SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

J. W. M. THOMPSON

It will be a great comfort to many, I am sure, to know that they will be able to obtain news of the next sterling crisis or devaluation from a choice of no fewer than three colour television channels. Truly our technologists are all that Mr Wedgwood Benn says 'they are. All the same, I would find it a shade easier to be san- guine about the country's prospects if I didn't find myself apparently in a minority of one in reacting with some dismay to the Postmaster- General's stirring news. Isn't there perhaps something slightly indecent about equipping our- selves with these costly toys at the very moment when we are begging yet another loan to add to our fearsome debts to foreign bankers? Apparently not, to judge from the general approval: it might be the most natural thing in the world to be doing at such a time. I would have expected at least one public figure, in one of the political parties, to be rash enough to utter those disagreeable words, 'But we can't afford it.' Nothing of the sort has been heard. We may all be heading down the drain, but evidently it's not thought safe, or perhaps even proper, to apply that chilling sentiment to any- thing so sacrosanct as television.

I still find it puzzling. With the country already under heavy bombardment from three channels by day and by night, it's obvious to anyone in his right mind that we don't need another massive dose of television. It's equally obvious that the television industry will strongly defend this use of public money, since it's a state expenditure for its own prosperity. But I can't help thinking of that familiar figure, the cheerful spendthrift whose progress towards the bankruptcy court is marked by irrepressible ex- penditure on his own amusements; or of those financially insecure African states which squander millions on showy, useless, 'prestige' constructions. I just wish some responsible per- son, at some time, had had the nerve to sug- gest putting off the whole extravagance until we had some money in the bank.

Calamity Dick

What an extraordinary hash Mr Crossman has made of his various announcements about pen- sions, teeth, spectacles, and similar high matters of state. Each fresh contradiction to fall from him wrings some new element of the bizarre from a situation already, one might have thought, exhausted of its potentialities in that direction. It is the sort of mess which only a minister of the greatest verbal dexterity could land himself in.

But I hope it won't be forgotten that all this began when he came under universal execration for making his celebrated teeth-and-specs announcement on the eve of the local elections. His original sin was not mere confusion: it was the far graver one of actually jeopardising some votes. I for one rather warm to him because of it. Admittedly the timing was, in narrow party terms, inept, and evidently caused by mere forgetfulness. But I don't much like the general view, expressed from the left and the right, that for a minister to fail to think of party

advantage at all time an nrinardonable blunder.

Indeed, I wonder it politicians ever suspect that their obsession with trivial party advantage is perhaps a main cause of the distrust which

they inspire. Of course they're not to be ex- pected to ignore such considerations: they would be rum politicians if they did. But they don't have to be quite so obviously bowled aye• with horror when one of them momentum, thinks of something else. Neither do they have to exaggerate the significance of their own lit.... affairs quite so excitedly. I don't suppose, to- example, that Mr Crossman's 'blunder' had any important effect whatever on the voting in local elections. What effect it had on Mr Cross- man's future is, of course, another matter altogether.

A place of strife

I am not at all easy about the role which my union is playing in the comical affair of Clive Jenkins and the Daily Mirror. Now that the paper's former columnist, George Gale, has dis- closed that he doesn't belong to the National Union of Journalists either, it's harder than ever to see good reasons why its new columnist should have been 'blacked' by the union for being a non-member. The Mirror people ex- plain away the contradiction by saying that Gale is obviously a professional journalist while. Jenkins is obviously nothing of the sort. True, very true. But where does this lead us? To the proposition that if you're on the Mirror and a journalist you don't have to join the NUJ, but if you're not a journalist you do—except that you're not eligible. Can this be right?

Spring in Downing Street

The great thing about the Prime Minister, it's often said, is his unfailing optimism. Those who share my appreciation of this enviable charac- teri:,tic must not be allowed to miss a memor- able example from the Sunday Times. `Mr Wil- son,' I read there this week, 'detects in the present political juncture echoes of 1958, the year before a sitting government actually im- proved its majority.' He does, does he? It's an enthralling thought. The present government's majority over the Tories in 1966 was, of course, 110. What, I wonder, has Mr Wilson in mind for next time? 150? 200?

I learned of another instance the other day. of Mr Wilson's ability to see the world through rose-tint:xi spectacles (with or without Mr Crossman's assistance). I'm told on sound authority that he was heard to say. with a sym- pathetic shake of the head, 'Well, I wouldn't like to be in Ted Heath's shoes now. . .

The Bath bun

The Marquess of Bath's son and heir, Lord Weymouth, this week announced that he has married an actress 'in order to legitimise the heir he is expecting in October this year.' Since Lord Weymouth has made it plain enough in the past that he questions the institution of marriage, I'm not sure how we peasants are supposed to react to this important news: ex- cept perhaps to reflect that whatever else he doesn't believe in. Lord Weymouth evidently does believe in hereditary titles and hereditary estates Would this be a case of what Sir Kenneth Clark in his final discourse on civilisation on Sunday referred to as 'heroic materialism"'