DIARY
ANTHONY HOWARD
udget Day has always struck me as one of the more bogus rituals of British life. The occasion — televised 'live' for the first time last Tuesday — has long since ceased to be anything more than a self- promotion project for the Chancellor, with some rub-off for his opposite number on the Opposition front bench as well. Why the title 'Shadow Chancellor' should have so much grander a ring than all the other watching-brief portfolios I don't know, but it certainly does. Harold Wilson did parti- cularly well out of it from 1956-62 and John Smith may yet match his achievement though, no doubt, he hopes, for not quite so long. About the rewards of actually being Chancellor I am nothing like so clear. The two outstanding post-war Chancellors were, after all, Rab Butler and Roy Jenk- ins. Neither ever got to No. 10. Will the curiously anonymous (take away 'the trapeze artist' father and what's left?) John Major have better luck? I doubt it. He has come in at what is beginning to look like the last lap of a government. That is seldom a very propitious moment to be at the Treasury. Since 1945 Harold Macmil- lan remains the only Chancellor to have vaulted straight from No. 11 to No. 10. It is not, I fancy, a record that is in any imminent danger of being broken.
The last MP to attempt a serious backbench insurrection against a sitting Prime Minister was Antony Lambton. In the summer of 1963 — and in the wake of the Profumo affair—he was the somewhat improbable promoter of Reggie Maudl- ing's bid to take over from Macmillan. He conducted the campaign with some skill, regularly infiltrating polls into the Daily Telegraph showing the then Chancellor as the overwhelming choice of Tory backben- chers. (At Westminster the plot never changes, only the characters.) In past days, of course, such findings counted for even less than they do today: until 1965 Tory leaders still 'emerged' through the custom- ary processes of consultation'. But Lamb- ton, as he told me the other day, still remains sceptical of anyone's chance of mounting a successful challenge to a deter- mined Prime Minister. He suspects there was a single week when Maudling could have seized the leadership in June 1963 but the moment passed. I got the strong impression that he thought the same thing would happen to Michael Heseltine.
Heseltine's two principal enemies among the press proprietors — Lord Stevens and Lord Rothermere — nonethe- less give every sign of being badly fright- ened. Their newspapers remain committed to the line that he lacks the stability of
temperament to be Prime Minister. Pre- dictably, they point to the sudden rush of blood they claim affected him at the final Westland Cabinet meeting held on Thurs- day 9 January 1986. I am sorry to dis- appoint them, but that version of his `impetuous' behaviour is not true. How can I assert that? For the best of all reasons. In my bulging file of unpublished ne*spaper stories there exists one that I wrote on Saturday 4 January 1986 and which, sadly, never saw the light of day. It begins: 'Mr Michael Heseltine is ready to stake his entire future on the outcome of the West- land Helicopters battle. He is quite recon- ciled to resigning from the Cabinet, poss- ibly this Thursday.' Whether that kind of premeditation redounds to Heseltine's cre- dit is for the Tory party to judge. But at least it disposes of the charge that through being Welsh or something — he is somehow too excitable ever to be allowed inside No. 10.
Whoever the claimed 'security source' was that tipped off the Sun last Friday to Farzad Bazoft's conviction for robbery, he has little to feel proud about. To have warned the Observer in confi- dence — once Farzad was arrested in Iraq — of a possible complication in its free- lance reporter's background would have been perfectly legitimate. In fact, that would have been in every way preferable to leaving its editor to find out about it from its accredited correspondent's former landlady. But to wait until his body was delivered in a box to the British Embassy in Baghdad to disclose his prison sentence argues a motivation that is as murky as it is 'We're making a go of it for the sake of Lord Mackay.' mysterious. The only explanation that con- tinues to suggest itself is that somewhere in Whitehall the view was taken that it might be prudent to prevent any public backlash getting out of hand. The chilling tones of realpolitik displayed last week on both television and radio by British representa- tives and even by Sir John Moberly, our former ambassador in Baghdad, indicated that the Arabist hold on the Foreign Office is as strong as ever. I hear, incidentally, that only a week before the execution a seminar was held at Chatham House de- signed to encourage British business invest- ment in Iraq. And, yes, our Government was well represented there.
It may still be six weeks until the local elections are due on 3 May, but in London the literature is already starting to flutter through the door. The first Conservative leaflet, which has just arrived, is printed in a tasteful green and is all about conserva- tion and the environment; recycling, atmospheric pollution, noise, dog mess — you name it, our local Tories have thought of it. All, that is, except for one thing. The most visible change in our borough over the past six months has been the sudden sprouting of unsightly oblong grey metal boxes dotted at regular intervals along the streets. They were erected without a by- your-leave from the ratepayers (sorry, poll-tax payers) and, so far as the local council is concerned, they still do not qualify for a word of explanation. They are there, of course, to serve the needs of cable television — part of the world of com- merce. And that, in the eyes of our young thrusting entrepreneurs at the town hall, obviously remains something that has no- thing whatever to do with the environ- ment.
Easily my most intimidating experi- ence of the week occurred on Sunday when I had to give a sermon in Guildford Cathedral. Why should speaking in church be so much more terrifying than anywhere else? The correct answer, no doubt, is that the preacher is meant to be delivering God's word and that, therefore, the re- sponsibility is correspondingly heavy. But that hardly applied in my case. No, I fear, the truth is that it is the trappings that do it. From the moment the verger presented himself in front of my stall, bowed to me, I in turn bowed to him, then we both bowed together to the altar, I was done for. By the time we got to the pulpit steps (mutual bows again) I may not have become God's vessel but I was certainly not in charge of my own destiny. Mercifully, I failed to manage the microphone properly, so no one heard a word.
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