Another voice

Yobs ahoy

Auberon Waugh

Aa horribly expensive ball I gave in Somerset for my elder daughter two summers ago over 60 glasses were broken.

The guests who were composed for the most part of the jeunesse doree of Durham University were of no particular political persuasion. Glasses just quietly plopped and shattered throughout the night and into the small hours as they always have done and always will do, I suppose. Furth- er damage was done to the door of a downstairs lavatory when some unfortun- ate young person locked himself in. A mirror fell from the wall and was broken.

All in all, I thought we got off very lightly.

Brooding about the extraordinarily quiet behaviour of the Federation of Conserva- tive Students at Loughborough University, where a party for 140 students resulted in only £14 damage, 'I decided that the true explanation was probably not that Con- servative students are better behaved than ordinary students. No, the truth, I suspect, is that they were not using glasses. They were drinking beer from cans.

British students are not a pleasant sight in large numbers. The females, with very few exceptions, are hideous and badly dressed, the males awkward and boorish. No doubt they look even worse when they are drinking beer from cans. Perhaps it was this spectacle which prompted the gentle Mr John Selwyn Gummer, a clergyman's son, to regard them as some previous Gummer might have regarded Venetian and French troops of the Fourth Crusade as they set about the rape, pillage and massacre of Constantinople in April 1204. Selwyn College, Cambridge, was never like this, he may have felt, as he cut off their £30,000 grant from Conservative Central Office in reprisal for that terrify- ing, obscene £14 worth of damage to two rooms in Loughborough.

In the days after this episode, as we all remember, the Labour press, taking its cue from Mr Gummer and unnamed spokes- men in Conservative Central Office, led their newspapers with bloodcurdling stor- ies: 'Tory Louts on the Rampage' (Daily Mirror) and `TORY YOBS' (Daily Star).

As they saw it, this 'orgy of drunken vandalism' cast a strange light on Tory claims to be the party of law and order. In the course of that week, I found myself saying at luncheon that I thought the Spectator ought to be trying to attract these Tory yobs. My next-door neighbour, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph (a very wise man who also happens to have spent many years of his life trying to attract readers to the Spectator) said `Ah yes, but how are you going to attract them?' Is there any reason to suppose they read anything?

Well, we could try waving to them, I replied, generously giving the rest of the company another opportunity to make that excellent joke about not drowning, just waving. We could offer them free cans of beer or plastic badges saying `Hang Ed- ward Heath', 'Bomb Russia now' etc. For my own part, I might try to wean them from this nasty habit of drinking beer in cans and offer them good, cheap wine through the Spectator Wine Club. One does not like to set oneself up as a sort of 'WEA do-gooder, and my own natural inclination is generally towards the more expensive stuff, but I am sure they would enjoy wine more than beer once they acquired the taste for it; people can get drunk more cheaply on wine nowadays, and then have all the fun of smashing glasses afterwards. At any rate I have decided to recommend some really cheap wines this month, as readers will discover if they turn to page 42.

But I am confident that the real objec- tion to these Conservative students is not that they are high-spirited or 'extremist' or even that they are young. It is that they are lower-class. There has always been room in the Conservative Party for a token sprink- ling of lower-class goody-goodies. What Tories cannot adjust themselves to at all is the development which Geoffrey Wheat- croft identified recently in the Daily Tele- graph, that the Conservative Party is rapid- ly becoming the natural party of the English working class — not of the north- ern unemployables, of course, nor even of ageing council tenants in the south of England, let alone of NUPE ancillaries, social `workers' or school teachers, unem- ployed blacks, lesbian single parents, or the rest of Mr Ken Livingstone's consti- tuency. It is becoming the natural party for those who are in work and own their own homes — a majority, in fact, of the English working class.

The problem with these Conservative students, as I see it, is that they want to belong to the Party: they are nauseated by the humbug with which socialists disguise their idleness, envy and despair, and they are fully aware that socialism produces nothing but poverty and oppression; they are desperately in seach of a group philoso- phy, even a slogan or catchphrase with which to disguise their own impatience with those less fortunate (call it realism) and their avarice (call it go-getting energy or hope for the future). Engaged as they are in the battle for minds and hearts of fellow-students, they have chanced upon the slogan of Liberty, with its pleasant 1960s associations of kicking the traces. Of course we middle-aged greedy men know that liberty — call it freedom, 19th-century Manchester school of laissez-faire econo- mics or what you will — is not only unviable electorally but also a load of rubbish. As one grows older, one's concern for one's own freedom may not diminish, and one's resentment of government in- terference may increase, but so does one's awareness of how other people's freedom infringes one's own. They invariably use it to affront the senses with disagreeable sights, unpleasant noises and smells. The electorate, by and large, is considerably older than these Conservative students, and in no mood to put up with any liberties from them.

But their problem is a genuine one, for all that. Conservatism offers no philo- sophical orthodoxy, like socialism, by which they can criticise the party's leaders, or from which the party leaders can dissoci- ate themselves as the need arises. It is all very well for Good Conservatives to point out that political dogma has produced most of history's greatest disasters from the sack of Constantinople to Auschwitz, the Gulag archipelago and Mrs Shirley Wil- liams, but even Good Conservatives need some orthodoxy from which they can dissociate themselves, some middle course to steer.

My own feeling is that Conservative students should forget about Liberty and concentrate on Private Property. It comes to the same thing, when you think about it.

Private property — the right to acquire and hold things and pass them to one's children

— is one of the strongest impulses in man.

far stronger than envy. Once it is recog- nised as the dominant orthodoxy of conser- vatism, everything else falls into place. The reason why no Conservative bigwig has ever dared advance it is a guilty feeling that private property is dearer to the hearts of

those like themselves, the Duke of West- minster and me who have lots of it than it is

to those like Christopher Booker and members of the FCS who have rather less. In my own observation, this is the reverse of the truth. The less people have, the more they prize it.