Notebook
r3.11 the day after the news of the royal divorce, the Daily Mail carried a picture np! Princess Margaret leaving hospital, the u„Qily Telegraph carried a picture of Lord itowdon's girl friend, but The Times on Its front page showed Princess Beatrix of tile Netherlands happily cycling, presuplably on the principle that one should Print only the good news. Also The Times likes to think of itself as a royal newsPaper although, I have been told on good authority, when the Queen stays at BalMoral, the royal household orders only one Times and twenty-three Daily Telefraphs. Princess Margaret's newspaper Ilabits were shown by the photograph of tier reading the Daily Mail open at Niger 13,einpster's column, which has always given an accurate coverage of royal goings-on. If one thinks of the Royal Parnily, not unkindly, as like a longtUnning family soap opera, it may be significant that in the week of Princess Margaret's divorce, the BBC killed off Paul Johnson (no relation), one of the less successful characters in the Archers radio serial about country life.
The National Westminster Bank has much to answer for — I refer to its directors, not te the amiable staff at branch level. Having knocked down several buildings of 4rehitectural beauty (including a trange Venetian Pre-Raphaelite branch just south of Holborn) they have erected the nionstrous 600-foot Seifert tower at Ilishopsgate. They ran a series of advert,Isements in the newspapers in which, ha, na, very funny, a whole page of newsprint contained only one small ad. Now I see titteY have produced a series of illustrated Fneques describing great moments of Brit industrial and social history. I could nye chosen some recent, more representative scenes: Colonel Seifert surveYing Centrepoint; shop stewards nrdressing a Leyland strike meeting; .turiching the last ship from the last Brit18'1 shipyard.
sinister Greek-American Telly ‘ojak' Savalas was seen last week in !lolborn, ostensibly on a visit to children In hospital, but might he not have stenned off at his lawyers to try and sue „.3°Itte other newspaper as he sued and £33,000 from the Daily Mail? The weeks, after Ugandan emigres, are the W°rld's greatest suers of English newsPers. A former editor of the Yorkshire t”r)in, Kenneth Young, wrote a book in iluich he suggested, mildly enough, that ge BBC Greek Service was biased against the Colonels' regime which Mr Young mildly supported. He was sued by three, to him unknown, Greek journalists in the BBC; he fought the case, lost, and although the suers were given derisory damages of some £15 each, Mr Young was broken financially by costs well into five figures. However, I have good news this week that one lot of Greek suers have had their come-uppance. Our Spectator colleague, Taki Theodoracopulos, who had been sentenced in his absence to fifteen months' gaol for an alleged libel
on Greek hacks supported by Helen Vlachos, has won his appeal before three judges in Athens. These excellent men, these Hellenic Lord Dennings, have affirmed the right of free speech in the city where free speech was born.
A few doors down from the Spectator in Doughty Street is the Holborn branch of Camden's Department of Social Services. Until recently they used to put up a sign to say that on Wednesday afternoons they were working to rule in protest against 'the cuts' which, alas, do not seem to have been inflicted. But does it matter whether they work to rule or not? Exactly across the road from this Social Services office there lived until recently an old, rather dotty woman whose main occupation in life was cramming her cellar room full of old newspapers. Some neighbours, worried about the old woman's health as well as about the fire risk posed by the vast piles of newspapers, telephoned several times to Camden Social Services department who took no action whatsoever. When the old
woman died a few weeks ago, it took the police and removals men, wearing face masks, three days to clear the flat.
The inscription on the title page of Graham Greene's latest novel The Human Factor is taken from Conrad's Victory: 'I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul'. Has anyone pointed out that The Human Factor echoes not only the theme but the plot of Victory? The heroes of both books are solitary men who, more from pity than love, take up with a woman in distress and cause her ruin. Baron Heyst, a South Seas drifter, rescues an English girl from a third-rate orchestra and goes to live with her on a distant island, to which they are followed by a cut-throat gang. Maurice Castle, an elderly British intelligence officer, has married a black woman to save her from the South African, only to lose her again thanks to the villainy of our own and the Russian secret services. Before his fatal act of pity, Heyst had been 'an impermanent dweller amongst changing scenes. In this scheme he had perceived the means of passing through life without suffering and almost without a single care in the world — invulnerable because elusive'. A spy, too, would need to have such freedom from emotional ties. Perhaps there is something of Heyst in Graham Greene, forever wandering in the hot parts of the world, 'an impermanent dweller amongst changing scenes.'
Last Sunday it was the Observer's turn to be stopped by an unofficial union dispute. Already the Thomson Organisation has threatened to close the Sunday Times and its other papers if such strikes cannot be prevented. Part of the trouble lies in the rather unsavoury, not to say criminal character of some of the 'casuals' who work on the Sunday newspapers for up to £100 a day. A friend of mine on one of our great Sunday newspapers entered the staff canteen on Saturday afternoon to find that several tables had been converted to stalls selling merchandise that had 'fallen off the back of a lorry'. He bought a revolver for £.4.
The Spectator's editor, like others before him, complains occasionally that I go on too much about how Anthony Wedgwood Benn has saved the economy of South Africa by enabling Rio Tinto Zinc to found a mammoth uranium mine at Rossing. Therefore I shall be brief in quoting from Monday's Daily Telegraph a report from Johannesburg that Rossing's production last year was 3,047 tons of uranium oxide and that `what some have nicknamed the Wedgwood Benn shaft has been abandoned'.
Richard West
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