ANOTHER VOICE
One's more leisurely reflections on Paul Foot's 50th birthday
AUBERON WAUGH
It sometimes happens to one at a party that the host or a deputation of guests demands that one makes a speech at short notice, when one is concerned only to go on laughing and joking and pulling funny faces. This is an embarrassment and a bore, because one has nothing to say and no time in which to collect one's thoughts. But it would be wet as well as churlish to refuse, so one stammers out a few inarticu- late sentences and retires, blushing, into a little pool of shame.
This happened to one — oh, all right, it happened to me — at a party given to celebrate Paul Foot's 50th birthday in London, appropriately enough, on the 70th anniversary of the October Revolu- tion. Nearly everyone I know seems to be celebrating his or her 50th birthday about this time. The dangers are obvious. I, who have another two years to go before this melancholy event, will be expected to make innumerable blushing appearances as the token Boy or Voissa Youf. Some- thing must be done to discourage these requests. I hope Spectator readers will bear with me if I now deliver the speech which I would have delivered at Paul Foot's 50th birthday party if I had had time to think about it. If that does not do the trick, nothing will.
First, perhaps, I had better set the scene. It was a most genial occasion. Carousing trade unionists, Socialist Workers and journalists make better company than any number of Conservative MPs. At the brilliantly delicious dinner prepared by Rose Foot with help from sympathisers, I sat next to John Birmingham (Helen Birm- ingham's husband) whom I had not met before. In the course of it, he pointed to the handsome gold chairs we were sitting on and said he recognised them as coming from a well-known north London caterer. ' Barmitzvahs a speciality', he said omi- nously. Thereafter he seemed to become obsessed by the conceit that far from this happy event marking Paul's 50th birthday, it was in fact his barmitzvah. When his turn came to make a speech it was full of Jewish jokes and Pentateuchal references which were lost on the rest of the audience who had not heard the original proposition. As a result it fell rather flat.
My own brief apology for a speech was an attempt to explain what Birmingham had left out, but brooding about it after- wards I wondered whether, if the event
had indeed celebrated Paul's onset of puberty rather than a significant milestone in his maturity, our two futures would have taken the same course as they have. The barmitzvah boy's utterances at these cere- monies are prescribed by tradition — Baruch atah adonoi, elohanu melech ha'olam and the rest of it — but Paul could scarcely have guessed, at the age of 12 or 13, what shape his life would assume in 37 or 38 years' time: working for Robert Maxwell's Daily Mirror by day on his poignant Bitter Hearts Column, receiving the complaints of OAPs, and victims of injustice, while spending his spare time labouring selflessly for the revolution which never comes, and which almost certainly never will come, and which he and most of his friends in the Socialist Workers' Party, as I believe, would find utterly vile if it did come. The same may not be true of other left-wing groups. On my one visit to a meeting of the Workers Revolutionary Party in Brighton, I was particularly impressed by the mad, staring eyes of Corin Redgrave and his colleagues on the platform. This form of infantile leftism was clearly recognisable as a psychopathic disorder. But the humorous, almost self-deprecating leftism of the SWP (except when they stand up to make their dreadful, boring speeches) clearly express- es no more than an intellectual and moral choice. Where have they gone wrong, or where has society gone wrong to drive them into such bizarre attitudes?
Foot's conversion from the idealistic left-wing liberalism into which he was born occurred, as I have been told, when he was a young reporter in Glasgow. He saw workers on Clydeside — in the days when there were still workers to be seen there — who would come into the pubs from work and sit on a stool. They would order eight or nine glasses of whisky, which they arranged in a row in front of them. Then they would drink their way through the row of glasses without ever looking up or talking to anyone. When they had finished the last glass they would stand up and still without saying a word to anyone, punch whoever was standing nearest to them. That was their life.
This upset Foot. He thought human life should hold more for people, and blamed the system which gave them no hope of anything better. They were the victims of selfish, greedy exploiters who did not care in the least about their welfare. He moved to what is now called the hard Left, and has been working ever since for what is still called workers' power, suggesting that these people should somehow have some say in their own destinies.
My own conversion from the genial, paternal conservatism still favoured by such as Ian Gilmour and St Peregrine to something rather nastier came when I was an 18-year-old National Service recruit at the Guards Depot, Caterham. Although there were officers at Caterham we hardly saw them. The place was run to all intents and purposes by NCOs and by a figure of authority which existed nowhere else in the British Army, so far as I know, called the Trained Soldier. Trained Soldiers were senior Guardsmen judged too stupid or too venal even for the single stripe of a lance-corporal, but given enormous power, almost of life or death, over the recruits in their barrack rooms. It was an early and somewhat unfortunate taste of what is the reality of workers' power: brutal, some- times sadistic, often vindictive but invari- ably — and most terrifying of all — bottomless in its stupidity.
From that moment I devoted myself to the class war with almost as much selfless dedication as my friend Paul Foot. Work- ers were often the most admirable people — nicer by far than many of my class — but not to be trusted with power. Workers' power was something to be evaded, outwit- ted and defeated; workers' interests were by definition the opposite of my own interests. Anything which made workers prosperous or powerful was to be frus- trated, even if it made such genial people as Lord Cowdray and Robert Maxwell prosperous and powerful, too.
Dispassionate observers may spot an error in both our positions. Why, in Foot's case, should his pity and anger about the brutalised workers on the Clyde make him suppose they were suitable people to wield power in the land? Why, in my own case, should my hatred and terror of workers' power make me grudge them the simple comforts of greater prosperity? Might not this prove an opiate for their angry, brutal natures? I cannot answer for Foot, but I can only aver that almost every aspect of proletarian affluence fills me with disgust: the sights, the smells and the noises. Perhaps we are both wrong, but it is too late to do anything about it now.
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