DIARY
Why is the Right in such a bad temper? You can't open a newspaper without reading an attack on what it has taken to calling 'the liberal intelligentsia'. Really, it's mystifying. You would think the Right had everything it wanted. There is a Prime Minister in power whom it affects to admire more than any individual since Churchill; there are said to be 10,000 million spare pounds in the Treasury; the Trade Union movement has been effec- tively castrated; the Labour Party has been sent into a double digit period of exile; important elected centres of opposition to the Government have been abolished by a pliant Parliament; 'family' values have been reinforced by the spread of a disease which, it is none too subtly implied, has some sort of moral dimension; the broad- casting authorities have been cowed to the point where they publish lachrymose posi- tion papers on their own shortcomings; the rich have enjoyed a period of unparalleled prosperity; private schools and hospitals have boomed as standards have been allowed to deteriorate in the public sector; the ILEA is soon to be abolished; expen- sive and highly profitable health-insurance schemes are soon to be given a massive, risk-free boost; the judiciary is as intoler- ant and tame as it needs to be; the nuclear arsenals are fabulously well stocked; there is a British military presence south of the equator; and now, as a final cherry on the sachertorte, there is a mischievous piece of anti-gay legislation being enacted to the undisguised merriment of all the most backward people in the kingdom. By all the criteria of the age, we ought, surely, to be living in paradise. Yet if anything now marks the tone of those ideologues who guided us into this era, it is, in their writing and speeches, increasing evidence of acri- mony and dyspepsia. 'Whingeing' was once said to be the prerogative of the Left, yet lately, it seems, it too has been privatised.
McCarthyism was not a crusade against communism. It was a crusade against dissent. It seems it has become unbearable to Thatcherites that there should be non-Thatcherites at all. It is as if a man, having spent years fashioning his house in a decorative style of which he approves, looks out of his window, and by taking a telescope can just detect on a distant hillside a house in a different style which he will claim, by its very difference, spoils his view. Even in paradise, one overlooks the neighbours. This is the only explanation I can find for the dispro- portionate amount of print the columnists of the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph have recently devoted to trying personally to discredit those who have the impertinence to profess different politics DAVID HARE from their own. Why else spend pages objecting to British films which do not correspond to an idea of England which an Oxford profeisor carries in his head? Why else take trouble to draw up lists of playwrights and novelists who, as yet, remain unconvinced of the Prime Minis- ter's achievements?
In my reading of Paradise Lost it is not Good's power which animates Satan. It is Good's very existence. This reasoning, I think, goes some way towards explaining the Government's obsession with the Church of England, an organisation which, on the surface, would not seem to repre- sent too grave a threat to this administra- tion's survival and prosperity. Nothing has been more comic in recent years than the political imperative which has lately forced Mr Douglas Hurd to make a public show of being a Christian, his eyes on television screwed up in prayer, rather in the manner of Mr Malcolm Muggeridge being received into the Roman Catholic Church with a photographer present. Mr Hurd's prayer might best be, 'Oh God, I hope this will satisfy her.' I have as it happens read the greater part of the Home Secretary's pub- lished work, a series of thrillers which he wrote with Andrew Osmond in his summer holidays some years ago, and, seek as I may, I cannot find in them many traces of piety. They did not strike me at the time as being urgently aimed at the devout. But now Mr Hurd is caught up in a general and humiliating humbug. To his credit, he is not very good at it.
Iwas recently invited to a party at the BBC. I went expecting there to be 500 people present and instead I found only 50, of whom I recognised only the man who does the weather and the man who intro- duces Grandstand. When my turn came, I asked Michael Checkland why on earth I had been invited, since it is ten years since I wrote a word for the BBC. 'Well,' he said, 'I thought that one of the great advantages of being director-general was that I could get to meet whoever I liked. And I assumed that if I asked all these people, they'd come.' Needless to say, I found this endearing. If a man's good opinion can be bought for a single glass of vodka, then mine was bought. He gestured round the panelled office, and remarked that no one ever got to see this place, except in plays where huge Scottish actors impersonated Lord Reith. He was deter- mined that more people should see it than in the past. In conversation he was both intelligent and serious, well aware of the legacy he has inherited from his two disastrous, patrician predecessors. He seems to me unlikely to spread among his staff the kind of disaffection in which they specialised. I asked why, after the recent Tyson-Holmes fight, the commentator had been able to say that although he had no idea whom Tyson would fight next, the one certain thing was that we should only be able to see the contest on ITV. Checkland told me that ITV had been smart enough to spot Tyson young, and they had been able to do an exclusive deal with his promoter. `Whom,' I asked fearfully, 'does the BBC sports department have a deal with?' He looked pained. 'Frank Bruno,' he said, and in those two words something of the immensity of the director-general's task came home to me.
Iam interested in the question of anony- mous mail. I had never received any until I wrote an article for The Spectator. My plays for the theatre have often been on controversial subjects, and they have attracted a huge, eccentric mailbag, which usually leaves me stumped for a reply. What do you say to someone who writes to tell you that what you have written has moved them to leave their husband, their wife, or their job? Yet I cannot recollect a letter without a signature. However, as soon as I wrote a piece in this magazine, explaining, as I felt, in relatively mild terms why it might be a good idea to vote Labour at the last election, I received a torrent of unsigned letters. Are the readers of The Spectator peculiarly cowardly? Or forgetful? Or ashamed?
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