Notebook
Everyone these days seems to be heaping blame for our present crazy public over spending on Lord Keynes, as the author of 'deficit financing.' There is another name which surely should enter the argument- that of the man who fifteen years ago was being invoked as patron saint by every would-be big-spending politician in the land. It was J. K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society, with its sloganising about 'private opulence and public squalor,' which turned us all into little parrots in the early 'sixties, chanting that litany about the need for more spending on 'roads and hospitals and schools.' It was from that time on that education, the health service and housing became by far the fastest growing areas of public spending (without, it may be said, any enormously marked improvement in the level of public benefit provided). As we now groan and totter under the vast mountain of bureaucracy which has been erected to administer those services, it is not the age of Keynes which is coming to an end, so much as that of the man described by Evelyn Waugh in his Diaries as 'an ungainly and deeply garrulous American who called himself an economist.'
A possible explanation for the Observer's renewed financial problems may lie in the no doubt apocryphal tale that some months after taking over as editor, Mr Donald Trelford rang up his accounts department to ask why he had not yet received any wages. 'Oh, we don't know anything about that,' they replied. 'Mr Astor never got paid anything when he was editor.'
Reporting on the cultural 'asset stripping' activities of Mr Peter Hall seems to be becoming a minor national industry. Great puzzlement has rightly been caused by the arrangement whereby Hall can apparently use public funds to set up a surefire commercial success like No Man's Land, and then, after a very brief National season, transfer it to the West End, drawing a personal commission of several hundred pounds a week. Almost as puzzling is Hall's curious arrangement with the LWT arts programme Aquarius, which is said to provide the celebrated director with £16,000 a year, for little more than three hours a week reading lines off an Autocue. I am told that the true figure, however, may be nearer to £21,000 a year, for just one hour's reading (malicious persons even add that most of Hall's lines are written for him by Frank Muir's son). Since Aquarius only puts out some twenty programmes a year, this would mean that Hall is paid at the rate of some £1,000 an hour (probably more than Shakespeare received in his entire lifetime). I know that Ernest Hemingway once received $15 a word for an article in Sports Illustrated (Guinness Book of Records). But I cannot seriously believe that the hard-headed businessmen behind LWT would be foolish enough to pay anyone £16 a minute.
What a seedy place the Savoy Hotel has become these days, rather like one of those grotty new hotels on the way to London Airport which provide 'conference facilities,' and are full of businessmen asking the way to the 'toilets.' Last week I was invited there to attend this year's 'Wolfson Award' lunch, what my wife, with her acerbic wit, described as a 'typical Quango occasion,' with rows of grey academics like Lord Bullock and Asa Briggs all looking like overfed businessmen. But I must not be ungrateful to my hosts, the Wolfson Foundation. The grub was excellent. And the occasion was redeemed by two agreeable speeches, the first rattled off at his usual breakneck speed, by Lord Goodman; the other from my friend Norman Stone of Cambridge, who received a vast cheque for his admirable book The Eastern Front 1914-7. Stone must be the only historian who has ever signed his publisher's contract in prison. The jail in question was Bratislava, where he spent six months after the failure of an attempt to smuggle a Czech refugee through the Iron Curtain.
Not for a long time can any book have aroused such sound and fury as David Pryce-Jones's life of Unity Mitford. I have been haunted by a sense of the personal tragedy of her life ever since I first saw her grave in the little churchyard of Swinbrook, near Burford, with its eerily portentous combination of name and birthdate 'Unity Valkyrie Mitford, 8 August 1914.' I have passed the spot in the Englischer Garten in Munich where she was driven to the desperate act of shooting herself on 3 September 1939. I also once stayed on the lone ly and beautiful little island of Inchkenneth, huddled beneath the grim basalt cliffs of Mull, where she finally died in 1948. For an island of only 150 acres (one house and a farm) it is extraordinarily rich in historical associations. Several Scottish kings were buried there as a kind of overflow from lona (down the coast). Boswell and Johnson called in on their Hebridean tour, and were agreeably entertained by the two daughters of the house on the harpsichord ( I like to imagine with the latest airs from London, by J. C. Bach and that young fellow Mozart). A later owner of the house wrote the Skye Boat Song here. And finally there was Unity. Amid all the posturing and righteous indignation of the past few weeks, the only reviewer (apart from her sister) who seems to have caught some hint of the personal tragedy of this story. behind David Pryce-Jones's rather glib colour supplement account, was Rebecca West—who was reviewing books even be' fore Unity Milford was born.
Although it was scarcely a review of the book, many people must have taken a slightly guilty delight in Lord Lambton's quite astonishingly abusive tirade in last week's Spectator. His comments on PryceJones were little more than a frame for his colourful portrait of Lord Weidenfeld. As for Weidenfeld's supposed reluctance to engage in 'the mundane task' of reading. I recall the story of how the eminent publisher used for years to weary his employees with the plea that they should and him 'another Lucky Jim.' Eventually one of the more courageous of his employees took him on one said and said, 'George, you keep on about what a marvellous book Lucky Jim is. I know you've never actuallY read it. Here is a copy—go away and read it.' Six months later, having had no response, she asked him, 'What did you make of it ?"Oh', replied an embarrassed Weidenfeld, 'I'm afraid I never managed to get beyond the first two pages. I hated it.
Remember Mr John 'The Toad' Silkin's Community Land Act, which was hailed as 'the greatest land reform in Britain's history'? Two years ago, it was being grandiosely claimed by supporters that, lo the first year of the Act's operation. local authorities might buy as much as '£750,000,000-worth of land.' Last week the Department of the Environment confessed that, in the first six months of the Act's operation, the town halls have so far only managed to buy 120 acres of land, at a cost of some £1,500,000. As many of us predicted, The Toad's dreaded CLA alreadY begins to look remarkably like that other 'greatest land reform in history,' poor old Fred Willey's Land Commission. By the time this was closed down in 1971, the bureaucrats had only managed to amass in the whole of London and the South-East some half a dozen building plots, totalling just under one and a half acres.
Christopher Booker
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