1 NOVEMBER 1968, Page 3

Rhodesia down the hatch

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH

While Labour awaits the result from Basset- law with some trepidation, the left is once again in revolt over Rhodesia. It is hard to accept the current line that if Labour holds Basseflaw it will do wonders for the party's morale. No doubt a resounding victory would have such an effect—if the swing to the Tories were reduced to under 5 per cent, for in- stance—but this seems most unlikely. And with the possibility . that further deflationary measures will be announced soon after the poll. morale looks like being a very uncertain quan- tity in the coming months. No wonder Mr Wilson forgot to mention Rhodesia at all in his own commentary on the Queen's speech. delivered to the Commons immediately after- wards.

This week a most touching scene was re- counted to me at which someone who is usually described as a prominent left winger sat with his head in his hands, pronouncing in accents of Chekhovian finality that a Rhodesian settlement would mark the end. Nobody present bothered to ask him: the end of what? Cer- tainly not the end of the Government. Scarcely even the end of one minor cubby-hole in his huge battery of illusions. Left wing conscious- ness can only be sustained on a note of drama. but it is drama of a highly formalised variety. If there is a divinity which shapes their ends, the divinity performs this service regularly once a week. No, the only significance of a Rhodesian settlement so far as the left wingers are con- cerned is that it gives them another opportunity to take up fifth ballet positions (head back. arms crooked, toes pointed) and look appealing. No doubt they expect and will receive tumultuous applause from such old-fashioned liberals as make up (with only slight variations of empha- sis) the English intelligentsia, but they don't deserve any applause at all and shouldn't re- ceive it.

The real tragedy of the left is not that it is so spectacularly ineffective, but that so many of its adherents arc self-important, boring and even nasty. Obviously this is not true of all of them. Mr Foot is a by-word for his amiability as well as for the spotlessness of his conscience. Among the younger left wingers there are two or three who are the most thoughtful and genuinely humane members of the House of Commons. But as the left surveys its own ranks —the superannuated public schoolboys who once took a housemaster's pep talk too much to heart, the simple exhibitionists. the small sprinkling of fellow-travellers, the inarticulate. the maladjusted and the emotional cripples-- its overwhelming impression must be one of frustrated stupidity. They have only their mutual admiration to keep them warm, and this is by no means in certain supply as they fall out with each other constantly and are all as vain as peacocks.

If the hopes and ambitions of Rhodesian Africans were entrusted to such people, their prospects for majority rule—or for a blocking quarter, or even for this exciting thing called a broad-based interim government—would be very slender indeed. Of course, the left is prob- ably quite right in saying that no written con- stitution we leave behind will be worth the paper it is written on. But since the only alter- native is force, and since we certainly lack the will and probably lack the ability to mount an invasion of Rhodesia and since the United Nations also lacks both, there is abso- lutely nothing for Mr Wilson to gain by listening to his left. Both major parties arc now committed to the hypocritical nonsense of pre- tending that they can bind an independent Rhodesia to any promises made by Mr Smith. The left is certainly doing a service to the cause of logic and truth by exposing this; but they are scarcely doing a service to either by pretending that there is a practical alternative.

Far more significant than the predictable noise of the left is the quite genuine distress to be seen at the centre of the party. Right wing Labour Mrs have traditionally alowed them- selves the luxury of left wing noises about Africa, and it is not hard to interpret last Tues- day's rebellious votes by Messrs Sheldon and Barnett, Barnes. Blenkinsop and Crawshaw in this way. The only earlier revolt which I can trace from Colonel Richard Crawshaw, OBE, Labour member for Toxteth, concerned the Territorial Army. But what is one to make of such middle-of-the-road, loyalist figures as Ken Marks from Gorton and Dr Miller from Kelvingrove?

