Postscript
Communicating an itch
P. J. Kavanagh
Iwas once on an Any Questions? pro- gramme with Jeffrey Archer and have never forgotten it. We chatted together before- hand, amiably enough, and he would be surprised to learn, poor man — though it is not possible to feel sorry for Mr Archer the effect he had on me: he made me itch.
I knew at the time there was something disproportionate and juvenile in my reac- tion (words like `bumptious' kept coming to mind) but it was not just his obvious self-satisfaction that was irritating; this can be an endearing quality, it is the self- dissatisfied who are more disturbing. Cer- tainly, he made it clear that he ridiculously over-valued worldly success and was over- pleased with his own, but it was not just that .either. It was something I recognised but could not quite define, which I suppose is why he made me formicate.
I was still trying to define it next day on the train, until my fellow panellist, the actress Sheila Hancock, began to laugh. `That man seems really to have got up your nose! Why don't you forget about him?' This was such good advice that I took it, and only remembered him recently, as my jaw fell slackly open, when I learned he was the man chosen (personally, it was rumoured, by the Prime Minister) to en- courage the Tory doubtful and to woo the likes of me, the floating voter. A man who represented for me everything necessary to forget in contemporary Britain. Was I mad, or was the Prime Minister? I was resigned to remain alone in this matter and was, if anything, dismayed to find that almost everything written about him since suggests that he has the effect on others that he had on me. Dismayed, because if that is the case how could our masters have made such a choice? Ferdinand Mount in this paper calls him `the most wince- provoking, hot-making mistake' incapable of answering a question without `filling the room with almost palpable clouds of embarrassment'. Byron Rogers, else- where, says he is the sort of man you only had to ask the time in order to dislike. But these are men, it is perhaps only men he affects in this schoolboy fashion CI say, chaps, let's take the rotter down a peg!') because we are jealous (oh, come on!) or afraid. Well, Jilly Cooper could not resist saying that the Conservative Party was suffering from fallen Archers, so presum- ably she is of our party.
But an anti-Archer party is a silly thought, a piece of playground-ganging- up. In fact I have gone so far in the direction of the personal I feel, in peni- tence, like founding the Jeffrey Archer Protection Society. What depresses me, and why I mention the matter at all, is that his appointment has put the last nail in the coffin of my respect for, and trust in, politicians. We all trust them a bit, surely. Even when they make terrible decisions like going to war over Suez, or tearing down Victorian terraces to build tower- blocks. Even when we know them to be wrong we feel they must have access to information, and be subject to pressures, we know nothing about. In their position we might have made the same mistake.
But how about a mistake, on the ordin- ary human level, that we know we could not possibly have made? What about, in this case, when they choose as a popular advocate of their cause a man that most of us (it seems) can recognise as born to unpopularity as the sparks fly upward? Boggling is bad for the mind, it induces laziness, but in the case of the appointment of Mr Archer to win hearts and minds, it is difficult to prevent. It was a choice to which their best and subtlest considerations must have been• applied. It was always puzzling that they thought Cecil Parkinson a good `communi- cator', with his cringing confidence — or is it a confident cringe? But if I would not buy a used car from Mr Parkinson (he makes me put my hand on my wallet, protectively) I would not even go near the garage if Mr Archer was rumoured to be around: I might get that rash again.
How can a government be taken serious- ly that cannot notice, in time, an obvious disaster in the cheerfully explicit shape of Mr Archer? Perhaps he was an impulse buy, which is bad. Perhaps he is what the Prime Minister genuinely admires, which is terrible.
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