Skinflint's City Diary

The stench of corruption in the public service is not new. A friend has been telling me that after the war he was visiting one of the ministries to get orders for his small electronics business. He met on the steps a well-known industrialist, now dead, Whose company has gone on to become an international name and one of the giants Of industry. The older man, who later got a knighthood (I suppose I had better not mention his name as his family is still around and very much in charge), took fly friend aside and brought from his Pocket a bundle of fivers saying it was half as thick as when he went in.

When my friend said he did not see himself giving bribes to the relatively senior civil servants with whom he had to deal, the industrialist said, "With these people it must be share tips. Just say you have a cousin on the stock market who often has a good share. After a week look in the Paper and see which has gone up in price and telephone your civil servant to say You bought a few shares for him and that You have got the profit you'll be bringing around."

English honesty

With certain senior politicians having their investments "carefully managed" by their aspiring younger colleagues, and institution and pension fund managers "taking UP a few shares privately," it is surPrising how small a token of appreciation is necessary in dealing with the public service.

One other thing: no longer can foreIgners say, "The trouble with Englishmen Is that they are so honest — they take the bribe but do not deliver."

Lords Madore and Slater of Tulchan

Sir Charles Clore, I mentioned a week or two ago, is buying an estate in Normandy Chateau Saint Maclou near Deauville. Jim Slater has just bought a 21,510 acre Strathspey estate, Tulchan, in Morayshire, complete with gloomy shooting lodge, from Lord Seafield for over £1.25 million. Slater has not dragged his feet making a fortune but the opposition, a farmer from Tunbridge Wells whose bid Slater topped by E25,000, is supposed to have made his money more easily and even quicker. He sold just nineteen and a half acres for building getting enough to:be in the bidding for Tulchan.

Pubs

The resignation of Mr Maudling as Home Secretary has resulted in some anxiety amongst those interested in these things who are looking for reform of archaic British licensing laws by Lord Erroll's Committee.

The brewers' lobby are, no doubt, busy seeing to it that there will not be a 'drink anywhere anytime,' report. But it is to be hoped that ideas will emerge resulting in legislation making it much more easy to obtain liquor licences and also the complete flexibility of opening hours. Any tendency to giving pubs and brewers monopolies should be confined to country districts. With this exception the main objective of a change in the law should be increased competition, lower prices and the breaking of the brewers' stranglehold on the public through the tied house system.

Self-service petrol

The Automobile Association would do a service to the motorist by forming a band amongst its members to carry stickers in their cars, "Down with self-service petrol." These self-service stations should be boycotted before the petrol companies have us cjanging our own sump oil.

Christopher Throwaway

It is disconcerting to see that Mr Chataway's Industry Act allows development boards to disperse up to El million without reference to London. There is something erratic and desperate about Mr Chataway's appointment and the sums that look as if they are to be thrown away. Too much of this money is likely to finish bolstering up big, usually public, companies. If the GEC, AEI, English Electric merger is any guide big firms are unlikely to turn away from their policies, set by the stock market, of seeking high return on capital employed even when this means selling assets and the reduction of labour and volume.

Mr Chataway should look towards the companies described as small businesses by the Small Businesses Association. These companies down to the smallest jobbing builder are over one million in number. Not much by way of encouragement and assistance by Mr Chataway is needed to induce these million firms to mop up the 900,000 out of work by each taking on no more than an extra pair of hands.

Stranglehold

The illegal return of the two Moroccan air force officers from Gibraltar to Rabat (instead of being put to sea in a longboat with ten days' hard tack) has upset most of us and none more than my favourite public school boy liberal B. Levin of the Times.

It is pointless to conjecture public reaction if the intended victim had been our own Sovereign Lady, and the assassins a pair of Royal Air Force officers doing a bunk to Morocco. It is pointless because I think journalistic comment, not shared by the Foreign Office, has got the wrong plot.

The naughty scenario I have flitting in my head is that General Mohammed Oufkir, who is reported to have been the prime plotter behind last week's attempt on the King, was in fact loyal and that the plotter in chief was Minister of the Interior Benhima. Oufkir, a notably efficient murderer, seems unlikely to have needed three bullets (including one in the shoulder) to finish himself off. The detective story-like ' confession ' in Gibraltar with its simple clue, "The leader of the uprising is some body whose name begins with 0 may be acceptable to Arab peasantry doting on a divine monarch, but difficult for those less credulous to swallow. Hassan's continued occupation of the throne looks like a put-up job with Morocco's Minister of the Interior Benhima emerging with the King's enforced agreement as the country's ruler.

The vindication of this theory will come when, as I suspect, Morocco gives the fugitives not only the fair trial they have promised Mr Godber, but a sentence less macabre than customary amongst Berbers, even if this means death.