POLITICS
'The great cause of cheering us all up'
SIMON HEFFER
Someone at BBC2 either has a well- developed sense of humour, or is trying to make some interesting political suggestions by uncharacteristically subtle means. Scheduled for the Friday before Christmas, albeit in the middle of the night, was a rare screening of that traditional festive family film The Triumph of the Will. You will, no doubt, have your own favourite jolly scene from it: the opening shot of the male romantic lead, Adolf Hitler, arriving from the air to address the 1934 Nuremberg Rally always goes down well. The screening complements a documentary shown by the same network last month, analysing the methods of the Fiihrer's friend and col- league Dr Goebbels. That programme seemed to carry a serious message of how our troubled politicians might learn from our erstwhile enemies.
The documentary revealed the secret of Goebbels' success. During a typical busy day as Minister of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment, he would be visited by vari- ous brown-nosing brownshirt movie-mak- ers anxious to pick up some business. They would try to seduce him with epics of pio- neer Gastarbeiter building autobahns, and of men in armbands supervising mass Aryan press-ups with a voice-over of Hitler's latest thoughtful observations. Swine Goebbels may have been, but fool he was not. He would tell such toadies to clear off and make films of handsome, blue-eyed blondes (with long legs and swelling mam- mules obbligato) singing, dancing and wearing very few clothes. As he well knew, the Volk needed some treats if they were to submit quietly to being run by a bunch of genocidal gangsters like him and his pals.
Oddly, Goebbels was committed to what Arnold Bennett called 'the great cause of cheering us all up'. It is a cause any politi- cian should regard as his priority. Survival, if nothing else, compels this. If public hap- piness was felt to be important in a fascist dictatorship, it must be absolutely essential in a democracy. This necessity becomes even greater if things are going badly. After a year such as 1992, it is time to forget about policies and concentrate on improv- ing morale, however dishonestly. There is no better time to start than Christmas. What is more, for the last few days nothing serious appears to have gone wrong, so the time to begin a pro-cheerfulness campaign is doubly propitious. Once the last war broke out Britain tried, with some success, her own propaganda exercise. Too precious to be left to politi- cians, it was discharged by the likes of George Formby, Arthur Askey and Gracie Fields; entertainers whose part in our victo- ry must have deepened the German nation- al humiliation more profoundly than any armoured conquest could ever have done.
At this time the British Sense of Humour became world famous. In fact, it was the English Sense of Humour: the Scots and Irish, thanks often to artificial stimulants, have their own infinitely superior varieties, and the Welsh, to judge from the likes of Lord Howe of Aberavon, have none at all. The English acquired a reputation for wit by having bombs dropped on them day and night for five years and retaliating by telling jokes about Hitler's testicles. Once acquired, this habit was hard to shake off. Post-war austerity and the failures of the Attlee government provided a new enemy, and new vehicles for jests to amuse the long-suffering, ration-booked British. By accident, and in the deepest adversity, we had become congenitally cheerful.
In this time of devaluations, redundan- cies, negative equity, royal and ecclesiasti- cal upheavals and impoverishments moral and material, our reserves of good humour are stretched again. At times like this in the past we have usually declared war on the French to provide a jolly distraction. A pre- vailing lack of robustness seems to rule out that option now. Nor can entertainers help. What is left of the British film industry would be incapable of remaking so cheer- fully subversive a film as Passport to Pimlico without a subtext of homosexual or ethnic strife. Sheer propaganda is the only answer.
So it is time to find our own Dr Goebbels. There are several obvious candi- dates for this historic post. Only because one cannot believe he would ever want to cress the line between journalism and pro- paganda is the front-runner, Mr Bruce Anderson of the Sunday Express, ruled out. In any case, political vicissitudes may even mean that, in his role as hagiographer-in- chief to the Tory party, Mr Anderson may well soon be occupied on his life of Mr Michael Heseltine.
One is tempted, therefore, to go for experience. There is, as many will remem- ber, a great former Tory propaganda minis- ter still alive, well, and functioning as flu- ently as ever. Things were done in a better tone in those days, so Lord Deedes did not actually have the same title as Goebbels. He was known tactfully as 'Minister with- out Portfolio'. It was no reflection on his abilities in the Macmillan/Home regime that within two years he had become Minister without Government. Indeed, the 'bottom' he acquired was perfect preparation for the ultimate Tory propa- ganda job: the editorship of the Daily Telegraph. Lord Deedes, long since retired from that chair, still adorns the columns of his old newspaper, offering sound if Delphic advice to his party. He might be valuable in an unconventional way, taking up the political time on tele- vision news programmes entertaining the public with his library of ripping yarns about Stanley Baldwin, Harold Macmil- lan and Willie Whitelaw. It would be much better than gratifying the modern and vulgar compulsion politicians have to talk about their policies.
But there is a brighter star yet, and one whose qualities exceed even those of Lord Deedes. He is world-famous. He is a master of our English tongue. He is a friend of the Prime Minister. More astonishing, he is simultaneously a friend of the last prime minister too. He is a politician, but he likes — or makes a very good pretence of liking — journalists. What he does not know about publicity in all its forms, savoury and unsavoury, is hardly worth knowing. Like Dr Goebbels, he has a handsome wife and fine chil- dren; unlike Dr Goebbels, he is not in the habit of killing them and himself when his party leader falls. I talk, of course, of Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare.
If Mr Major would like to cheer us up in a harmless and cheap way, with none of the distracting difficulties of a Mellor or a Lamont affair, Jeffrey is his man. He should be brought into the Government, even the Cabinet, as soon as possible. The corridors of the Department of Pop- ular Enlightenment would ring with foot- steps of film producers going out in search of voluptuous women. Belea- guered Britain would soon smile again. Of course, with Jeffrey in charge of promoting the Great Cause, those smiles might not always be intentional. Only the mean-spirited, however, would find any- thing to complain of in that.
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