Spectator's Notebook
IPRAY—with no great confidence that Mr Harrison Salisbury's eye-witness despatches in the New York Times, coming so soon after the abrupt cessation of the Christmas truce in Vietnam, will succeed where all else has failed in mobilising enough American public opinion against the bombing of the North to persuade LBJ to call a halt. The war against the Com- munists can only be won, as Sir Robert Thomp- son has time and again pointed out, in the South; bombing the North only adds a new dimension of horror to a grand guignol of a war, but it is as likely to prevent as to expedite a peace settle- ment, and it carries with it a built-in and open- ended escalation factor. It is totally unjustified now that America has sufficient forces and equipment in the South to hold the line in- definitely against anything that the North Viet- namese are able to do. America is fighting a limited, not an all-out, war : she only damages her cause outside Vietnam and—at bloody cost to a nation one-tenth her size—fails to advance it inside it by continuing to insist that bombing the North is within that limit. It may be that LBJ feels that overtly aggressive action of this kind is necessary to retain the confidence of the American people. If so, the stratagem hardly appears to have been conspicuously successful. Perhaps it's time to try a new one.
Sober and Incapable
It was a good Christmas for presents this year, if my own children's experience is anything to go by. Little girls, of course, are easy to buy for: they always know precisely what they want and it's usually clothes. But this time the ten- year-old boy struck oil, too, with a motor-racing circuit complete with a pair of electrically-oper- ated remote-controlled racing cars. (British made, too : it's reassuring to know that, if we're berated by thrusting foreigners for treating industry as a game, at least we compensate by treating games as an industry.) In my boyhood it was clockwork trains, but though few of us really be- come engine-drivers when we grow up (perhaps nobody even wants to, any more), most of us drive cars, and the new breed of toy must at least teach a boy the right way to take a corner. Which thought is prompted by the dreadful Christmas road deaths figures. I'm quite sure that the road safety people are right about the contribution that alcohol makes to the total. But Mrs Castle already has her eye on that one. Isn't it about time that something was done about the thousands of (mostly occasional) drivers who are incapable even when sober? Sheer bad driving by those who know no better causes, I'm sure, far more accidents than speed alone. Yet while speed limits are now ubiquitous—not even excepting motorways—the man who passes a pretty simple driving test at eighteen at present earns the right to half a century or more of motoring, during which driver and car alike may change beyond recognition, without any further test of his fitness to us this lethal device. Surely this is crazy?
Rhodesia Blues
My own present to myself (no gentleman accepts any others at Christmas) was Robert Blake's life of Disraeli. It is, as the reviewers with rare unanimity have said, magnificent. One fascinating minor revelation in the book is that many of the descriptions of life among the poor in Sybil were taken by Disraeli from a Govern- ment Blue Book of the time, from which several passages were actually copied out verbatim. I'm glad to see this practical testimony to the Blue Book, which I've long felt to be an unfairly neg- lected art form. Over the past few days, when I've been able to put Disraeli down, I have myself been reading the Government's Blue Book on Rhodesia, which contains the British version of the talks on board HMS Tiger. Although I can't quite see the dialogue being transcribed verbatim in some outstanding new novel, it makes fascin- ating reading. Nor am I at all surprised that Mr Wilson held up publication until the few days between the end of the last parliamentary session and Christmas, when it would attract no atten- tion. For it hardly reflects particularly well on the Prime Minister, who is shown becoming in- creasingly desperate as he sees the chance of a settlement slipping away from him.
At the first afternoon meeting Mr Wilson an- nounces his intention of raising the question of improved facilities for African education, but apparently never does so. By the following morn- ing he is already giving up his earlier demand for a British military presence in Rhodesia to ensure the settlement is adhered to, and appears to be suggesting that Messrs Nkomo and Sithole, the Rhodesian African Nationalist leaders, should be temporarily exiled to Britain.
Ridiculous But it is not until the final meeting that the drama comes. Smith refuses even to commend the full settlement terms to his colleagues: Wilson replies that this puts him, personally, in a very embarrassing position, and asks for an adjourn- ment—during which Smith tells him that he's had enough and wants to leave the ship. Wilson then pleads that
the British cabinet had authorised him to meet Mr Smith but only if it was clearly under- stood . . . that the intention of the meeting was to reach a final and definitive settlement . . . Mr Smith . . . must [sic] give his per- sonal undertaking to commend the settlement to his colleagues. Even on this basis the settle- ment would be liable to criticism in the Com- monwealth; but . . . if it was thereafter rejected in Salisbury, the British government would get the worst of all worlds.
There then follows an absurd charade in which Wilson tries to prevent Smith from leaving the Tiger until he has made up his mind to 'com- mend' the settlement, a ploy which Smith defeats by declaring that if he is forced to commit him- self while still on board it will be against and not for the settlement. Wilson complains that: The situation was ridiculous. The Rhodesians had no need to cling obstinately to their state of pseudo-independence . . . equally, it ought not to be inevitable for Britain to embark on mandatory sanctions . . . Each was in a diffi- culty; neither was seeking to dictate to the other . . . while it could be argued that it would be worth taking the risk of shaking [sic] the Commonwealth if a firm agreement with Rhodesia had been possible, the British govern- ment was not prepared to take that risk if the agreement itself was uncertain . . . he himself had continued to believe in Mr Smith's good faith. Was he now to be shown to be wrong? Finally, the Prime Minister draws to a close with the remarkable assertion :
But if the last chance of a settlement was now lost, it would not necessarily be a matter of weeks or even months (to bring the rebellion to an end); it might be a matter of years.
And a happy new year to you all.
No Comment 'The morale in prisons I visited appeared high.' —Lord Mountbatten in his report of his inquiry into prison escapes and security.
NIGEL LAWSON
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