Notebook
I recently turned up a cloth-bound notebook which, at the age of nine years and three months (according to the flyleaf), I had planned to fill with interesting facts and observations, the intention being to 'solve the mysteries of the world'. This grandiose project did not get very fat. Boredom seems to have set in on page 12 after I had written down the lengths from beak to tail of various species of bird and reported that wood pigeons 'spoil the corn and oats and millions of other things so you are allowed to shoot and kill them any time of the year you like which I think is rather a pity'. On page 1, however, there is what appears at first sight to be an important clue to the character of the author and prophecy of things to come: 'I admire everyone who drinks quantities of white wine'. Alas, I did not at that time know anybody who drank quantities of white wine, and on closer inspection it becomes clear that this statement, like everything else in this pathetic book, was in fact cribbed from somewhere else. This particular sentence seems to have been cribbed from Lewis Carroll's Introduction to Symbolic Logic, which in those days, although I could not understand it, seemed jolly clever. You know the sort of thing: (1) There are no pencils of mine in this box. (2) No sugar plums of mine are cigars. (3) The whole of my property that is not in this box consists of cigars. What is the conclusion? I refer to this because it can only have been as a result of some similar logical process that The Times on Tuesday chose as its main front-page story a leading article from the Bow Group's magazine Crossbow calling for the dismissal of Sir Keith Joseph. I do not know exactly how The Times, or the BBC for that matter, arrived at the conclusion that nothing more important had happened in the world that day than the publication of Crossbow's editorial, but the process of deduction presumably started from the premise that the membership of the Bow Group includes 63 MPs, of whom eight are Cabinet ministers. The fact that the Bow Group has practically no influence on anybody, that it is a playground for ambitious young Conservatives who tend to swim with the current intellectual tide, does not appear to have been given any weight in The Tbnes's deliberations. Even the blushing confession of a Crossbow spokesman — 'It is just a sounding board for ideas. We never have a group opinion. This article was written by Nigel Barber' — did not shame The Times as much as it should have. Returning to the subject next day, the newspaper limply declared: 'Despite the explanation and denials yesterday, the magazine's message is certain to be a talking point in the party at Westminster and in the country'. But it would not have been, of course, without the prominence The Times gave it, which is what is known as creating news rather than reporting it. The paper's former editor, Mr William Rees-Mogg, explained last year in a television interview which was never transmitted that in selecting the main news story for The Times, he always considered whether it would still appear years later to have been the most enduringly significant event of the moment. This may not be a very snappy way of doing things, it may even be ridiculously ambitious, but I like it better.
The Bow Group, by the way, has nowadays rather a lot in common with the Monday Club: too much for comfort, perhaps. For one thing, both of these Conservative clubs are broke. The Bow Group, so it is reported, cannot afford to produce any more editions of Crossbow this year because donations have dried up. In the case of the Monday Club, donations fell by one third last year, and it ended 1980 with a deficit of £10,244. But that is not all they have in common. The most recent issue of Monday World had an editorial not all that dissimilar from Crossbow's, except that its language was more vigorous. 'The promises made during the last election have clearly not been kept, and increasingly one will wonder whether this government is anything other than a wishywashy socialist government, and really whether it had any intention of being anything else.' What may have discouraged The Times from choosing this editorial as its lead story was a touch of inconsistency, for the leader continued by expressing the hope that the Government 'will have the courage to gamble; that is, to hold on to its present policies' (My italics). Maybe it is this lack of rigorous logic which can be held responsible for the Monday Club's decline. Or perhaps one should blame the club's other publication, The Monday News, which announced the other day that Chapman Pincher's book Their Trade is Treachery was 'an official publication'. Whatever the reason, it is hardly surprising that last month's annual general meeting was attended neither by the retiring president, Lord Salisbury, nor by his successor, Lord Massereene and Ferrard.
For some time I have been worrying about Arezzo, the town in Tuscany near which we have a house and to which I therefore repair on every possible occasion. It is inexplicably rich, having, so I am told the highest per capita income of any Italian city. It is full of Mercedes cars and Range Rovers (La Range as they call it). Now I read that it is also the headquarters of a masonic lodge so grand and so powerful and so corrupt that its exposure has caused the downfall of the Italian government and a crisis 'without precedent' in the long and tedious history of Italian political crises. But I cannot help believing that even this crisis is not what it appears. There is nothing new about freemasonry in Italy. It has existed in Tuscany since 1733 and, following attempts by Mussolini to suppress it, it is known to have enjoyed a revival since the war, largely because of official American encouragement. There is nothing fundamentally surprising about the fact that, in common with some certified villains, a couple of cabinet ministers belong to the lodge in Arezzo, even though the Vatican recently reminded Catholics that freemasonry was incompatible with membership of the church. The Vatican does not approve of the Mafia either. Nor does it approve of abortion, which long before it became legal was practised in Italy on a massive scale. The Italian press is pretending, I suspect, to be shocked about the exposure of something which it has always known to exist, rather as if the newspapers in England suddenly revealed with horror the existence of the House of Lords.
Ever since I learnt that we had seven subscribers among the passport officers at Kennedy Airport, New York, I have been interested in what advertisers would call the Spectator's 'readership profile'. Recently I got a letter from a friend who described watching 'a wrinkled old negro with fuzzy white hair' pushing a dust-cart along Porchester Terrace in Bayswater. 'When he emptied a bin into his cart, he picked out each object between thumb and forefinger, little finger raised in the most fastidious way imaginable. After apple cores, old SevenUp cans and assorted snotty Kleenex, he extracted from the depths of the bin a soggy Spectator, leant with obvious relief against the railings, and read it from cover to cover'. In case this story may not impress potential advertisers, let me report the contents of a notice to be found in Brooks's Club, St. James's Street. The managers note with regret that certain periodicals are being removed from the club, especially Spectator, Private Eye. Would the member responsible kindly desist from so doing'.
Alexander Chancellor
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