ANOTHER VOICE
A quick, flip response to the errors of Walkero-Heathism
AUBERON WAU GH
Asmall item which I cut out from a newspaper at the beginning of the year it coincided with Lord Stockton's death, so I could not write about it at the time reappeared on my desk this week by some quasi-miraculous process. I feel it may Contain an urgent message for the Con- servatives as they begin to nerve them- selves for another general election, although its application may not be im- mediately apparent. The item appeared in the Daily Mail's `Letter from America' on 2 January, the day after Christendom had celebrated the Feast of the Circumcision, appointed by the Council of Tours in 567 to replace the heathen excesses which had previously Opened the New Year and which sprang from the idolatrous cult of Janus, the ancient, two-headed Italian god of door- ways.
The Daily Mail's American correspon- dent, called George Gordon (presumably his family came from Scotland, where they take the Feast of the Circumcision very seriously), did not, however, comment on this: He merely revealed that a Californian-based organisation, puzzlingly named the National Organisation of Cir- cumcision had named the Prince and Princess of Wales as parents of the year. The organisation was calling for 1987 to be named the Year of the Intact Child, and praised the Waleses for not having had Prince William or Prince Harry circum- cised.
At the time, I thought it tremendously unfair on the two young princes to have the state of their private parts not only adver- tised to the world in general but also used for propaganda purposes by an obviously unpleasant and bossy pressure group. It was also unfair on the Waleses. Nobody in the country is at greater pains thanthe Prince of Wales to avoid setting citizen against citizen. If the concept of One Nation has any relevance at all, it surely applies to the Prince, his mother the Queen, and his saintly wife, a blessed trinity composing the only effective figure- head for our national unity. We are allowed to know that the Waleses do not smoke and do not encour- age their guests to smoke, but Wales has never made the mistake of his oafish cousin Gloucester and lent his name to a viciously divisive body like Ash, the organisation of Anti-Smoking Hysterics. In all the count- less issues which divide the nation into bitter, mutually antagonistic groups rich vs poor, unemployed vs employed, North vs South, homosexuals vs straights, Protes- tants vs Catholics, those who slice Stilton like a Cheddar vs those who scoop it out, Liverpool vs Everton . . . — the Prince of Wales has been a model of impartiality, seeing and respecting all points of view. He has not even come out very strongly against journalists, child molesters or drug dealers, reserving his scorn for those foul creatures at the very -bottom of our nation- al dung-heap who have done more than anyone else to destroy whatever fabric our nation once possessed, and for whom not even the most perverse or drunken com- mentator has a good word: the nation's architects.
In every way he has been the model of a virtuous and sweet prince, whom flights of angels should sing nightly to his rest, yet here he was being thrown into one of the most elementary and acrimonious of all our great national divisions. At my prep school just after the war, where we were all conservative, all rich, all southern, all Catholic, all homosexual, where we had none of us tasted Stilton or heard of any football teams, and where there would appear to be nothing to divide us, we decided to draw the line between the circumcised and uncircumcised. Round- heads and cavaliers, as we called ourselves, formed into rival armies and fought bitter battles, in the course of which blood was spilled, bones were broken and much of the school's property destroyed.
What chance has the Royal Family of being a focus for national unity now we know that the heir to the Throne has taken a stand on this most elementary of all our divisions?
Lord Stockton's death was used by Peter Walker as an opportunity to push various Heathoid propagandist statements at his unfortunate constituents in Worcester, re- minding them that Macmillan was a One Nation man, and urging them not to suffer the creation of two nations, 'one em- ployed, one unemployed, a prosperous South and a poor North'. But the more one examines this concept of One Nation, delightful idea that it undoubtedly is, the more one wonders whether it amounts to anything more than a pious incantation.
Nothing is more divisive, of course, than a general election. Labour appeals to the envy and idleness of the poor, the Alliance may appeal to the sense of moral and intellectual superiority or possibly the so- cial insecurity of a further group, while the Conservative Party appeals to the avarice and defensiveness of the well-to-do. 'One Nation' Conservatives, a dissident faction within a faction, hope to appeal to a cross-section of all these groups. I cannot see that in fact they stand for anything more than themselves. What, in fact, do they mean when they talk of One Nation to a country which has chosen to divide itself into any number of antagonistic camps?
Perhaps they mean a nation united behind one football team, as in the World Cup of 1966. Perhaps they mean a nation united to agree about the awfulness of the weather. But the sad truth is that the whole idea of One Nation is a bit of fascist rubbish. It is a device by which political leaders can convince themselves that they scatter plenty o'er a smiling land when in fact they are robbing one group of their fellow-citizens in order to satisfy the idle appetites of another.
If one tries to establish the most accessi- ble common attribute of the British race as it exists today, one is left with some advertiser's projection of a cross between the typical Sun reader and the typical Sunday Times reader — both gross, mater- ialistic, donkey-jacketed, culturally ignor- ant and socially rootless. Andrew Neil may be the model for one, Jocky Wilson for the other. In fact the English race is various, complex and, in its diversity, almost in- finitely subtle.
What we need is a quick, flip heckle to the One Nation rhetoric. We all know that the young have chosen to set themselves in opposition to the old, the old to the young, the poor to the rich, the anti-smokers to smokers. Yet still we accept these One Nation platitudes as holy, a reminder of how things used to be. On the greatest debate of all, I think I know where Disraeli stood, although one can never be sure, since his father, Isaac D'Israeli, was no- thing if not lax in his religious observance. But I have no idea where Heath or Walker stand. Perhaps the best response to the Heatho-Walkerian One Nation sermon is also the most obvious one: 'Show us your cock!'
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