Notebook
T tried to telephone Mrs Elizabeth Carew1 Hunt to console her about the damage caused to her Wimbledon house last weekend. Unfortunately, the telephone did not answer, and I have read in the newspapers that she had to be treated for shock after the IRA bomb explosion which wrecked the flat of her tenant, the Attorney-General. Eighteen months ago I had a very agreeable conversation with her. She had been engaged in a much publicised dispute with Sir Michael Havers about the rent he was paying for his flat. This, for seven years, had stood at £10 a week; in 1976 it was raised to £15 a week; then, in November 1979, Mrs Carew-Hunt tried to increase it to f.25 a week. Sir Michael refused to pay, Mrs Carew-Hunt took the issue to a rent tribunal, and finally, after much haggling, they agreed out of court that he should pay her £22 a week, and that the rental should in future be index-linked, which means it will only recently have reached the £25 Mrs Carew-Hunt was asking two years ago. It seemed to me that Sir Michael had got off very lightly. For this modest sum he was getting a drawing room, dining room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, a private bit of garden, and a private parking space for his car. But there was another reason why I felt that Mrs Carew-Hunt deserved a rather higher rent. She told me how the Government had recently spent £5,000 on installing bullet-proof glass and electronic eyes in Sir Michael's flat and how there was now a permanent police guard outside. This made her feel uncomfortable. 'I don't suppose they would do that if there wasn't any danger,' she said. How right she was. The flat was wrecked, though fortunately while Sir Michael was abroad. He i says, understandably, that he doubts f he will ever want to live there again. But one should also consider Mrs Carew Hunt, whose only desire has always been to live quietly and grow herbs in her garden. She deserves very generous compensation.
ichael Foot looks rather like one of those eccentric, well-meaning schoolmasters who are mercilessly mobbed in class. And Tony Benn is the arrogant little boy in the back row who knows just how to make the lives of such men a misery. It is a well-tried technique. It depends upon the teacher having a touching faith in the fundamental worth of little boys, and upon him believing that, if he is consistently nice and understanding, he will bring out the best in everybody and have a happy united class that will eventually profit from his instruction. If he fails, such a teacher will blame himself rather than the wreckers. Tony Benn knows exactly how to deal with a teacher like this. You look always clean, eager and attentive; you never smile or laugh; you participate actively in class; you seem, indeed, like the model pupil, except that, in tones of high earnestness, you persistently talk confusing rubbish, ask unanswerable questions, dispute every innocent point that is made, until in the end the teacher, not knowing whether you are teasing him or not, goes off his head and may even forget to put on a black coat for a memorial service. The teacher may in the end realise what is happening and take disciplinary action, but by then he is disillusioned and has lost faith in himself, while the boy will show wide-eyed incomprehension at the injustice which has been done to him. The wide-eyed incomprehension bit was in Wednesday's Guardian — an article by Tony Benn entitled (by him, one must assume) 'Setting the record straight'. It was total nonsense, but it served its purpose by making Mr Foot look even more foolish and pathetic. Nowhere has Mr Foot been made to look more ridiculous than in Mr Benn's own account of their last-minute attempt to achieve a reconciliation. Mr Benn had prepared a statement setting out 'in good faith' his position on collective responsibility in the shadow Cabinet. The 'key paragraph' he quoted from this statement meant nothing at all, yet Mr Foot took the trouble to propose two amendments to the text, neither of which detracted from its meaninglessness. One was that the responsibilities referred to should 'apply equally to all of us', and the other was: 'We cannot have one rule for one person and another for others'. 'I added them readily,' wrote Mr Benn, as if he had magnanimously made some major concession. This is the key to successful baiting in this genre; pick on some piece of weakness or stupidity by your opponent and pretend to find it all immensely serious and significant.
T do not say that breakfast television will 1 be a failure. On the contrary, it is likely to be a success. If television is there, it is watched. Many would stay up all night to watch it if they could. Many more will certainly watch it in the morning, even if this involves a certain amount of inconvenience. (How does one watch television while shaving?) But I do object to the Independent Broadcasting Authority's claim, in its yearbook published this week, that the new breakfast-time service will 'meet a public need'. This is humbug. I do not believe that the public has expressed any opinion on the matter. Have there been protests or demonstrations against the lack of television at breakfast time? The public need for breakfast television is no more evident than is the public need for any other inessential consumer product. The need will be created by marketing men. Breakfast television will fill two needs: the need of a certain number of people to make a lot of money and the need of any organisation — in this case the IBA — to feel that it is expanding and increasing its power.
One can quite see why some people do not like their names. If you want to be an actor and are called Michael DumbleSmith, it is reasonable to change it to Michael Crawford. If you are an actress called Deborah Kerr-Trimmer, who can object to you dropping the Trimmer? Even more obviously, Walter Matthau is a better name for an actor than Walter Matuschanskayasky, as Maria Callas is a better name for an opera singer than Cecilia Kalegeropoulos. Even the Spectator could not face Taki Theodoracopulos as the name for one of its columnists and obliged the poor man to drop his surname. What is less admirable is the urge to appear more slick, up-to-date and dynamic. Many names one sees on television are very suspect — the Christian name 'Jon', for example. What is wrong with the name Donald Woolfitt? Why is it improved by spelling it Wolfit? More depressing still is the urge to sound more aristocratic or original. Nigel Davies is a perfectly good name, and it did its owner no credit to change it to Justin de Villeneuve. To make yourself sound foreign is only forgivable if you happen to be a ballet dancer. A lot of information of this sort is to be found, if it interest you, in a new book called Naming Names by Adrian Room (Routledge & Kegan Paul, £9.75).
More news from Sweden. Our correspondent reports that ten Swedish schoolteachers have been expelled from their trade union, which means that they will no longer be allowed to teach. They earned this drastic punishment by taking courses in their spare time and at their own expense in order to improve the quality of their teaching. This was against the cherished trade union principles that nobody should work in his spare time and that nobody should do anything at all without being paid for it. I wonder if Swedish schoolteachers are allowed to read books.
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