Notebook
Shortly before Christmas a London taxi driver called Fred Housego won the Mastermind competition on television after swatting away at his books in the back of his cab while waiting for fares at Heathrow airport. There cannot have been a taxi driver in London who did not bask in the reflected glory. 'It is not commonly known,' one of his fellow professionals informed me next day, 'that cab-driving is officially designated a "profession". This is because of the "knowledge". What• you need for Mastermind is a well-trained brain, and there is no better training than the "knowledge". It is better than a university education'. I was feeling too harassed to discuss this question, being on my way to Piccadilly for a final, desperate attempt at some elementary Christmas shopping. By the standards of previous Christmases, the traffic flowed freely and the shoppers looked reasonably relaxed. Even Oxford Street was bearable and free of tawdry decorations. The recession had happily done its bit to civilise Christmas. I read Mr Malcolm Muggeridge in the Listener discussing 'the end of Christendom'. Among the great religious festivals, he said, Whitsun was dead, Easter was dying, but 'Christmas just manages to hang on for commerical rather than liturgical reasons'. He was wrong about that. Commercialism may prey upon Christmas, but it is not responsible for its continued popularity. If religion now plays only a small part in its celebration, sentiment plays a large one. I believe that most people still like to regard Christmas as Scrooge's nephew regarded it — 'as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know pf, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them [or any people, for that matter] as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.' It is the failure of Christmas to live up to such expectations that often induces feelings of bleak melancholy at this time of year. But there will have been no melancholy in Mr Muggeridge's cottage at Robertsbridge. One of the most striking characteristics of prophets of doom is their irrepressible cheerfulness.
'My wife still believes in Father Christmas,' confided the taxi-driver unhappily. 'Good heavens' said I. 'What will you do? will you give her a stocking?—No,' he said, 'but [will give the dog a stocking'. lie explained that he had no children and that the dog, a miniature spaniel, was a sort of substitute. I wondered What one put in a spaniel's stocking. 'I have bought him a plastic bone with blood painted on it which squeaks when you bite it.' One could hardly blame commercialism for this particular Christmas purchase.
Mrs Thatcher does not appear in her best light during the season of goodwill, which may be why Labour has been doing so well in the opinion polls. That generosity of spirit which I have no doubt she possesses in abundance finds difficulty in expressing itself. She has mastered the art of appearing tough, honest and determined, but at the price of concealing the warmer side of her nature from public view, The Guardian last week was accusing Sir Geoffrey Howe of following the advice given to Churchill by Lord Keynes in 1925 — 'that it will not be safe politically to admit that you are intensifying unemployment deliberately in order to reduce wages; thus you will have to ascribe what is happening to every conceivable cause except the true one.' Such a charge could not fairly be made against Mrs Thatcher. Her Christmas reply to the 'dossier of despair' from the unemployed of Teesside — a batch of complaining letters sent her by their local Labour MP, Mr Ian Wrigglesworth — was to remind them of 'the fallacy that governments can produce jobs at will without any regard to cost'. It was a happy coincidence for Mrs Thatcher's enemies that the Christmas episode in Mr Robert Kee's televised history of Ireland should have dealt with the potato famine and the disastrous consequence of government reluctance to intervene. We saw an actor impersonating Sir Charles Trevelyan, the Treasury official who was in charge of the relief works in Ireland and to whom the principle of self-help was sacred. His eventual decision to abandon the Irish to 'the operation of natural causes' contributed, no doubt, to the emigration of 1.5 million Irishmen, the death from starvation of perhaps one million others, and to the troubles that have plagued Anglo-Irish relations ever since. There is no parallel, of course, between the starving Irish of the mid-19th century and the prosperous British unemployed of today. But if Mrs Thatcher is to win the next election, she must be on the alert. If evidence of real hardship is revealed anywhere in the British Isles, she must visit the afflicted, weep in public, and shower them with public money. It is her only hope.
It is so difficult to be as grateful as one should be. After campaigning for years against the various lunatic schemes for turning Piccadilly Circus into a maze of overhead walkways, car tunnels and towering office blocks, the Spectator should be pleased that the facades, at least, of its principal buildings are to be preserved and that pedestrians will continue to shamble around at ground level. But we are only quite pleased. The final plan, as proudly described in a GLC brochure, is to create, on the Trocadero site, 'an entertainments complex on a scale unique in Europe' intended to attract some 3.5 million visitors a year. The present Circus is certainly very sordid, but at least this means that nobody wants to go there with the exception of a few dusky gentlemen of faintly criminal appearance. Now we are to have Disneyland in the very heart of our congested capital, a place of pilgrimage for all the family comprising 'the most exciting features of entertainment to be found throughout the world' ([quote a PR spokesman). And who are the developers responsible for this nightmare? They are not, as you might expect, a bunch of grasping capitalists, but the administrators of the pension fund of the country's electricity workers, going under the glamorous name of Electricity Supply Nominees. Poor London.
This is a cautionary tale which shows that Mr Richard Ingrams, the editor of Private Eye (and our television critic), should never allow his fundamental sensitivity and good taste to influence his professional judgment. He does not often do so, you may say. But before Christmas, for what I assume to be reasons of delicacy, he rejected at the last moment a cover illustration which showed an IRA hunger striker announcing 'Oi tink oi'll'ave a bit of Christmas puddin' after all, 'or words to that effect. At the time it was thought that the hunger strikers would die. But, as it turned out, they did indeed eat their Christmas pudding. It would have been the perfect Private Eye cover.
If you have not yet renewed your subscription to the Spectator, I urge you to do so quickly, for in two weeks time the cover price will .rise again, this time to 50 pence. This is a cruel New Year present to our long-suffering readers, and I can only apologise — with the usual exhortation to compare the cost of magazines with the cost of cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women. This may make the Spectator appear quite cheap. It will be cheaper still if you take out a postal subscription now, thereby obtaining it for 40 pence a week for the next 12 months.
Alexander Chancellor
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