Political Commentary
BY CHARLES CURRAN TO adapt Mr. Brendan Behan, the old triangle must now go jingle-jangle on the banks of the Suez Canal. While Britain, France and the United States are composing the tune, I want to look at the personality of Colonel Nasser. I had several opportunities of meeting and talking with him in Cairo When he celebrated in 1954 the second anniversary of his arrival in power.
To dismiss him as merely a 'phony Pharaoh' strikes me as over-simplification. He is a politician whose stock-in-trade consists of nationalism and poverty—two forces as real, and as explosive, in Egypt as they are everywhere else. Fluent, articulate—he speaks excellent English—he is a type familiar in our own public life; the man who turns to politics as a means of expressing his own resentments, of projecting his personal tensions in a socially acceptable form. Bitterness at foreign domination; puritan anger with corruption and luxury; a sense of inferiority turning into hatred—Nasser is Egypt in Microcosm.
He displays that unmistakable mark of the second-rate, the belief that human affairs can be reduced to simple, single Causes. For him there are two : the Financiers and the Jews. His mind is not well-furnished, and these themes recur con- stantly, with little verbal variation. The violence of the lan- guage that he, like his Junta associates, employs about the Jews Is startling in its crudity. He does not admit any right to the existence of the State of Israel; he sees that State as something created by the foreign financiers for the purpose of maintain- ing their rule on the Nile. (I recall one lunch-table conversation on this theme with members of the Junta which was brightened for me by the remark, 'If the Jews have a right to Palestine. then the Romans ought to reoccupy London—or at any rate St. Albans.) Persistently, in conversation, Nasser suggests a personality under strain, pent-up interior tensions kept with some difficulty tinder control, liable to explode under pressure. He finds declamation easier than discussion.
. His mind is exhibited in a book he wrote, after his arrival in power, called The Philosophy of the Revolution. In its English translation it reads as artlessly as an adolescent's diary; a blur of confused ideas, banal and jejune. But it contains one Passage that is as revealing as a spotlight. Nasser relates how, as a youthful member of a nationalist society, his mind dwelt Constantly on the assassination of King Farouk, brooding in fantasy over the act of killing, oscillating between fascination and horror. Then he and his associates passed from fantasy to reality. They set out to kill an individual who is not named. logically exact, of a figure who constantly recurs among conspirators : the unstable young man who is ruthless at one level of his consciousness, and at another a remorseful, nerve- ridden wreck. This is the type that often turns informer.
The clinical picture portrayed in this passage from The Philosophy of the Revolution strikes me as an accurate repre- sentation of Nasser. He is a man whose aggressive impulses are shaped by rhetoric. I should make a very different assess- ment of some of his Junta associates, in particular of Wing Commander Gamal Salem, his second-in-command. The taci- turn Salem has no instability about him. He conveys sharply the impression of a welded personality, with a violent unity about him—a man for whom blood is the best argument.
These impressions of Nasser are confirmed in detail when you watch him addressing an open-air meeting. As a soapbox connoisseur myself, I put Nasser in the first class. Few men are more gifted than he in handling a crowd. The greatest mob- orator I have ever heard was the late Mr. Tom Mann; even though he was then past sixty, with his best days behind him. he was above all others. Nasser falls short of the supreme, but not by very much. Even when full allowance is made for the superior ductility of a Cairo crowd massed under a hot sun. Nasser is superb. On a platform his personality blazes like a naphtha flare. It exhibits the full extent of the orator's crafts- manship. With his high, piercing, flexible voice, his complete identification with the audience, his power to move them with precision from anger to enthusiasm and then to laughter, he is a demagogue whom nobody could forget.
If he falls now, 1 hope we shall insist that his successor in Egypt is someone with an impediment in his speech.
The Suez crisis has produced some hasty rethinking about the practicability of cutting the call-up. Mr. lain Macleod had little difficulty in disposing of the Socialist 'end conscription' zealots last Tuesday night. His guarded words about selective service must be carefully noted. Basically, the objection to selective service is not military but political; it would probably be attacked from the Left as violating the sacred doctrine of Fair Shares.
One of the weightiest arguments against the present call-up system is that it is a deterrent to long-term recruitment. The continual movement in and out of National Servicemen iS highly unsettling to the Regular soldier. much the level of Army pay but the resistance of the girl friend.. It will be necessary, also, to give the middle-aged officer more help in bringing up his children.
Politicians are examining the entrails of a new pamphlet, called Houses to Let.* It has been produced by the unofficial Bow Group of young Tories; but it is published by the Con- servative Political Centre. Consequently, there is speculation about whether it foreshadows the lines on which the Govern- ment will tackle rent restriction.
The authors of Houses To Let are both young men in their twenties. Neither was born when rent restriction began. They look back in wonder at this forty-year-old jungle, and then enter it with all the gusto of youth. In sixty-four sharply writ- ten pages they tell the whole story, without catchwords or claptrap or party incantations. Clear, cogent, pungent, it is a most impressive piece of pamphleteering.
They make three proposals : (1) immediate decontrol of about one million houses; (2) gradual decontrol of about four million others; (3) the retention in the rents refrigerator of about a million houses now decaying into slumdom. The elec- toral arithmetic of this is noteworthy. For the third proposal would remove the most stubborn obstacle of all—namely, that to provide a margin for repairs to the oldest houses would need a rise in rents likely to make any politician quail.
The authors supply a number of new ideas. They want to give working-class tenants in a free market more than a week's notice; and to supplant the Rents Tribunals by the machinery of the County Courts. It is a contribution of vigour and origin- ality, an exercise in exorcism that may help to lay the most persistent ghost of British politics.
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