ANOTHER VOICE
Do the ordinary people really want Mrs Gaddafi for their Leader?
AUBERON WAUGH
For as long as I can remember we have all been telling Nigel Lawson that he is much too unattractive as a human being ever to be Leader of the Conservative Party, let alone Prime Minister. Although he would never admit as much, I begin to receive the impression that we may have convinced him. The general feeling is that he intends to retire from politics in good time before the next general election, possibly even after this next Budget. The gossip is that his wife, Therese, has no enthusiasm for staying in 11 Downing Street — and who can blame her, after her spiteful prosecution by Metropolitan Policemen under the Bottomley Terror and that a newly humanised Nigel is happy to play along with her and get out while the going is good, as Harold Wilson did in 1976.
I fear he would pay no attention to us if we all changed our tune, and started saying that on second thoughts he is not as unattractive as all that — there is nothing wrong with him that could not be put right by some new suits from a better tailor and a little training from Terry Wogan in the art of being relaxed in public. Perhaps bitterness and suspicion are too deeply engrained, but I have the impression that Wogan could perfectly well do for him what he did for the Princess Royal. Lawson is a wittier man than Howe, but less good at hiding his cleverness. All he needs is a couple of lessons. He may not be tremendously attractive, but very few politicians are.
Alas, I fear I am wasting my time trying to persuade him after all these years. Only his wife can do it. What we must do is to try and persuade Mrs Lawson that the country needs her husband: that he is the only credible alternative to Mrs Thatcher, who is about to become the most appalling liability to the GOvernment, to the Con- servative Party and to the country as a whole.
There are many reasons for concluding that Mrs Thatcher has made her contribu- tion and should now be retired. Let us start with the one which Mrs Lawson might understand best. In an alarming leader which appeared in this week's Sunday Telegraph St Peregrine Worsthorne, who seemed to have been infected with Mrs Thatcher's populist madness in several respects, made a very sage observation: `People object above all to interference with their habits, which is why it is so important that governors should under- stand those habits.'
It was all very well when Mrs Thatcher was bashing the trade unions and bashing the Argies, but now it has gone to her head and she is letting her bashers loose on the middle classes, interfering with our habits in ways which may vary in their intensity from person to person, but add up to a massive and totally unacceptable interfer- ence.
Mrs Lawson experienced it herself, when she was maliciously prosecuted and humiliated by the Metropolitan Police for being one millilitre over the permitted level, but her case is not particular. In Mrs Thatcher's passion for bossiness, she has allowed ignorant zealots in the police and fanatics in the various transport depart- ments to make it illegal for Britons who live in the country to have lunch or dinner or even drinks in each other's houses, thereby putting an end to a tradition of hospitality which is as old as human socie- ty; she has made it illegal for country dwellers to visit their pubs, and is making it ever harder for them to smoke tobacco while travelling. She has turned the police into enemies of the public.
Some people who are not affected by these things may smile, but they amount, as I say, to a mammoth interference, and one which makes many country dwellers curse her government every day of their lives. Others curse her for different reasons no doubt: the million-odd employees of the National Health Service who want even more money for less work; the 1,200,000 holders of gun licences who are about to be annoyed by Mr Hurd's hysterical and nannyish measures to annoy them. Some weeks ago I wrote of what may prove the greatest single reason for recognising her as a liability — the threat she represents to the European Community by her single- minded bossiness — but it is on the matter of law and order that the warning lights should be flashing brightest.
Not content with sending uniformed thugs to obstruct and intimidate private citizens about their lawful occasions, she honestly imagines she is so much above the common law of England that she can send plain clothes assassination squads, like Colonel Gaddafi, to shoot unarmed people in the streets of foreign parts, and expect to be applauded for it. The most sickening thing of all is that she is applauded. Ordinary people think and feel she has the right to murder terrorists without trial or enquiry because that is how terrorists also behave. Never mind trying to explain to them that our entire claim to legality in Northern Ireland rests upon the fact that we are not in a state of war: we are merely enforcing domestic laws against terrorism, murder and the rest of it. As soon as we start using terrorists' methods and murdering people on the basis of an inaccurate intelligence tip-off, we lose any right to administer law and order.
It is absurd to suppose that the secret services can be trusted to murder the right people. Of the three claims to justify the Gibraltar shootings — that the targets were terrorists, that they were armed, and that they were in immediate possession of a bomb — two were wrong. Next time, they will probably shoot some American holi- daymakers.
But the most sickening thing, as I say, is that nobody seems worried. Most of the newspapers, led by the Sun, have ap- plauded the shooting and poured scorn on any suggestion that there should be any enquiry beyond a perfunctory inquest, with or without the presence of the Govern- ment's servants to explain their behaviour. Just what, one might ask, has happened to the rule of law in a country where house- holders are not permitted to wave so much as a fish-knife at a burglar? I am not saying that Mrs Thatcher should be tried or impeached. No doubt she would get off, just as Jeremy Thorpe did, although he was at least brought to trial. But she should certainly be retired: she has gone over the top and become a public danger.
Three writers on the Sunday Telegraph leader page this week decried what St Peregrine termed 'the growing gap be- tween what ordinary people think and feel and what the elites think and feel', suggest- ing we should all pay more attention to the ordinary people. They are wrong of course. Ordinary people are ordinary peo- ple because they are not as clever as 'the elites'. On the whole, they do not think very much. It is the function of 'the elites' to guide and persuade them, not to imitate or suck up to them. When we have a Prime Minister who starts sending assassination squads around the world like some de- mented Middle East dictator, the time has come for 'the elites' to assert themselves.
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