MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
WHEN this article appears in print the General Election of 1951 will already have started to drift away from us into the wake of history. The dustbins of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will this morning have been bursting with discarded window-cards and election addresses. Out from among the ashes and 'the potato-peelings will peep the photograph of the candidate, still wearing the win- some or the sagacious smile, still framed in the tonic headline, " Where I stand." Upon the walls and hoardings the large portraits of the contestants will flap for a few more days in the October wind ; thereafter their handsome features will be pasted over with advertisements of things to eat. In the committee- rooms the remains of long envelopes will be stacked on the deal tables ; the pencils, chewed at the ends by anxious workers, will litter the floor ; bottles of adhesive paste will stand gloomily among the small steel clips ; and the dust will settle slowly during an empty afternoon. Everybody will now return to their normal functions, feeling that life is horribly quotidian ; that human nature is malicious and mean ; that our electoral system is a travesty of sense and logic ; that they may in the heat of Wednesday last have said something that, in the cold of this Friday, they wish they had not said ; that they really must try to make it up with Mrs. Hetherington ; and that it would be a good thing, after all this dust, to take a day upon the downs. These mornings of Katzenjammer, when the clouds seem to hang very low upon the hills and steeples, are familiar to all of us. They do not provoke feelings of agreeable lassitude: they pro- voke feelings of saddened disgust. By Monday morning the pulse of life will have resumed its normal rhythm, and the excited workers will, in the hebetude of their ordinary lives, slowly forget the passions and the agonies, the loves and hatreds, that marked the General Election of 1951.
* * * * The candidates for their part will be divided into two cate- gories, namely, those who succeeded and those who failed. The former will wake up tomorrow, beatific in the consciousness that they are now the elected representatives of the people. For a few hours longer, as they pack their belongings and say fare- well to their agents and assistants, the constituency smile will linger on their features. Even so, do we notice how the smile of greeting assumed when two friends pass each other in Pall Mall does not fade immediately, but is worn for the space of five yards by each of them, as one walks on towards St. James's and the other towards Trafalgar Square. When the candidate, now the Member, enters the train that will bear him to London and eventual eminence, he will lean out of the carriage window still wearing the constituency smile, still waving the constituency wave ; but as the train gathers speed and snorts out beyond the boundary of his division, the smile will vanish suddenly ; he will sit back in his seat and upon his features will settle the grave look of legislative responsibility. In a few days now he will walk down to Westminster. He will meet many friends there who have been through experiences identical with his own ; they will struggle hard to tell him of some of the more brilliant replies with which they were enabled to silence hecklers, at the very moment when he was himself about to tell them how, in Honiton Road on Tuesday night, he had said. . .. . Yes, it is wounding, when for three weeks one has been so central a figure, to find oneself just a squealer again, waiting with other new boys to shake hands with the head master.
* * * * My sympathies are not, however, with the successful candi- date: they are with the candidate who has been defeated. The Member of Parliament will very soon find his own level ; will soon be reduced to his real proportions by that mighty catalysis. He will discover that the fact that every individual in that great Assembly has been through the same- ordeal of an election pro- duces a sense of comradeship and confederacy even among the sharpest opponents. He will find that the spirit of the House is something more even than the sense of the House, and that in the precincts of St. Stephen's even the most vicious or untruth- ful people hesitate to display their malice or to tell their lies. No need at all to waste pity upon the successful. The defeated candidate will, while the count was taken, while the packets of ballot-papers crept up and up against him, have adopted an expression of patient virility, of senatorial calm. But in the early hours of the morning, having shaken himself free from sympathisers, he will find himself in his own bedroom, in his own pyjamas, a pitiable person who has failed. Rage may seethe within him at the lies that were whispered, at the stupidity of the mass mind, at the inability of the elector to assess the relative importance of events. He may reproach himself for lack of assiduity in canvassing, for a failure to throw into his campaign that extra ton of vigour that might have tipped the scale. He may make all manner of excuses and protective gestures. But the awful fact remains that, whereas his opponent is able to call himself Member of Parliament, he can only remain a candidate who has not secured sufficient votes. It is no good pretending that this is an agreeable reflection.
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Having three times been beaten in an election, and twice poignantly, my heart goes out to the defeated. It is probable that during the months that they have been nursing their con- stituency they have become fond of the place and fond of those with whom they were closely associated. As they -slink back into the train for London the faces and voices of the last fort- night will still be vivid to them. They will still be able to visualise the striped suit of the reporter to the local paper, the faded photographs in the village hall, the wet asphalt outside the school. Their fingers will still shape themselves to the feel of the portable microphone; or notice the absence from their lapel, of the red or blue rosette. And still in their' ears will echo various voices, shouts of acclaim, derisive laughter, or merely the workers in the committee-room calling each to each: " Not to forget the window-cards they asked for up at Lethbridge." In a year from now even the name of Lethbridge will be only dimly familiar ; all that energy, all that excitement, all that hope and strain, all that expense of spirit, ending in nothing. A gentleman returning by train as a defeated candidate ; tomorrow he will go -to his office ; he will not pass, as the bus threads its way down the Strand, large photographs of himself upon the facades of houses ; the conductor will not greet him by name ; the passers- by will not stare at him in recognition. No longer will he be The Candidate, the centre of love or hatred, the admired and feared ; he will just be a tired man going back to his office after a wholly unproductive three weeks. Such sympathy as he is accorded will be as repugnant as cups of luke-warm camomile tea.
* * * *
I should much like, in my capacity of an elder statesman who never became one, to minister words of comfort to the defeated candidates. But there are no words of comfort. The whole process of being beaten at an election is humiliating, saddening, squalid and a trifle absurd. It is no use my saying, " But my dear man you will forget about it—the wound will have healed completely in six months' time." Such wounds do not heal completely ; one can, if one presses down upon them, feel them for years. The only consolation is to resolve that one day, with equal resource, sincerity and courage, one will fight a really safe seat ; and that thereafter there will be no slinking into the train back to London ; with senatorial gait, accompanied by adulation, will one stalk slowly to one's reserved compartment. On the way to Westminster.
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