AND ANOTHER THING
High jinks ahead as Lucky Jimmy's party takes the field
PAUL JOHNSON
hat are we to think of Jimmy Gold- smith's Referendum Party? I have known Jimmy for over half a century and am fond of him so I cannot pretend to objectivity. But I will have a try. Goldsmith appeared on Saturday in London on a platform pro- vided by the Campaign for an Independent Britain, an amateurish organisation by the look of it. To expect the politically curious to turn out in central London on the first really hot Saturday afternoon of the year was optimistic. And the meeting was not advertised. Yet Westminster Central Hall was packed, all seats taken long before it began, people standing in the doors.
There was no spin-doctoring, to put it mildly. Two bedraggled, home-made ban- ners hung over the speakers. The line-up on the platform was entirely of middle- aged or elderly grey men. There were some women in the audience, but hardly anyone of either sex under 40. The long-winded gent who introduced Jimmy remained anonymous. There was also a celebrity called Viscount Tonypandy, a who-he? fig- ure to most of those present. Jimmy did not help matters by beginning with a long quo- tation of Isaiah Berlin spouting Herder, but very few people heard what it was since he was too far away from the mike. It was a considerable time before this elementary defect was put right. Yet, in that stifling, dreary hall, everyone strained to listen. The audience was educated: they took in all the points clearly. There was a huge, pent-up resentment in the room, a feeling, among that nondescript collection of worried, mid- dle-aged, middle-class people, that all the good things in Britain were being surren- dered without a fight, without anyone being given a real chance to object. Afterwards there was a scrumptious tea in the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors: choice of Earl Grey, Darjeeling or Lapsang; neat lit- tle sandwiches; four kinds of cake.
Goldsmith is something of a pop idol on the Continent. At his meetings in France, the young scream out, `Jeemee, Jeemee!' Over here, his followers call him 'Sir James'. There is a subdued note of defer- ence. There is also wonder that a man who has made so much money could actually be against the big battalions. At the tea party, a neatly moustached figure who might have been a retired schoolmaster said to me in awe, pointing to Goldsmith, 'That man is a walking billion-dollar note, and he is on our side!' Wherever he goes and whatever he does, Goldsmith is inseparable from his fortune.
Some newspaper pundits over here object sourly to Goldsmith's declaration that he is prepared to put £20 million into his campaign. By what democratic right, they ask, is a single individual able to weigh politics in his favour by such a colossal sum? But at least Goldsmith throws in the cash openly, almost with bravado. And it is his own money. It is preferable, in my view, to the furtive process whereby the Conser- vative Party gouges out hefty sums from company chairmen in return for knight- hoods and peerages and other baubles, paid for in cash which properly belongs to shareholders. Moreover, as Goldsmith pointed out in his speech, in the current year the Brussels bureaucrats have allocat- ed £80 million — of our money! — to be spent on pro-federalist propaganda, to making people, as they put it, 'more Euro- pean-minded'. This fact was new to me and brought a gasp from the audience, as well it might. One would like to know where, exactly, portions of this huge sum end up. How much of it comes to Britain? Does some of it stick to the fingers of those MPs, of all parties, who beat the federalist drum to Brussels's tune? And how much is deposited in the capacious pockets of the noisy Euro-enthusiasts in our media? At least with Goldsmith's money we shall all know exactly how it is spent.
The Government eyes Goldsmith with fear and loathing. After Goldsmith had a highly successful meeting over dinner with a dozen or so Tory ministers and leading backbenchers, John Major swallowed his rage and, fixing his features in a grin, invit- ed the intruder to a hush-hush meeting. Nothing came of it. Once he is convinced of the strength of an argument and the righteousness of a cause, Goldsmith is not to be deflected by flattery or indeed any- thing on offer from Major's increasingly bare cupboard. Nor will he be content with a mere promise that the Conservatives will hold some kind of referendum at a time to Hello Mrs Goldfish, is Mark in?' be determined on a question yet to be phrased. Goldsmith insists that the referen- dum be held on the earliest possible date and that the question be agreed by all the political interests at a conference presided over by the Speaker of the House of Com- mons, Betty Boothroyd. In short, he wants to take the issue right out of the hands of the Government, which experience shows cannot be trusted to do the honest and democratic thing on Europe or any other issue.
So it looks as though Goldsmith will go forward to the general election without any prior understanding with any of the parties, and with a full slate of candidates. There will be no shortage of people willing to stand. The Conservatives have made a lot of prominent enemies in the last two decades. Many of them will not be content with voting for their opponents — they want to strike damaging blows where it hurts by active opposition, especially in seats held by those identified with alien forces. This is going to be a watershed gen- eral election, and an unusual one in many ways. Central Office may hope that the Goldsmith party will be drowned in the normal electoral hubbub, but it will be able to claim air-time by virtue of the number of seats it is contesting, and Goldsmith is adept at grabbing the headlines, as his record in France shows. It is improbable that his party will actually win a single seat, but that is not the object. The operation aims to force the Conservative Government into capitulation on the referendum issue or, failing that, to punish the party for its treachery to British interests, and in partic- ular those elements who reject British sovereignty and support federalism.
My calculation is that Goldsmith will fail in his first object but succeed in his second. He will contribute substantially to the Con- servative defeat and — what is more impor- tant — to the purging of the party's federal- ists in the Commons. This will hasten the process, starting in earnest after electoral defeat, whereby the Conservatives turn themselves into a homogeneous national party, leaving federalism to the rest. The British political system will thus be realigned in a way which offers electors genuine choices about our future. All this makes Goldsmith a significant figure on the political scene. And, thank God, he is also an entertaining one. My guess is that there are high jinks ahead.
Previous page
