VIEWPOINT
What was it all about?
GEORGE GALE
I imagine that in years to come, supposing I am ever asked, or ask myself, what is it that I chiefly recall of the 1970 general election, I shall remember the weather of this June. The English weather at its best is incomparable; and the weather during the past campaign has been almost perfect. There have been times when one wanted nothing more than a brief cloudburst, a lancing of the heat: and this also I was lucky enough to be nearly present at, last weekend in the west country, when the sky burst over Bideford and Barnstaple and I was privileged to walk in a sunlit evening beneath trees still dripping with water and old blossom and new fruit and old leaves. The sudden luxury of puddles, to feel shoes splashing in them, to know that the blue sky and the hot sun were as passing as the swift life of the ephemera of May, tolerantly to accept that the electoral verdict in its due time would also be seen to be ephemeral, all this was to realise again that all was vanity and all was transitory and that nothing much would change although nothing would ever be precisely the same. This is, was, the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is necessary (which is the way I'd like to have it put) or rather (which is the way Michael Oakeshott framed it in the original version) everything in it is a necessary evil.
Right, then. I've remembered the weather. What else was it like, this general election of 1970, how was it then, precisely, as the misguided Ranke thought it possible and desirable to find out? Well, there was George Brown belting his way through the country, shouting at anybody who'd listen. A first-class performance, vintage stuff. I hope the television people preserve their yards of film: we shall not see the like again. If ever a man deserved to have won his way back into Prime Ministerial favour and ministerial office by hard work, good nature, honest sweat and native cunning, then that man was and is George Brown. If ever a Prime Minister could resist such cumulative blan- dishments, then that Prime 'Minister was, and presumably still is, Harold Wilson. Please relent, Harold; be generous. George is far better than most of the rubbish you'll be rewarding. You know that and I know that and we all know that and you never need to bear grudges again. George is far too earthy, in the best sense of that word, to have to await his reward in heaven, in whatever sense.
And of course we will remember you, too, Harold, when we think back to this election. But presumably what we will remember of you at this time will become inextricably entwined with what we remember of you at other times. You blur into a kind of Wilso- nian background, in which nothing is ever very distinct, in which accents move in and out of Lancashire and Yorkshire then slide surreptitiously southwards, in which your statesmanlike silvered hair goes in and out of focus and your nose suddenly is, and as suddenly is not, comic and red. You have engaged us in the most peculiar embrace; we start to laugh at, and then it's with, you: we seek to grapple with you in anger and end up giggling and sniggering at your demolition of some hapless foreign intruder into one of your cosier press conferences; and if, af- terwards, we find ourselves appalled as if we had partaken of some incestuous or otherwise forbidden act, yet nevertheless at the time we thought we were having fun. All your past tomfooleries, your Rhodesian boast, your profligate and disastrously delayed devaluation, your weakness and cowardice in the face of the unions, your tolerance of the likes of Stewart, the unemployed men you have largely bought off with benefit, your huge economic failure to make growth and your petty economic success with sterling, your reduction of the British influence to its present nadir: all these, and more, because the sun has shone, and you have been chirpy, we apparently forgive you for. Or, which is the same, all these we blur into a past and a present and, presumably, an immediate future, in which cash jingles in our pockets. We will remember you, Harold, all right: but not, I think, specifically in terms of this general election, except for the blurred haze of your and our momentary self-satisfaction.
Now to say something of Ted Heath. He will not, I suppose, believe this of those who have written of this, and especially of his, campaign, that the pain he has endured has been also felt by us: not, of course, that we have been hurt to anything like the same degree, or for the same sort of reasons, but, in a minor and guilty way, witnessing Heath's electoral ordeal has been painful. Even journalists who started off the cam- paign fired with leftish fury against all Torydom had had their anger totally cooled by the end, and replaced by -a combination of pity and respect. This sorrowing ad- miration was presumably not the effect intended; but in the end, when much else is forgotten and forgiven, the wounded dignity of Heath in the last week of the campaign may persist longer in recollection than the false heartiness of his laughter, the blueness of his suits and shirts and ties, the awful knotted ganglion of his nervous tension.
I am afraid that I cannot bring myself to admire either the strategy or the tactics of the Conservative party campaign, and I imagine that such recollections of it that will survive will be simply of its maladroit inep-
`Oh, 1 don't care who wins—I could never even tell the difference between margarine and butter.
titude—it has not even struck me as plausibly decent, or honest, but just unin- telligent and largely unintelligible—but Heath remained brave. That is all I think I shall remember, except for the absurd traffic arrangements; whereby respectable citizens like myself were herded brutally into nasty aircraft, there to be baked for endless minutes on aircraft tarmacs in conditions which no self-respecting Irish horse-exporter would suffer his horse-meat to bear, in order to get ourselves from x to Y at a slower overall speed than that possible by any other known means of mechanical transport. British Railways emerge with great credit from the Conservative party's grandiose efforts to fly people around this country in a special chartered aircraft accompanied by specially chartered charabancs. I only hope somebody somewhere turned a decent penny on the deal, for otherwise the entire enter- prise was a dead loss.
I have left to the end the question of what the election has been about; for in one sense I do not know, and in the other sense, although I know, I will not know (nor will anyone else) what had been decided for much time yet. I do not know what it has been supposed to be about, in that at no time did the economic issue, which all agreed to be the central issue, become an issue proper at all. I do not know, at the end—and I have listened, God, I have listened—what precisely it is about prices and wages and the inflationary situation that the Con- servatives would do that Labour will not do, and vice versa. I have concluded that neither side knows. There has been no true issue here; all there has been is an agreed agenda, subjects for discussion. Thus the election, in this regard, ended as it began: as a choice between men and not matters, a decision of style. In the other sense, in which I know what the election has been about but will not know for some time what has been decided, I refer, of course, to the man and the matter_which, like a huge and unburst thundercloud, has overcast the entire summery campaign and whipped up the dust with accompanying winds and left everything unsettled, heavy and anxious.
This is not the time or place to elaborate on Enoch Powell. In the matter of public repute I am as yet unsure whether he is more sinned against than sinning. I find the sanc- timonious sentiments of the Times as offen- sive as I do the wilder aspects of Powell's conspiratorial theories; and as dotty. I find myself appalled at the reckless way politicians and commentators attribute the basest motives to Powell, and ascribe to him qualities they would under no account whatever admit to recognising in any other class of politician than the caricature class of Southern white supremacist: the sin such politicians and commentators are most eager to detect in Powell they never seem to imagine may reside, likewise, in themselves. Even quietly to suggest that Powell alone among the major politicians has en- deavoured to express what a very great num- ber of people want politicians to express
seems apparently, in the present climate of intolerance, to court obloquy. The response to Powell, not only of politicians and com- mentators, but also of the public, is such that no other residual impression of this election can remain than that he has dominated it; nor can any other conclusion be so far reached than that, to this very great extent, the general election of 1970 has been in- conclusive; however decisive otherwise, on men rather than on matters, it ostensibly appears.
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