ANOTHER VOICE
A plea for lords, ladies and baronesses who are disabled
AUBERON WAUGH
So I, too, was had for a mug. Liverpool is not going to prove the battlefield for a domestic Armageddon between the evil forces of Mordor in the north and GandaIf the Good from the land of the hobbits. One could say that Mordor, in the person of Derek Hatton, has done an Ingrams and knuckled under, but in truth the whole business was just another non-event, an opportunity for politicians to make a little scene, monarchise and draw attention to themselves.
This might seem a good opportunity to resume the series of speeches I would have delivered in court against Mrs Claire Tomalin if Ingrams had not cravenly sold the pass. Frantic requests arrive by every post, but it seems to me there is no hurry. When the In Tomalinam cycle is completed it will be stitched in vellum and offered as first prize in a Spectator bingo competition. For the present, there is another Times Newspapers journalist who stands in more urgent need of being tormented.
Last week Mr Bernard Levin delivered a sermon on the subject of social responsibil- ity. He cited the case of Mrs Ralph Lawson, mother of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who uses taxi vouchers sup- plied to her as a disabled person by the GLC because she is reluctant to ask her hard-pressed son for any money. She, says Bernard, should be twice honoured: once for refusing to burden Nigel with extra financial commitments, once for express- ing gratitude to the GLC. But there are other disabled people, he opines, citing unnamed 'lords and ladies and baronesses' who could well afford their taxi fares and these too, he hazards, are taking advantage of the GLC's philanthropic scheme. Such people — and the number of disabled peers and peeresses is small, its members easily identifiable: the Duke of Buccleuch, Lady Masham, Lady Darcy de Knayth . . . — are to be despised and ridiculed as irresponsible members of society: Would you stake your life that among the 'lords and ladies and baronesses' . . . there is none who could regularly afford the full taxi fare? And those who could, but prefer to cadge it from those who in many cases are less well off than they are themselves; what does 'responsible' mean to them, other than what it means in the sentence 'I think somebody else should be responsible for the cost of my comforts?' . . . 1 hope the taxi-cadgers have their fingers shut in the door.
Now I do not suppose for a moment that the Duke of Buccleuch, Lady Masham and Lady Darcy de Knayth ever avail them- selves of this GLC benefit. I also wonder if our Bernard made thorough investigations into the financial position of Mrs Ralph Lawson, but that is beside the point. The most obvious objection to his argument is that he is wrong. Why on earth should these putative lords and ladies and baronesses who pay enormous sums in rates and taxes not expect any services at all in return?
But what really distressed me about little Bernard's performance was the hatred he whipped up against these putative and probably non-existent disabled lords, ladies and baronesses who use the GLC taxi service. Mothers who do not take money from their sons are to be com- mended. They are a proper burden on the rates. I hope Mrs Rose Levin took note. But disabled lords, ladies and baronesses who take advantage of the sums they have already paid in rates, to which hard- working 57-year-old bachelor journalists may also have contributed, are to have their fingers shut in car doors.
Has Mr Levin forgotten all the lessons about love which he learned in Poona only five and a half years ago, at the feet of the Rasputin-like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh? Last week the Bagwash was deported from his 64,000-acre estate in Oregon, leaving his 93 Rolls-Royces behind and most of his Air Rajneesh fleet of private aeroplanes, declaring that 'America is no democracy, it is simply a hypocrisy'. The State of Oregon could not wait to see the back of him and his multi-million-dollar free-love enter- prise.
But in April 1980, Mr Levin, newly returned from a second visit to the Bag- wash's ashram in Poona, was very keen on this idea of love as the great salvation of mankind. How many people now remem- ber the series of three articles published in the Times in the dear lost days of Rees- Mogg: 'Struck by enlightenment in Poona' (8 April 1980) , 'An extraordinary journey to the interior' (9 April 1980), `The joy of shedding their chains' (10 April 1980)? There was one more, on 5 June 1980, 'A rather special kind of loving', in which further tribute was paid to the 'extraordin- ary refulgence of love and wisdom that emanates from this remarkable figure' — and then silence. Enthusiasm for the Bag- wash did not reappear among Levin's slightly embarrasing retrospective list of Enthusiams, published in 1983. What has gone wrong? Let us return to April 1980, when the 51-year-old, five-foot-four bachelor re- turned from a second pilgrimage to the Bagwash, having received a 'powerful sense that he is the conduit along which the vital force of the universe flows'. Even then he jibbed at Bagwash's fulsome sup- port of Mrs Gandhi, pointing out that she was a 'criminal and a tyrant' and found that his liberal sympathies were affronted by Bagwash's support for the caste system and advocacy that the 'Untouchables' should be kept in their place. But he did not object to the staretz's dirty jokes, nor to the way that his body- guards sniffed people before they were allowed into the ashram: 'The sniffing . - • must be accepted and digested by anyone wanting to understand Rajneesh, before the kernel of his mystery can be approached.' He did not object to the fairly explicit sign outside the ashram: 'Shoes and minds to be left here.' The human mind, he decided, was an obstacle to our reception of this message of love. Bagwash was preaching the same messages as Jesus and Buddha before him: 'that love is the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, and that everything we need to be, wish to be, and ought to be, we already are.'
Levin did not even object to the lies which Bagwash told. We must be prepared to suspend traditional forms of judgment. `Rajneesh is not trying to purvey informa- tion, but a truth that by-passes conscious thought.' He accepted that many of the staretz's groupies were in love with him, and recounted an experience of his own: 'A Canadian girl I met had an ease and naturalness that were like magic; she made me want to hug her, though I hardly need say I didn't.' Why not? The 51-year-old, five-foot-three-inches bachelor may have missed a good opportunity. He dismissed sexual gossip about Rasputin on the grounds that such gossip 'conveys more about the gossips than about the subjects of gossip'. How grown-up! But why has this high- principled bachelor, now 57 years old and five feet two inches high, decided to climb out of the flower and back up the green fuse, as it were? I am afraid that this sad story tells us more about the plight of 57-year-old bachelors who missed out on the 1960s than it does about the vital forces of the universe. We should weep for him, no doubt, but let us not take it out bp disabled lords, ladies and baronesses.
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