Conference Notebook
I suppose that one of the lessons of this week's Labour Party conference in Blackpool is that no one is indispensable. Sir Harold Wilson, who only a year ago dominated this little world of gas-bag oratory, composite resolutions and card votes, flits around this week like the Ghost of Christmas Past. He h imself seems obsessed by days gone by, reminiscing constantly about Clement Attlee, even to the point of telling friends that he is here for just the precise amount of time that Labour's post-war Prime Minister used to spend at the conference after his retirement. However, one good story about the laconic Attlee emerges from Sir Harold's recollections. He was, as you might expect, a great deal more strict about Cabinet ministers publishing anything while in office than any of his successors have been. The late John Strachey apparently produced a book of poetry and sent it along to Attlee for permission to publish. He refused point blank, but obligingly gave Strachey his reasons. 'Doesn't rhyme,' he said, 'and it doesn't scan: If ever Labour needed a tangible example of how the Great Dream has misfired and to what extent Britain needs—to employ this week's vogue word—'regenerating', Blackpool itself proves it. It is the sheer grottiness of the place that is so infinitely depressing. Dismal and joyless, it nevertheless grimly parades the fun business. A kind of seething underlies the attitudes of the poor drudges— no doubt wickedly underpaid—who wait on table and serve behind the bars: I actually heard one visitor who dared to protest that she was being charged more than the posted price list in a pub being told, 'If you don't like it you can lump it'. Yet I'd judge that in spite of the sinking it would hardly be dearer for a family of four to take a holiday in the South of France than in Blackpool. Like all sweeping generalisations, that needs qualifying: I'd except an excellent emporium known as Robert's Oyster Bar, where delectable Colchesters cost only £1.20 a dozen, to be washed down with a first class bottle of the '76 Guinness from an obliging pub next door.
In spite of all the years spent climbing the greasy pole to the top of the Labour Party, Jim Callaghan sometimes appears an almost alien figure. His big speech on Tuesday-which did neither sterling nor the Labour Party much good—provoked a one-word response from one of his most senior cabinet colleagues: 'Thuggish'. Certainly, he seems to lack an appreciation of the sentimental nuances of his party. Sir Harold was wont to attack the Trotskyist Left but he in variably balanced his remarks with a ritual rebuke for the Right. But Jim sails in, demolishing not only the New Left, but upsetting the old entrenched Stalinists within the party as well with a crack about the economic problems of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. More than that, that speech was listened to in stolid silence and there was no standing ovation at the end. As one delegate explained: 'Jim laid about him so much that one did not want to be seen clapping without knowing precisely who one was sitting next to'.
The Callaghan style is a source of pride to his aides and advisors. They admire his popularism and his instinct for the jugular. When I asked one of them whether he had been toiling over his master's speech he said 'Hell, no, it was all his own work. Didn't you recognise the genuine thud of the Callaghan boot going in ?'
As a former union official, the Prime Minister is noticeably more at ease with union people than with the more earnest intellectuals around the party conference. Even among the left-wing firemen, who have never been Jim's supporters, he seemed perfectly happy. 'You've always done everything for me,' he declared generously, adding 'except vote for me'. Among the moderates of the General and Municipal Workers, he joined in congratulations to Fred Peart (absent because the Lords went back to work this week) on his elevation as Labour leader in the other place. As General Secretary David Basnett observed, 'I don't know why it's taken the Prime Minister so long to give us the leadership of the House of Lords. After all, the General and Municipal already have most of the members'.
The Woodward and Bernstein of this gathering are a pair of oddly matched journalists, Christopher Hitchens and Peter Kellner, who have rushed out a political biography of the Prime Minister—Callaghan: The Road to Number 10. Hitchens, of the New Statesman, is a witty, fearfully ambitious exTrotskyist. Kellner, a product of business journalism, has for a long time worked on 'Insight' for the Sunday Times, and is an expert on the Middle East. People tended, depending on their segment of the media world, to talk about 'Hitchens's book' or 'Kellner's book'. The story of how reflective, statistically-minded Kellner managed to co-operate with the fun-loving Hitchens will no doubt be revealed in the follow-up film— All the Premier's Men. Anyway, Jim offered no co-operation in the enterprise and, slightly churlishly, refused the inscribed copy they offered him this week. So they re-dedicated it to the host of that particular evening, Clive Jenkins of ATSMS, a renowned collector of Labour movement memorabilia.
One of the stories that the Kell ner-H itchens team tells in the book is of the remarkable coincidence of the contest for the junior assistant general secretaryship of the Association of Officers of Taxes (now the Inland Revenue Staff Federation), in 1936. The three candidates were Stanley Raymond, later to be head of British Rail and the Betting Levy Board, Cyril Plant, last year's chairman of the TUC, and Jim Callaghan. Reminiscing over dinner at Blackpool this week with Cyril Plant, the Prime Minister observed that had the election gone differently, he might now be a union leader and Mr Plant Prime Minister. Tom Jackson of the Post Office Workers swiftly pointed out that in that case, Callaghan would now be compulsorily retired on age grounds.
A noticeable development in the British conference scene is the large numbers of people who have no direct business to be there, but who nevertheless flood into Brighton and Blackpool. Among these groupies are characters of sufficient charisma to compete with the politicians themselves. One such is Mr Cedric Price, the famous zoological architect and mouse-fancier, whose clothes, especially his archaic stiff-collars, have been the talk of Blackpool.
So that the Tories will not feel too neglected this week, I can retell a story going the rounds of the Labour conference about Mrs Thatcher. It appears that as part of the hoped-for concordat between the Conservatives and the unions, a union leader was invited to lunch with James Prior, William Whitelaw and Mrs Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher 'S opening remark deeply embarrassed the union man : 'You don't like me, do you? she said. 'Why not ?' Overcoming his inhibitions, and encouraged by Mr Whitelaw to speak frankly, he told her: 'I don't like 3 woman who looks as though she spends all her time at the hairdresser's'. Two weeks later Mrs Thatcher appeared in her new 'windswept' hairstyle.
Peter Paterson
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