DIARY
JEREMY PAXMAN
Budapest
havehave been in eastern Europe, making a film for Newsnight on the growing problem of European migration. The sight of the huddled masses on the Hungarian/Rumani- an border, their few belongings in an assortment of plastic bags, is redolent of half-remembered images of Ellis Island or displaced persons' camps after the second world war. They sit by the side of the road with that exhausted indifference that belongs to the very poor accustomed to a lifetime of being shouted at by men with guns. It is hard to exaggerate the potential scale of the migration. Rumanians are the most visible — and the most commonly excoriated — because they are so numer- ous and because so many of them are gyp- sies. A truck-driver and a waiter from a Mack Sea resort, who had somehow man- aged to pass themselves off as Rumanian nobility, were only two of several people to come out with the old stories about how if you gave the gypsies houses they put their horses in the living-room and slept out- doors themselves. But the old prejudices won't wash. Elsewhere on the refugee trail I met Bulgarians, Albanians, Russians, Moldovans and those who used to be called Yugoslays, to say nothing of a dozen non- European nationalities. A mass movement of people has started and threatens to become an unstoppable tidal wave if the Russians finally overcome the 'shortage of special paper' which has held up their issu- ing of passports.
The migrants are mainly heading for Germany because, even in recession, its economy offers wealth beyond the dreams of these peoples' avarice. There are, of course, horror stories. German border guards talked to me of mothers and chil- dren they have found wandering in ice- bound forests suffering from frostbite. In the first two months of this year, six chil- dren under 12 months were abandoned in the snow by parents trying to slip over the border from the Czech republic. An Indian migrant was discovered frozen to death in the forest the other week. Nobody knows how many have managed to slip into Ger- many, but it is unlikely to be less than half a million. So alarmed have the Germans become that asylum laws are being rewrit- ten, radar detectors are being tested on one section of the border and hundreds of sher- iffs are being signed up to control the bor- der. Central European neighbours watch all this with mounting alarm, knowing that the only short-term solution may turn out to be a new Iron Curtain — which was the one thing from which they thought they'd escaped. The only question will be on whose borders it is set up. 'Why can't you go back to Rumania?' I naïvely asked a hungry young man sleeping rough in Prague's main railway station and waiting to try to sneak across the border. 'Surely it would be better than living like this?' Have you been to Rumania?' he replied, com- pletely baffled by the question.
The debate about how and why the eastern European joke died rumbles on. `There's no need to make fun of your rulers when you can change them,' was one theo- ry, coined in the warm afterglow of the vel- vet revolution, and unlikely to survive long exposure to the idiosyncrasies of democra- cy. There is, however, more than a grain of truth in the idea: the joke was the revenge of the people on the old men in astrakhan hats who made their lives such a misery. It was truly subversive because, as Brecht pointed out, the one thing authoritarians can't cope with is people laughing at them. But it depended for its force on the inher- ent contradiction of the socialist states, that the workers' paradises nurtured the gulags, that 'democracy' meant dictatorship. When words mean what they say, you need anoth- er kind of humour. Someone on the Czech/ German border told me an impenetrable story about a man waking up shivering in the middle of a January night and getting out of bed to discover the radiators were belting out heat. Shaking his wife awake, he 'We can re-enact the battle on Mr Gummer's pond.' cries, 'Wake up, wake up, the communists are back.' No, I didn't get it either, even after vast quantities of Czech beer.
The best, or at least blackest, humour comes from real life. A Hungarian border guard described to me how, during the Cold War, he'd caught the same woman twice. Each time, she was trying to climb the fence into Austria. Then, a few months ago, the guard spotted her at 300 yards. She was heading determinedly across the fields towards the border, struggling under the weight of a long ladder on her shoulder. No one had told her that in the meantime they'd taken down the fence.
he Spectator editor's idea of a bit of fun on my return is to send me a copy of Sir Robin Day's book, But With Respect, a col- lection of interviews with people ranging from Nasser to Neil Kinnock. This looks an innocent enough bit of mischief-making. Robin has made no secret of the fact that he doesn't think much of many of us who have followed in his footsteps. Stephen Glover had a shot at some similar stirring while interviewing the great man in the Evening Standard (`My chief purpose is to get him to say something about Jeremy Paxman, the Newsnight hit-man'), but Robin courteously didn't come to the bait, and I've no intention of obliging either. The interviews are an impressive collection, well researched and persistent, although it is hard now to understand why some of them excited such controversy at the time: as he himself remarks, 'What then may have seemed fierce and provocative would not raise an eyebrow nowadays.' This, he seems to believe, is because of the number of interviewers who have 'a sort of "come off it" or "come clean" attitude', as if pro- ceeding from the assumption that much of politics necessarily involves being economi- cal with the truth. We ought, Sir Robin believes, to treat politicians as if, prima facie, they are honourable men. So are they all, all honourable men. But I wonder what Sir Robin would have said in reply to Lord Lawson the other night when he claimed to me that he shouldn't be held accountable for things he said in the House of Com- mons about British exchange rate policy at the time we went into the ERM, on the grounds that 'as a man of the world' one ought to understand that former Chancel- lors cannot say what they really believe about exchange rates in the House of Com- mons. Or to Lord Prior, when he claimed that putting VAT on domestic fuel did not break government election promises, because 'it wasn't actually in the manifesto, was it?'
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