DIARY
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE The menace of heavy drinking seems to bedevil Britain's security services. This cannot be for lack of trying to grapple with it, since official pressure to weed out heavy drinkers has been intense ever since the carousing habits of the defectors Burgess and Maclean first caught the headlines. Yet judging by the recent Bettaney case no progress at all has been made. To anybody who knows anything about British male society this failure should not be very surprising. For drinking heavily in this country is an integral aspect of all approved forms of male social behaviour in every class. Truth to tell, it is the man who drinks too little, rather than the man who drinks too much, who arouses the suspi- cion of colleagues; even of superiors. `So and so is a teetotaller, sir', that really would set the alarm bells ringing, much more so than any warning about someone having hit the bottle. If a man in this country wants to avoid drawing attention to himself, or wants to avoid standing out like a sore thumb — which is presumably what agents do want to avoid — the very Worst solecism for him to commit would be to say, 'No thanks, I have had enough.' Because regular excessive drinking is so little abnormal it is ab§Olutely absurd to suppose that males are ever going to shop colleagues on that account, or that their superiors, in practice, would genuinely approve of any subordinate who did. This being the case, the only solution is to recruit more women into the security services, since, although women also drink too much, the habit with them is more a source of shame than of pride. Certainly in
the case of women there is no drink Mythology as there is with men. In this respect, it is amusing to note that in the new television spy series starring Alec McCowen, which started last week, the MI5 director already is a woman. But before this de-manning process goes too far, perhaps someone should bear in mind that in Russia, too, quite as much as in Britain, there is a long tradition of exces- sive male drinking. So perhaps, on the Principle of setting a thief to catch a thief, MI5 should keep on a few male lushes, at least for as long as their principal enemy is likely to be the KGB.
A. few years ago — it seems more like an age — politicians used to try to per- suade the public to accept painful change on the ground that it was in the national Interest. For example, in those days the Public would have been asked to accept this new Fowler pension scheme as a sacrifice by this generation for the good of generations yet to come. The same kind of appeal would have been made to the unemployed: to put up with present
hardship so that their children might in- herit a more profitable Britain in the future. Possibly this playing of the patriotic card went too far, which might explain why the pendulum has now swung so far in the other direction, to the point where politi- cians never use the national interest as an argument for having to do things which upset sectional interests. When the middle classes were up in arms against the pros- pect of having to pay for their children's higher education, it seems never to have occurred to Sir Keith Joseph to tell them that they had a public duty to accept this extra burden. Part of the trouble may be the extent to which commercial advertising techniques, which always offer pleasurable things to people rather than demanding painful things from people, have in- creasingly accustomed us all to only one kind of appeal: that to self-interest and self-indulgence. Billions of pounds and' immense quantities of intelligence are spent yearly on perfecting these techni- ques, all of which have to do with titillating 'My client is of impeccable character and has no previous convictions other than for rape.' individual greeds. In theory, of course, governments could lavish comparable re- sources perfecting techniques for arousing collective or national responses. But they don't. They hire professional communica- tors, like Saatchi and Saatchi, who try to sell political policies in exactly the same way as they are accustomed to sell consum- er goods, i.e. by emphasising the gratifica- tion which their policies will bring to individuals. It could be that this huckster- ing technique has now become so habitual that no other would have the remotest chance of success. On the other hand, an appeal to duty might have an electrifying effect precisely because to so many young ears it would sound like nothing that had ever been heard on earth before.
It is given to few 85-year-olds to die on the tennis court. So when, after years of declaring that this was exactly how he wanted to go, our friend actually did so, just like that, on a rare sunny afternoon at Hurlingham Club, all the members were very happy for him. Then came a detail which cast a shadow. Instead of collapsing after a smash, as had been his ambition, the end came, in the event, after a double fault. Strange to say, this trivial tennis court example of God's perversity — spoil- ing a good death for a ha'porth of tar, so to speak — has shocked me much more than the infinitely more serious one of the Bradford football holocaust.
C an an important national newspaper be responsibly edited from a hospital sick bed, as is the fate at present of the Times, due to Charles Douglas Home's prolonged illness? Judging by the extraordinary treat- ment meted out last week to David Howell MP, one of the Tory 'Wets', I think the answer must be that absentee editing is as undesirable as absentee everything else. Howell was accused last week in a top leader of trying to smear Mrs Thatcher by comparing her present difficulties with those suffered by Harold Macmillan as a result of the Profumo affair. I have now read Howell's speech in question and this nasty accusation is so totally unjustified as to call in question the sanity of whoever made it. Shades of the mad Lord North- cliffe, who also nearly ruined the paper by trying to run it by remote control.
Apropos my suggestion in the Specta- tor that the correct euphemism for an old journalist should be 'seasoned', a reader writes to say that a more accurate descrip- tion 'for the likes of us' should be 'pickled'. He signs the postcard, 'Yours, ever more so, Brian'. Brian Inglis, I presume.
Previous page
