SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON
This has been National Mosley Week, it would appear. How unbelievable all the fuss of recent days would have seemed only a few years ago. We have had the full Establishment treatment: memoirs serialised in The Times, lengthy re- views and evaluations, a press conference, an entire Panorama devoted to him—The Return of the Invisible Man indeed! Mr Shinwell's summing-up seems to me the best out of all this material, so far. His point was simply that for all the talent, energy, glamour and so on which the brilliant young Mosley possessed, he hap- pened also to be 'a damn fool.' This is the essential truth which has not always emerged from the rather solemn analyses I have been reading. A vein of slapstick comedy has run through Mosley's career; he has been cursed by nature to carry around with him his own banana-skin.
I thought this showed during the long filmed interview on Monday, when the humour- less 'Man of Destiny' could be glimpsed pos- turing behind the urbane and charming mask of Mosley's old age. However, by one of those shifts of value caused by the passage of time, what probably seemed closest to the comical, to present-day eyes, was the piece of old film showing Mosley in full histrionic flow before a massed Blackshirt rally. That kind of total emotional attack upon a crowd has gone out of fashion in this country, so that today it is more likely to produce guffaws than adora- tion: but it worked dreadfully well in Mosley's heyday. He was, to my knowledge, an amazing demagogue. As a politically minded schoolboy I attended one of his huge meetings. I remem- ber precisely the drug-like effect of his speech on the crowd and I can still hear (with the same chill of revulsion at mob aggressiveness) the wild explosion of applause when he sat down. It might look a bit Chaplinesque now, but one was not at all tempted to laugh then.
Fun and games
It's a relief that the Olyntpics are nearly over. In spite of splendid excitements like the pole- vaulting contest, what has come across from Mexico City most strongly has been a rather
sour blend of chauvinism, racial discord and medical alarm. It has been slightly sickening to see stretchers and oxygen equipment playing such prominent parts in what is supposed to be a supremely healthy occasion. I don't mind, in fact I find it rather delightful, that Britain should have shone mainly in the huntin', shootin' and fishin' departments. But did British track athletes do poorly because of the ridiculous altitude (which according to Dr Roger Bannister turned the Games into a farce) or because, to quote the team captain, 'we have an amateur attitude to what is a professional business'? For both reasons, most probably; and either implies a fairly severe criticism of the entire Olympics set-up.
It would be pleasant to think that after this year something saner and less frantic will take the place of the Olympic Games, but I don't suppose there is much chance of that. The next dose will no doubt come round on schedule in 1972. Will there by then, I wonder, be a few more black faces among the British athletes? Perhaps there had better be or some- one will find cause for complaint. At least by that time I hope that the TV reporters will have realised that the high-pitched, high-speed and often inaccurate gabble of the old steam radio sports commentator is wearisome and redundant when we can see the events actually happening on our screens.
The new provost
Robert Blake is rather young to be elected head of an Oxford College (he is fifty-one), but the Queen's College, Oxford, which has just ac- quired him as its new Provost, ,is to be con- gratulated. This is not only because he will make a very good Provost but also because his election brings to an end a period of what by all accounts has been singularly animated campaigning on behalf of various candidates for the vacancy. Ever since Lord Florey died early this year, reports of intricate and Snow- ish manoeuvrings have been emerging from time to time. After all that, Mr Blake, as a distinguished scholar hitherto unconnected with the college, may well have proved an attrac- tive candidate to some simply because he wasn't caught up too much in college politics. On the other hand, he enjoyed the powerful support of Professor Trevor-Roper, always a formid-
able factor in Oxford elections (cf. his masterly analysis of the forthcoming election to fill the poetry chair which appears on page 582). Even so, at one stage Mr Blake and his leading rival found themselves in the cliff-hanging situation of a dead-heat. That, if I remember rightly, goes beyond any device to create dramatic tension used by Lord Snow in The Masters.
In the unregenerate pre-Franks days, Mr Blake would now be set on the course leading inevitably to-The. Vice-Chancellorship, but the introduction of an electoral system-far choosing the Vice-Chancellor, instead of leaving the succession to be settled by seniority, implies at least a notion of uncertainty in this respect. Nevertheless, Oxford retains its power to deal with these reforms in its own way. An Oxford friend, explaining to me the new arrangement recently, said that the next Vice-Chancellor, Mr Alan Bullock, would have the distinction of being the first to be chosen by election. And who, I inquired, would have got it under the discredited old seniority rules? 'Bullock,' he replied tersely. I've since been told that in fact Mr Bullock would have had to wait one year longer under the old system. But the spirit of the thing seems much the same nevertheless.
Money no object
I dare say few people noticed that the cost of the Concorde has just edged upwards by another £50 million or so. The news, quite understandably, rated only an inconspicuous mention in those papers which didn't actually ignore it. Thanks to- general acceptance of the idea that we 'cannot afford' not to pour our money into this kind of technological develop- ment, the Concorde will no doubt receive. quietly and without undignified argument, any number of millions that its sponsors declare to be necessary. In much the same way the men of the Middle Ages spent recklessly on building cathedrals, and so far as I know no one then questioned the expenditure on the ground that (for example) housing conditions generally- left much to be desired. Faith was involved. The Concorde is our (that is to say, Mr Benn's) cathedral.
It is only appropriate that one effect of wide- spread supersonic flying will be to help knock down the earlier cathedrals which the Con- corde is replacing. It's interesting to think what will happen if the tests which the Ministry of Technology has now begun plainly show that the cathedrals cannot long survive sonic booms. I'm tempted to suggest to our weekly competi- tion-setter that it would be an ingenious exer- cise to draft Mr Benn's statement explaining that such a loss, while of course regrettable, was an inescapable result of the technological re- volution we all care about so deeply - . • Meanwhile, I'm amused to learn that the proposed route for the Concorde's test flights, while remaining mainly over the sea, will also lie right across the Scilly Islands. What with 'one thing and another, Mr Wilson must love Mr Benn this week.
Previous page
