would-be politicians. But before any party can further Hattersley's power-urges, it has to be assembled. That is where 'a clear ideological position' comes in. No party has ever been elected on an ideological position, but Hattersley has to have one, however inappropriate or disastrous, to keep the party behind him while he waits for Buggins's turn to come to power.

What do we do, do we send out a lot of marketing men into the country . . . and say what are the policies people want and then when we find out what they'll vote for, we'll write it into our manifesto? That is not the sort of politics I want to be involved in.

Of course not, because the Labour Party would disintegrate if anyone tried to re- form it, and Hattersley would sooner lead this vicious prehistoric monster into gov- ernment when Buggins's number is called 'it tastes faintly nutty.' than he would risk his position at its head.

Later he compared Labour's message of redistribution and public ownership to the Sermon on the Mount, saying that no bishop would ever be expected to re-write the Sermon on the Mount 'to attract the trendy, unwardly mobile middle-classes'.

Never mind that this is precisely what a number of bishops — both Catholic and Anglican — were doing with their various manifestoes before the election. The new Gospel they had discovered, in their plod- ding half-baked way, was precisely the opposite of the Sermon on the Mount's emphasis on the unimportance of material things. It was old-fashioned welfare social- ism. Never mind that it succeeded only in emptying their churches still further. What is Hattersley's version of the Sermon on the Mount which he must 'interpret in language that people understand'?

The only clear ideology which is acceptable to domocratic socialists is the greater free- dom that comes from greater equality.

If we don't believe in that, we might as well do something different. Unless we believe in something, we don't exist.

Taken in conjunction, these three sent- ences are quite breathtaking in the villainy they reveal. The only possible sense in which 'freedom' can be equated with 'equality' in modern Britain is in the unspoken promise to give the lower classes more money. More money does, un- doubtedly provide the possibility of greater freedom. But he cannot spell out this promise, because everybody knows that socialism nowadays produces exactly the opposite of more money for the lower classes.

His last sentence, which might seem to be a clever gloss on Descartes, is in fact completely meaningless unless one under- stands that it is addressed exclusively to Labour Party workers. What he is in fact saying to them is: 'Stick together, folks. You see your Roy Buggins all right, and Roy Buggins will see you all right.'

Perhaps he will. But for the rest of us. Roy Buggins, in his natty suiting and six large meals a day in two houses, must be seen as the original, reach-me-down False Prophet: 'Beware of false prophets which come to you with sheep's clothing but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?' (Matthew vii 15-16)