Camp-follower
The press has behaved lamentably over the Paris trip. It allowed itself to be carried away. Fortunately, there are members of Parliament who are made of sterner stuff. We still have had nothing but verbiage from the marketeering lobbyists, yet Fleet Street, with a handful of exceptions, has been swallowing the Prime Minister's Foreign Office's hand-outs whole and regurgitating them without even momentary digestion.
Mr Peregrine Worsthorne in the Sunday -Telegraph, who recently has been delicately dissociating himself from Lord Hartwell's marketeering editorial line in both Sunday and Daily Telegraphs, reneged on his own independent line and joined the camp- followers of the faithful. His piece, ludicrously headlined 'Heath on the side of history' was possibly the daftest even he has ever written. Mr Worsthorne, like Mr Jenkins, uses the language of messianic fervour: 'If Mr Heath had met with defeat in Paris' (and who can possibly be sure that he has not?) 'it would have been the victory of nothing, this steadfast rock-like certainty replaced by confusion and dubiety, his fer- vent faith confounded by a welter of nega- tion. I cannot but be thankful that certainties 1 do not share seem to he prevailing against a scepticism I cannot escape, and that it now looks as if the die is cast. Let us admit it: the Europeans deserve to win. The sceptics have failed to produce an alternative faith.'
Sense seems to desert men. Sceptics are not supposed, dear Perry, to produce alternative faiths. Sceptics are supposed to remain sceptical, especially when confronted by a 'steadfast rock-like certainty'. It is not more or new faiths we want, or the rock-like certainties of Resale Price Maintenance men, but the intelligent appreciation that Mr Heath, thus far aided and abetted by almost the entire British press, is engaged on the greatest con act of the post-war years.
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