DIARY ALAN WATKINS
he most extraordinary dates, from the Day of the Atonement to the Chinese New Year, taking in Royal Ascot along the way, are being canvassed in discussions of the election. The most crucial dates remain those of the party conferences: SDP, Ports- mouth, 29 August-2 September; Liberals, Harrogate, 13-18 September; Labour, Brighton, 28 September-2 October; and Conservatives, Blackpool, 6-9 October. Mrs Margaret Thatcher's ideal arrange- ment would surely be a triumphant, Perhaps attenuated Conservative confer- ence following a poll on 1 October. Unfortu- nately this date would allow the dreaded Social Democrats to hold their conference before the campaign started. Even 24 September would — just — allow the SDP to squeeze in. Polling on 17 September would ditch both them and the Liberals. Against my theory is the prejudice that October is somehow a proper, a correct month for elections, whereas September is not.
Only a few people that I know are famous enough to be asked to advertise things. Mr Kingsley Amis used to advertise Wallpaper. Mr Auberon Waugh advertises the Folio Society. And Mr Barry Norman (whom I know less well) appears on television to advertise something called the Mortgage Corporation. Mr George Segal and Miss Glenda Jackson I do not know at all. They are currently doing a cross-talk act extolling the virtues of the Hanson Trust. Miss Jackson I could just have met, however, for she is a political kind of person. She was once rude to Mr Peregrine Worsthorne before, during and after an Any Questions programme in which they were both participating. She had a visible role in the Labour Party's Greenwich hY-election campaign. Yet Lord Hanson is not only a Conservative but one whose company embodies those features of Mrs Thatcher's Britain which, I should have thought, Miss Jackson finds most repug- nant. Why is she advertising it? The explanation offered is that Lord Hanson has done much for a theatrical project dear to her. I think Miss Jackson owes it to her admirers to provide further and better particulars.
The Campaign for Tactical Voting, or TV 87, which is organised by Mr Jeremy Seabrook and Mr Paul Ezard, got off on the wrong foot as far as I was concerned by saying, in its introductory material, that While of course the object was to get rid of Mrs Thatcher's government, nevertheless the campaign should try to give the im- pression that it was primarily to do with fairness in the electoral system. There seems to me nothing wrong in wanting to get rid of Mrs Thatcher and in proclaiming that tactical voting is the best way of achieving it. The organisation has, howev- er, bumped into a legal obstacle. A well- disposed academic lawyer has given his learned opinion that it would be contrary to electoral law for the campaign to pro- duce lists, on the lines of: vote Jones (Alliance) in Much Wittering but Brown (Labour) in Coketown Central, and so forth. The lawyer goes on to say that a newspaper could nonetheless produce such a list with impunity — as one or two may well do before polling day. He may be right in law. But I do not see why organisations such as TV 87 should be treated differently from papers.
It is difficult to say why certain phrases catch on. 'Bias against understanding' and 'mission to explain' strike me as both flat and tendentious. But I would not wish to detract from Mr Peter Jay's and Mr John Birt's achievement in coining them. I would, however, question the reputation of Weekend World, which both of them inaugurated. The trouble with this prog- ramme is not the normally excellent inter- viewing by Mr Jay, Mr Brian Walden and, now, Mr Matthew Parris. It is rather what surrounds the interview, the icing on the cake concocted by the 'researchers', who seem to bear the same relationship to research as the Little Chef motorway restaurants do to chefs. At the beginning of the week they sit down and decide what the 'line' is to be. Every contribution is then shaped and cut to fit the line. Some years ago I agreed to be interviewed on film about Labour's Congress of Bishop's Stort- ford. The researcher involved, Mr Bruce Anderson, was commendably frank, manly even, beforehand, saying that the line was that the confab had been a failure. If! did not support this view, my contribution would not be used. But I would be paid nevertheless: he would see to that. I lucubrated, I was not used, but I was duly paid. Mr Anderson has now, I am glad to say, bettered himself by joining the Sunday Telegraph.
Evelyn Waugh once complained that, on the one occasion when he met P. G. Wodehouse, he talked about nothing ex- cept income tax. I find I do rather the same when in the company of a member of the theatrical profession. Unbalanced, I know: but I remain obsessed by the injustice that actors and actresses who are out of work can draw unemployment benefit, whereas freelance journalists cannot. I used to think that the Revenue 'deemed' (useful word) the actors and actresses to be employed by the theatre or company con- cerned and accordingly taxed them under PAYE. This course would have had a certain internal consistency. Not so, it seems: they still pay tax under Schedule D. This is unfair enough as it is. But the Commissioners perpetrate a reverse injus- tice, adding injury to insult. They try to tax freelance journalists at source. Unless you go to a ferocious lawyer, as I did, the cowardly paper invariably caves in to the tax man. The NUJ is as usual quite useless. Perhaps we should all join Equity instead.
While writing I like to construct little hurdles for myself. The most recent one was to get through this diary stint without once mentioning the fell disease A . . . This is not cheating because I am going on to ask about other afflictions, herpes, to start with. Whatever happened to herpes? Do people still suffer from it, are their lives being ruined, is there a cure? It is not that I really want to know the answers. But I think that television in particular, having started to cause the unease, ought at least to tell us how things are going. Then there are various diseases connected with dogs. A few years ago we were informed, again by television, that this country was about to be over-run by a plague of rabies caused by filthy European animals. Yet nothing has happened. Similarly, and according to the same source, our children were sup- posed shortly to be struck by blindness on account of dogs' mess in public parks and on the streets. We have heard no more. It occurs to me that, if the danger had been as great as we were informed it was, half the voters of Islington — the dogs' mess capital of Europe — would now be having trouble with their eyes.
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