Political correspondents often feel an almost paternal interest in those Kies they have seen through a by-election and through the various horrible initiation ceremonies into the mysteries of parliament. Ken Marks, whom I saw defend Konni Zilliacus's old seat at Gorton against a terrifying horde which included one young Churchill, a young Liberal, an old Communist and a disgruntled author, has always seemed to me to embody everything that is most sensible and decent in the Labour movement. A head- master by trade, he is passionately interested in local government and all the things he should be interested in. Yet here he is. bold as brass, defying his Whips and very likely his con- stituency interest to vote against the adjourn- ment and demonstrate in advance his repudia- tion of Mr Wilson's sell-out to the Rhodesians. And behind him, muter and less glorious, is the spectre of those 119 or so Labour MPS who defied a two-line Whip and abstained.

An extraordinary change has, however, come over Mr Wilson. and I think it can be traced back to the South African arms fiasco of nearly a year ago. Since that disastrous episode, when it will be remembered. he incited Mr Silkin to organise a back-bench petition against a de- cision of the Cabinet. Mr Wilson has given up even pretending that he is interested in back- bench opinion. His anxieties now centre ex- clusively upon the danger of Government resignations.

To anyone who is a little more detached than the Prime Minister, this danger seems as slight as that of an effective back-bench revolt. Frank Cousins, it is true.. resigned on a straight left- wing ticket, but in so doing he merely demon- strated what had already become painfully clear, that he could never be a serious parlia- mentary figure. By and large, left wingers do not resign from this government; they just fade away and accumulate, like so much flotsam, in the various Cabinet committees. But Mr Wilson is still haunted by the memory of his own road

to the top, and if somebody like Mrs Castle (second in every popularity poll) were to threaten her resignation, I honestly think he would drop the whole of Rhodesia, broad- based interim governments and all, like the pro- verbial hot potato. Which is why it is so im- portant that any sell-out should appear in broad-based interim clothing.

So everything depends on just how much clothing Mr Smith is prepared to allow, in the interests of public decency. Here the difficulty is not so much Mr Lardner-Burke and the other hard-liners in the Rhodesian cabinet. Two people who have recently returned from talk- ing to Mr Smith—they are of widely different ideological positions—rePort their conviction that Smithy is a man of sufficient calibre to stand up to any number of Lardner-Burkes. The main difficulty they both report—and their conclusions were reached quite independently of each other—is Mrs Smithy.

Now here, surely, is a job for Mrs Hart. When Mr Thomson flies out to present the male point of view, he should be accompanied by Mrs Hart to discuss the women's angle with Mrs Smith over the coffee cups and glasses of creme de menthe. At present her only serious job is that of vetting Mr Benn's speeches, which must be a most depressing occupation, and if her promotion was aimed at preventing her from resigning, as many people suppose, then it can only be a matter of time before she realises that she has nothing worthwhile to do and might just as well resign after all. She has been installed in a very depressing little office at No 70 Whitehall, and gets only a Humber with the job, which (I think I am right in say- ing) she already had.

While Mrs Hart remains unemployed, she represents some sort of deadline on the con- clusion of negotiations—the more drawn out they are, the more likely she is to come to the end of her honeymoOn period in the Cabinet and resign at the end of them. Another dead- line of sorts is represented by Mr Wilson's rash decision to call a Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference on 7 January for the purpose, among other things, of absolving him from his NIBMAR vows made at the last Com- monwealth Prime Ministers' Conference. If Mr Wilson is able to confront them with his sell- out as a fait accompli, the atmosphere will be awkward enough. If he can only show them his rejected proposals for a dishonourable settle- ment, the mind boggles at what the conference can hope to achieve.

Already the good Dr Kaunda has convinced himself that he will soon be facing an Anglo- South African invasion in defence of the new Rhodesian constitution (naturally enough, we shall be committed upholders). It is hard, in the cold air of the temperate zone, to see this as a serious danger, although it is amazing what the central heating in Westminster Palace can do to the imaginations of people who are not by nature accustomed to such luxuries. Our basic problem, which Mr George Thomson, that great African innovator, has at last tumbled to, is that inside Rhodesia Britain has responsibility without power. We all know whose prerogative it is to live power without responsibility, but it should not be too difficult to coin an aphorism about its inversion. Responsibility without power is surely the pre- rogative of a Colney Hatch Napoleon, and until people realise the alarming extent to which Westminster Palace sometimes resembles Colney Hatch, they will never understand the full subtleties of our present situation.