Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
THE time was when the best journalists that money could buy were always Socialists. In the Press Lords' Club, the proprie- tors moaned away about the uppitiness and expen- siveness of these red-faced coons who were rapidly growing too big for the boss's boots. It seemed the end of civilisation as the press lords knew it when papers like the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail were forced to appoint radical editors. I don't know that any of these rebellious serfs of the type- writer actually had the nerve to claim the right to marry his proprietor's daughter (though Ian Fleming married another proprietor's wife) but it was rumoured that some perverted proprietors would occasionally adopt a pretty paperwoman as a travelling companion. It certainly looked as if the blue blood was soon to be diluted and dis- coloured with ribbon ink to the bastardisation of the scribblers' race. Whoever owned the presses, Labour seemed assured of the allegiance of the brightest and highest-paid writers in them.
The pattern has changed in the last five years, however. The constant, urgent suction of de- mand has at last produced an obediently flowing supply. The pragmatic, realistic, no-nonsense, anti-Communist journalist is now in stock at all your favourite news-stands—the choice is wide. It ranges from the crafty, philistine, crowd-pleasing demagogy of Robert Pitman to the paradoxical, philosophical, elite-flattering aristogogy of Pere- grine Worsthorne, from the humourless, wooden, frozen-fingered sniping of Anthony Lejeune to the serio-comic, provocative, exhibitionist dive- bombing by Bernard Levin, whose daily column reads like H. L. Mencken re-written by Jerome K. Jerome.
These four (who will not thank me for forcibly making them colleagues even if only in the same sentence) have more in common than the know- ledge that their view of life, under the froth and 'pray of incidental opinions, basically coincides with that of the men who pay their salary. Quite reasonably, they do not want to abolish the society in which they earn their living. They also share a common gimmick, a propagandist donnee, which is growing dangerously thin with over-use. This is the pretence that each of them is a lonely, insulted, embattled defender of human freedom in a country ruled by tasteless bureau- crats, self-deceiving idealists, power-mad politicians, imbecile pop stars, criminally suspicious of the friendliness of the Big Daddy American President and criminally gullible about the friendliness of the Big Brother dic- tators of the Soviet Union.
Sometimes, to hear them denounce the dark- ness at noon, you would imagine that women had already been nationalised, Westminster Abbey become an anti-God museum, the good Tories and good Socialists been interned on the Isle of Man, and the careerists and climbers united in conspiracy to sell the land to the Reds. They stand on the top of the pyramid, looking down on tiny tremors in the great monolith, and they shout: 'Backs to the wall, the enemy have cap- tured the citadel.' Every British national news- paper supports capitalism, though they do not all back the Conservative party; no British national newspaper advocates Socialism, though some back the Labour party. Yet our individualistic, anti-planning, pro-competition opinion-makers still seem to assume that the public is being deluged day and night with left-wing propaganda, seduced in the schools and universities, debauched by BBC satirical programmes.
One of their favourite rhetorical gestures is to demand that everyone on the left should, in letters to The Times, paid advertisements, articles and broadcasts, denounce every savage murder committed by a black in Africa, every denial of free expression in the Soviet Union or any of the Communist countries. On Wednesday, this week, Robert Pitman called British 'progressives' to demand an invasion of Nigeria to punish the assassins of Sir Abubakar. This, he said, was what we would be doing if Mr. Garfield Todd were found dead in a ditch. The reason we are not doing so, he explains, is that the left secretly `expect higher standards from whites than they do from blacks.' It is hardly worth while point- ing out that it was Mr. Pitman who has imported the whiteness-test here and who is assuming that the Nigerians may have committed political murders because they are black. It can hardly be said that General de Gaulle's secret service is setting a higher ideal for the treatment of opponents. It was white men who operated Auschwitz.
Of course, I abhor the Nigerian slaughter. I am saddened but not surprised that their be- haviour should be so beastly. Despite being blinded by my sentimental, optimistic, pinko be- lief in the possibility of the brotherhood of man, I do not expect the Algerians in Algeria to behave with much more kindness than the Frenc% in Algeria. And those brain-washed liberals who excuse every crime done by the enemies of democracy and publicise only those done by its supporters are mainly figments of the imagination of right-wing paranoiacs.
It would be a very boring occupation and role in life to be the automatic signatory of a letter of rebuke to anyone who was discovered sinking below the minimum standards of civilised be- haviour, anywhere in the world. But if that is all they want, then I am willing to collect a few fellow progressives and keep this missive in standing type. The fact that most critics of political behaviour begin with their own govern- ment is not due to some inborn streak of treachery, it is purely a matter of realism. If we cannot change the policy of our own country over, say, hanging or homosexual law, or abor- tion, then we will have even less chance of chang- ing the policy of the Soviet Union on book cen- sorship, or anti-Semitism.
`Our side' must always keep to the rules it claims are the source of its moral superiority. The fact that we break them continually, and secretly, with very little protest any more from even the few remaining bleeding-hearts among the Lilac Establishment, is one of the saddest and most frightening results of the Cold War now in deep trench dugout phase. The Conformist Conscience continually sets new hurdles for the radical left. Bernard Levin, also on Wednesday, demands that we publicly rejoice because Governor Faubus is backing integration to retain his job. The logic is difficult to follow. But, if it helps to mellow him, two cheers for Orful Orville, chaps, hip, hip.
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