A Spectator's Notebook

, or years I have been trying to find the time

ri „to get started on my campaign for English riome Rule. I think the hour has now struck.

Id For far too long the guilt-ridden English,

[11nch-drunk with anti-imperialist attacks r,oni Asia, Africa and Ireland, have thought d annut Scotland and Wales only in terms of that England ought or ought not to concede !.the Celtic fringes. It is time we started thinking about our own rights.

The fact is that the interests of England and

o! the English — rather than those of the Scots flti Welsh — demand that we rid ourselves as lar as possible of the Celtic incubus. The very ',,east we can do is to compel them to set up cottish and Welsh Parliaments to deal with i( their own domestic affairs on the Stormont odel. It is intolerable that English MPs hould have to sit up half the night considering Scottish local government reform, Welsh se.Werage authorities and the incomprehen,sible details of feu duties. It is no less intolerable that England, which almost invariilbelY returns a majority of Tory MPs, should Periodically saddled with socialist governntents by the backward Celts. We must not be deterred by legalistic argh!irnents about the ownership of North Sea . which certainly doesn't belong to the ?cots and which they are powerless anyway tic) extract. England for the English is the cry 2.0n1 now on. No Kilbrandon nonsense about ,.gional devolution within England, either. re is no mileage in Mercian nationalism. If ,`Lne English are at last allowed their rights, ;;ey will do very well as a nation. There will hey to be very strict control of Celtic imMigration, naturally, but there will be general agreement about that. If enough support — and cash to get the Inovement organised — is immediately forthne°rning, I am prepared to arrange a i'eremonial raising of St George's flag to 11:11augurate the campaign. There is no time to ne lost, or our chances will be fatally `°/npromised by half-measures, conferences, rItilOre Royal Commissions and speeches by illie Ross. Let's get moving now. COntraCtillg out -Y is it that so many people say they want coalition, or something called a 'government 115..f. national unity'? Well, it is obvious why the ,therals want one, but what is the attraction 1.0 others? I can only conclude that it is due to desire to contract out of making political decisions. h If one party asks you to 'stand up to the ,..41ons' and vote for the control of incomes, .vv,hile the other party urges you to give in to unions and let inflation rip, I suppose you ight feel that either course would involve ,"LnPleasantness. Better, perhaps, to dodge the and let the politicians make it for you. then they can be blamed for everything and JOU need not feel responsible for whatever f,°es wrong. It is no doubt intended to be, as .almost certainly would be in practice, a eeiPe for having nothing done about anything. If it ever comes about, it will probably be 'cause both parties have decided that they ItyLant to get rid of their leaders and that this is _ne only way to do it. Things would undoubtedly -have been different.

Lain would have been a cautious Chancellor, and would almost certainly have prevented the gross over-inflation of government expenditure to which Mr Barber and his colleagues succumbed under the panic pressure of high unemployment and stubborn industrial stagnation. Nor do I think he would have allowed the miners' strike of 1972 to get to the point at which the Wilberforce settlement triggered off another round of wage inflation. Whether he could have prevented or avoided a statutory incomes policy is another question, but he might have done.

What seems to me certain is that he would have turned the balance of the recent election. There is nobody now in the leading echelons of the Conservative Party with his popular appeal, his oratorical gifts — or his political acumen.

Contemporaries

Two Sundays ago, Kenneth Rose reproduced in the Sunday Telegraph an old Oxford Union group photograph which showed the late Hannen Swaffer and Mgr Ronald Knox surrounded by a group of undergraduates which included Lord Greenwood of Rossendale, Mr Justice Crichton, the new Secretary of State for Employment and me. It makes you feel pretty old to be branded as a contemporary of judges and life peers, and I remember my father saying exactly the same thing when William Temple (who had been at school with him) first became a bishop.

B young and earnest we looked then! ho But And v

d above ove all, how very, very kempt, not to say hevelled. Even Michael Foot — at that time a devoted Lloyd George Liberal — was actually wearing tails and a white tie. Tempora mutantur, don't they? I find that while at Oxford I also got myself photographed with Lloyd George, G. K. Chesterton and John Buchan — not, of course, all at the same time, though that would have been an interesting encounter. I am desperately sorry to say that I can't remember anything Chesterton said; I only remember the way he wheezed when he laughed, which he did quite a lot, though probably not at anything I said.

John Buchan

John Buchan, however, was unforgettable. He was Senior President of the Oxford University Conservative Association, and he took the job seriously. He went out of his way to cultivate successive generations of undergraduate officers of the Association, No one could have been nicer and more helpful to young men than he was. I think he was always mindful of the experience he gained as a member of Milner's 'Kindergarten' in South Africa, and he wanted to do what he could for the next generations. Once one knew him well enough to get beneath the slightly buttoned-up lowland Scottish exterior, he was a most delightful host and conversationalist.

Incidentally, one of his books that is well worth digging out and re-reading at the present political juncture is The Gap in the Curtain. It contains some salutary warnings for ambitious pdliticians in the peculiar times that lie ahead of us.

Puppets

The one thing that will convince me and many other people that Ministers, of whatever party, in the Department of the Environment are the mindless puppets of power-crazed civil servants will be a decision by Mr Crosland to go ahead with the absurd plans for rural motorways in the Midlands and elsewhere. Even leaving aside the fuel crisis and the need to preserve good agricultural land, the economic case for these costly monstrosities has been totally destroyed at recent public inquiries. It has even been reluctantly admitted by the Department's officials that it would be cheaper — and take less land — to upgrade existing trunk roads and bypass towns and villages, which is clearly preferable.

The fact is that the officials and engineers of the regional Road Construction Units love building motorways. Without them, their occupation would be gone, and they are desperately trying to force their plans through before economic reality catches up with them. The amount of money already wasted on so-called 'road improvements' has been scandalous. Every February, in my part of the world, miles and miles of quiet country roads are laboriously fitted with unnecessary concrete kerbs to get the year's money spent in time. And, when Mr Barber announced cuts in roads expenditure last December, one County Surveyor gave the whole game away in a press interview. He didn't say the cuts would deprive motorists of needed road improvements: he said there wouldn't be enough money to keep his men employed throughout the year!

Cat crisis _

The three-day week had some unforeseen effects. My secretary has been tompiaining bitterly about the dearth of sbtnething called Whiskas Wondergreen. This, I discovered on inquiry, is a brand of cat litter.

If, like me, you don't live in a London flat which has access neither to garden soil nor to ashes from a solid-fuel stove, you probably don't even know what cat litter is. Let me now tell you that it is the basic material for cats' indoors loos. They like to scrabble in it after performing their natural functions. God knows what London's flat-dwelling cats have been doing during the crisis. Perhaps it is better not to inquire.

Streakers

There has been some discussion at Westminster about who would be the first MP to streak through the House of Commons. Betting is fairly even at the moment between Mr Cyril Smith and Mr Arthur Lewis, with Mr Dennis Skinner as a likely outsider.

Angus Maude