Home In The West
By 3. W. M. THOMPSON
ONE must give a Prime Minister his due. Sir Alec Douglas-Home goes down like a peppermint cream with the Tory womenfolk. Watching him. and his audience, at the 'mass rally' which he addressed at Devonport last week- end, one found this thought recurring. It was not an especially original thought: but then, original thoughts were rather rare at this event. Sir Alec plodded through the plain little party- political speech which had been put into his hands, and it was received with cordiality but without rapture. Yet he had only to reply tartly to a heckler, or to interject one of his extra- ordinary jokes, to bring cries of delight from the West Country women in the hall. There was a matron in brown, sitting near me in one of the front rows, who positively fell about with mirth at the one about the rooster and the ostrich egg; and another old favourite of Sir Alec's, about every fifth baby being 'a Chinaman,' had her entranced.
Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound . .
Well, it was more of a healthy pink, in truth, but the effect was much the same.
This ability to enthuse the faithful women workers of the party is certainly not to be under- rated in an election year, with, just ahead, an infinity of envelopes to be addressed and door- bells to be rung. But Sir Alec, in his strenuous journeys up and down the country, is seeking to do much more than that. He is engaged upon the most intensive speaking tour undertaken by any Prime Minister since the war, and its pur- pose can be nothing less than to achieve a major realignment of public opinion. This would be a heavy task for a supreme orator.
The estimates of Sir Alec's progress as an orator have varied strangely this year, ever since he set out on his travels in January: from the happy approval displayed in the Daily Express to the contempt revealed unrestrainedly in the New Statesman. Much had changed, evidently, since those first, tentative appearances in the Kinross by-election. Sir Alec had blossomed (according to one view) into a public figure of confidence and power, or (alternatively) had dwindled into helpless incoherence. As it had been my lot to hear him speak, day after day, during the Kinross campaign, I had marvelled at the thought of either momentous transformation —whether a new release of confidence, or a sudden blight of ineptitude.
I dare say there were others in the Forum cinema at Devonport who had gone there with a strong curiosity to see just how Sir Alec did carry the thing off. After all, it is not a frivolous interest, when the Prime Minister has made so large an electoral investment in his own prowess as a persuader. The Forum, a dimly green auditorium, had been sparsely decorated with posters promising Straight Talk And Action or bearing other reassuring messages. The place was decently crowded. The community singing went heartily enough. The last verse of the National Anthem ('as printed on page one of the com- munity song sheet') was given no quarter. We gazed in admiration at the vision of. Miss Joan Vickers, MP for Devonport, radiating party loyalty on the platform, all blue from head to foot (yes, even her hair was truest blue). Colonel Varley, of Colman Prentis and Varley, sat affably at his ease amid the throng.
And the central figure, the star performer, lean to the point of boniness, with a grin made almost skeletal by the harsh lighting, exuding an engaging blend of nervousness and jauntiness surely never paralleled in another major political figure? Let me offer my own judgment right away, and if it is different from the appraisals of other observers I cannot help it. As a speaker I found Sir Alec, after all these months in Downing Street and the House of Commons, exactly the same as he had been in the village halls and schoolrooms of Kinross and West Perthshire. There is the same jerkiness yet persistence in
`The Servant .
delivery, the same tendency to fluff a word here and there or to betray apparent surprise at hav- ing reached the end of a sentence, the same liking for music-hall jokes, the same effect of inner energy and conviction not being wholly ex- pressed, the same total absence of pretentiousness or the grand manner, the same basic appeal of the honest man doing his best.
This is Sir Alec's style. It has not changed, and no doubt it will not he changed. It is not his way to command his audience. He appeals. to it.
Will this, can this, do what the Tories. urgently need it to do? If one is doubtful, it is partly at least because of a lack of size in the' performance. To bridge the Gallup gap, to secure the allegiance of enough of the disenchanted at this late date, is a massive task: it calls for a. Herculean act. Mr. Henry Fairlic, writing in the, Sunday Telegraph after this West Country tour,. quoted one 'detached observer' as saying: 'If he can keep this up at a general election he will certainly not lose votes.' I am sure this is true: but, of course, it will not be enough not to lose' votes. • Before Sir Alec spoke, Mr. Nigel Lawson, had been glimpsed, evidently trying to be unob- trusive, at Plymouth's Grand Hotel. Mr. Lawson, has been identified already as one of Sir Alec's. speech-writers, and it is true that he had toiled, on the draft of the Prime Minister's speech that night. Nevertheless, as Sir Alec quickly demon- strated, the role of the speech-writers can be easily misunderstood. Like other Prime Minis- ters before him, Sir Alec is served by talented fellows like Mr. Lawson (from the Sunday' Telegraph) and Mr. Eldon Griffiths (from, Newsweek), who.. provide material for his speeches. But to suppose that Sir Alec merely reads out another man's script is utterly wrong: indeed, the reporters attending his meetings know it to be laughable.
The reporters arc provided, according to nor- mal practice, with an .advance text of each' speech, and this may. well be much as Mr. Lawson wrote it: but in the delivery that night, as always, there was hardly a sentence not re- phrased, given a new emphasis, shifted to a fresh, context, or in some way given Sir Alec's personal. impress. It would seem that the jokes are dropped' in on the spur of the moment from Sir Alec's• private repertory. The language, extracted as it may be from other men's raw materials, is. equally his own.
The reporters, as a matter. of fact, have a. terrible time trying to keep track of Sir Alec's• incessant departures from his script. It was this• problem which led The Times into that famous' mishearing the other week, so that they reported him as asking for another 'ten years' of office' when he had in reality asked more modestly for a further 'tenure.' The Times had abandoned the script in despair and relied upon old- fashioned shorthand and the human ear:– with, unlucky results: Sir Alec made another speech in Plymouth that evening which was not scripted and not reported. As he goes about the country on these journeys he always addresses private, off-the- record gatherings of local editors. His brisk, off-the-cuff summaries of the political and inter- national situations arc much praised for their forthright and concise character. What Sir Alec had to say to the West Country editors evi- dently went down very well. This is the irony of his present gallant onslaught on public opinion: Sir Alec is at his best speaking unre- hearsed to small groups, and, for a Prime Minister, electioneering is not like that.
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