LETTERS Taxing the Poll
Sir: My warmest admiration for your con- cept of polling the lop people' (The Spectator Poll, 11 October). This should provide us with great enjoyment and amusement as the general election approaches. But it has one flaw. Knowing their views is well worth while, because by definition they are the power-holders and — as far as they can manage the effort — the opinion-formers of Britain, but the Opinions are not themselves likely to be sensible, rational, or valuable. They are the people who have triumphantly brought Britain to the despicable state from which Mrs Thatcher has just begun to heave it — abominable snowmen, Professors Moriarty and Colonels Moran; men of the dock who in your quizzes usurp the jury-box. As Mr Worsthorne, now happily recovered apparently from the sycophancy which drove so many readers from his Sunday Telegraph last year, sensibly writes of just these creatures in your same issue, 'God, how I hate the great and the good.' To have these first people of our nation's life, Britain's protozoa, merely giving their Opinions is destabilising to the mind.
Can not you and Mr (Mrs?) Harris work out a few sets of accusatory questions to set these gentlemen as well as the flattering ones they are accustomed to? The quizzes could come in pairs, and the children who won't take the nasty medicine would lose the pleasures of pontificating for publica- tion in the other.
G. Stone
82 Archery Road, London SE9
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