Another voice
The end of an era A uberon Waugh 'It is also true that Mrs Williams holds a number of views which on The Times we do not share. She is an'egalitarian, and we are not. She wants to abolish private education, and we do not. She believes in a wealth tax which we believe would depress business investment still further. Yet The Times must take the rough with the smooth .
'Why, though, would we still say that this somewhat indecisive woman, of middling intellectual attainments, and mistaken views, would make a good Prime Minister?'
The magnificent leading article which appeared in The Times of 10 February 1981 to support the idea of Shirley Williams as Prime Minister was not, of course, signed, but every syllable in it glowed with the high intelligence, the fairness, the humour and the humanity which have been glowing there 14 years from the noble brow of Mr William Rees-Mogg. There were the same measured style, the occasional striking phrase — 'The two old parties are widely seen as having failed, as being two grimacing skeletons of political despair' — even a little joke about leadership of a reduced Conservative party resolving between Mr Terry Higgins of Worthing and Mr Jerry Wiggins of Weston-super-Mare, although the giggle was quickly stifled: 'Not a bad choice, all things considered.' And from all the benignity and quiet patriotism, there came a stern warning at the end: 'Beyond the quality of the leader and the form of the electoral system, there is the question of national unity. Mr Foot divides the nation; so does Mrs Thatcher . . . But the nation believes in its own unity, and may take a terrible revenge at the next election on those who represent division.'
It was a masterpiece, although I cannot claim to have been entirely convinced by it. Mr Rees-Mogg's sublime view of his fellow countrymen takes no account of Original Sin. He overlooks — perhaps he is even unaware of — the malice, the hatred, the ancient, irremediable grudges and resentments of the North East. He hears their voices at Blackpool and Wembley, he sees ignorance , sloth , stupidi tyandvindictiveness parade themselves with all the arrogance of power and he looks to little Mrs Williams to save us all: 'The British have lost confidence in themselves. None of their other leaders talk to them in their own true language, a language of good nature, of friendliness, of fair dealing, of balance.'
Of course that is what we would all like to believe. What could be more agreeable? But has Mr Rees-Mogg ever actually been up North and tried to talk to Glaswegians, for instance, in a Clydeside or Gorbals pub, in their own true language of good nature, friendliness, fair dealing and balance? Or steelworkers in Rotherham? Or miners in south Wales? Obviously these bitter, unpleasant, moronically stupid people are not typical of a majority of Britons, but it is precisely Mr Rees-Mogg's passive or 'wet' approach to them which has allowed these previously caged Calibans to impose their unpleasant and destructive preferences on the country.
How would Mrs Williams's arrival alter the balance of power between these Calibans and the elected government? The only promise of change must be that where Mr Prior is wet, she would be wetter. Where Mrs Thatcher is cowardly and falls back on inflationary solutions, the Social Democrats would be even more inflationary. There can be no carrots to offer the working class so long as trade union views on what constitutes a 'job' prevail, so the moderate, non-divisive policy must be to take away the stick of unemployment too. Does Mr Rees-Mogg really believe that will help, or is he perhaps just the tiniest bit in love with Mrs Williams?
Let us look a little more closely at the love-object, described as being 'a somewhat indecisive woman of middling intellectual attainments and mistaken views.' Of all the crimes and disasters perpetrated by British governments since the war, whether by omission or commission, I feel the only one to compare with Mr (now 'Lord') Stewart's murderous policy in Nigeria (which all the Gang of Four supported) is the imposition of comprehensive schooling. Quite apart from its exacerbation of class antagonisms — even in such calm backwaters as Somerset, middle-class or hard-working children of any class are regularly beaten up as snobs — it has removed any prospect the workingclass child might ever have had of improving himself, escaping from the miserable proletarian rut which the 'workers' create for themselves wherever they have the upper hand.
By the time Mrs Williams arrived in September 1976, with her background of St Paul's and her degree from Somerville College, her much vaunted 'personality one can relate to', it was plain to everyone except the blindest ideologues and fanatics in her Department that the whole comprehensive idea had been an atroPious mistake. It was not too late, then, to rescue a large part of an education system which had once been the pride of Britain, which produced most of the Labour Cabinet and represented the only ladder out of the vicious circle of stupidity, ignorance and inertia for generations before theirs. Instead of which, this somewhat indecisive woman threw herself into the battle to end all selective education with the fanaticism of an Ayatollah. The comprehensive system is her monument, and so long as there is breath left in my body I shall seek to punish, torment, humiliate and ridicule this loathsome pig-headed woman for the damage she has done her country.
So Mrs Williams is not my choice for Prime Minister, and I must beg to differ from the judgment of Mr Rees-Mogg. But having described the retiring editor of The Times as being somewhat wet, and usually wrong, and responsible in no small measure for the prevailing wetness and wrongheadedness which are making it all but impossible for Mrs Thatcher to govern, why do I say that I love the man and regard his retirement from The Times as one of the saddest things which have happened in my lifetime?
It would be easy to explain that, in a nation which is rapidly dividing quite sharply (despite his own perception of it) into wets and nasties, one instinctively sides with the wets. But it is not for his wetness that I love him. I love him partly, no doubt, for his scrupulous fairness, his benignity, his ability to understand and respect other people's opinions, his sen'se of his own absurdity, his courtesy and simple good manners. These qualities of patience, fairness, moderation and high intelligence undoubtedly add up to a sort of wisdom even if, in combination, they generally produce the wrong answers. More than anything else, I love him because he writes in the beautiful clear English of an honourable, educated man. The Times was rubbish before he joined it and will almost certainly be rubbish (although of a different sort) now he has gone. It is too early to condemn the appointment of Harold Evans, but not too early to express misgivings. If, in the months that follow, footling diagrams or 'graphics' begin to appear illustrating how the hostages walked off their aeroplane into a reception centre; profiles of leading hairdressers suddenly break on page 12; inquiries into the safety of some patent medicine replace Philip Howard's ruminations on the English language; if a cheap, flip radicalism replaces Mr Rees-Mogg's carefully argued, honourable conservatism and nasty, gritty English creeps into the leader columns where once his sonorous phrases basked and played in the sun; if It begins to seem that one more beleaguered outpost has fallen to the barbarians, we should reflect that there never really was en England which spoke in this language of good nature, of friendliness, of fair dealing, of balance. It was all a product of Mr Rees-Mogg's beautiful mind.
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