Another voice
Against the disabled
Auberon Waugh
If Mrs. Thatcher is seriously disturbed by insubordination — not to say disloyalty — in the Cabinet, then her remedy is at hand. She must restore the practice of creating hereditary peerages. What other incentive do rich Conservative Cabinet ministers have to show loyalty against their better judgments? Sir Ian Gilmour, Mr Whitelaw and Mr Prior are all obvious candidates. Even the appalling Mr Walker, despoiler of the English shires, is probably rich enough after his early days in unit trusts to qualify for such an honour, however much other Conservatives might judge that he has qualified more notably for the gallows.
For my own part, I attribute the disintegration of the upper reaches of British society in no small measure to the fact that Mr Heath retained Mr Wilson's ban on the creation of new hereditary peerages. It was quite right for a Labour government to have nothing to do with it — apart from the fact that they don't believe in that sort of thing, none of us really wishes to see a second generation of Shinwells, Kagans or Stewarts of Fulham prancing around in ermine. But if Conservatives believe in anything beyond 'creating wealth' (i.e. making money) they must surely believe in historical continuity (i.e. handing it on). The hereditary peerage was both the symbol and the embodiment of this human aspiration.
Nobody of taste or discernment can seriously covet a life peerage any more. Even if it had not been cheapened by the strange crew of nonentities and villains already ennobled, the whole concept of life peerage is an explicit denial of historical continuity, human survival after death and all the rest of it. But I may as well admit that throughout my youth and early manhood I always hoped I would end my days as an earl. Journalism was an odd trade to choose with this in mind, but when I first started work for the Daily Telegraph in 1960 I wore a dark suit and stiff white collar every day. There was still hope. By diligence and good behaviour, by deference, ruthless opportunism and all the traditional qualities of advancement in an ordered society it might still have been possible to win a coronet with eight balls on tall points, strawberry leaves between, which would have marked the arrival of the Waughs among the hereditary aristocracy of the land. What possible motive is now left for deference or good behaviour? Others, it is true, might have settled for less, but with Mrs Thatcher's pig-headed and continuing refusal to grant a knighthood to Mr Peregrine Worsthorne she should scarcely be surprised that not a single commentator found a good word to say for the last Budget — with the exception of Mr Ferdinand Mount, who is probably going to be a baronet one day in any case.
It would be easy to work oneself up into a frenzy of resentment and self-pity — here I am, living in a huge house and quite rich (anyway much richer than Lord Gowrie) white, over 21 and suitable for an earldom in every way except that earldoms are no longer being created. Can Mrs Thatcher be surprised if I no longer wear dark suits and stiff white collars to work, I no longer smirk and rub my hands together whenever I meet • a Cabinet Minister, I feel not the slightest urge to stick up for Sir Geoffrey Howe's boring little Budget and am sometimes even to be found making tasteless jokes about junior members of the Royal Family? Without the distant prospect of a hereditary peerage the card house of social order collapses, the string of degree is untuned. To the extent that anyone in Britain works at all, we are all working under the cloud of one dismal fact, that the last earldom was created by letters patent on 6 October 1961, and the recipient of this honour was Antony (sic) Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones.
Jones must remain our inspiration. If journalism seems an odd trade to choose with the distant prospect of an earldom in sight, his own trade of photographer was even odder. When he was first raised to the earldom, and later appointed a GCVO for staying the course, there were dingy, resentful little voices to be heard saying that they wouldn't be prepared to do what he had done, even for an earldom. Let them look at him now: an earl, a viscount, a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order and a beautiful, engaging, wellmannered wife. Game, set and match to Jones. Glamis, Cawdor . . . and now, as President of the International Year of Disabled People, something very much like King of our modern Britain, too.
I do not know what ceremony attends the investiture of a Disabled People's President — whether he is robed, anointed, crowned and exposed to the cheering multitude. Probably not. But there can be no mistaking the aura of veneration which attaches to the post. In a country which is torn by conflicting interests and class antagonisms, tender sentiments towards the disabled are just about the only thing we can all agree on. As I have said before, those ostentatious signs advertising toilet facilities for the disabled which greet travellers at Heathrow Airport are far more a symbol of the nation, and of its precarious unity, than the Royal coat of arms or the Union Jack. One day, perhaps, the wheelchair motif will be adopted as our national flag, and the mysterious third sex which has begun to appear at motorway comfort stations Men, Women and semi-ambulant Duos will be adopted as our official sexual identity. All of which may sound a trifle bitter, hid, as it happens I am a disabled person myseh and therefore, surely, entitled to be bitter. Since 1958 I have been officially designated as a hundred per cent disabled, although even at a hundred per cent I rank pretty low in the hierarchy of the disabled. I am no .nearly so unfortunate, or so much to be pitied, as those who can claim mobility allowance, constant attendance allowance, invalidity pension or unemployability suP. plement. But I am considerably more disabled than • Lord Snowdon, and while recognising a snrt of logic in the proposition that in the country of the disabled the one-legged mat! should be king, I sometimes wonder what and the other million-odd registered criP" ples in this country have done to deserve his concern for us. That his concern is pronir ted by nothing but the milk of human kindness can scarcely be doubted, since with an earldom in the bag he has nothing ° gain. But as one of the miserable renmaids of humanity to whom the prospects of an earldom is no longer available, I do not see why I should follow obediently under Ilis flag, or acknowledge his leadership. Let nie now say that I regard the whole Year of the Disabled with a jaundiced eye . . . In a morning's haranguing with the 'Year' organisation office and the DHSS press department, we were unable to agree of? 3 figure for the number of citizens more or less permanently confined to a wheelchair, so I have decided to invent one: 180,000, or one in every 289 of the population. These people are certainly unfortunate and a, proper charge on the charity of the rest 01 us. Anybody who goes out of his way to helP them is doing a good thing, and anything which improves their lot is to be welcomed. But they are not nearly so unfortunate as the much greater number of People who are, permanently confined to bed, or to a melltai hospital. And they certainly do not have die right to demand that theatres, shops, museums, stately homes, entire cities should be built; or that public meetings and the whole organisation of normal everydaY life should be adjusted to their special requirements, that every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill made low. the crooked straight, the rough places plain,' Above all, they are not to be werrieo about nearly so much as the 660,000-0dd fellow-citizens who will actually die this year. Until these good people have orga' nised themselves into an International Year for the Dying I will continue to see their concern for the disabled not as an exercise in true compassion so much as an escaPe from reality and as an exercise in fake optimism. Collectively, the v,/heelchair army is no more and no less than another strident pressure group maki" exorbitant demands on public resources.
Previous page
