Westminster Commentary
MOTORIST in Surrey, gestur- ing expansively out of the car window: 'The Hog's Back.'
Inattentive passenger, ig- norant of local topography: 'I didn't know he'd been away.' (Collapse of stout Parties.) For who is this lithe, I, bronzed figure, with a new o: spring in his step and a new f;learn in his eye, and a new, sharp pencil in his Pocket, waving the lift contemptuously aside i nd bounding three at a time up the stairs to
.i : he Press Gallery? Refreshed, replenished, re- uvenated, it is your humble servant Taper ti he ack once more humbly at your service, once tlini ore ready to offer his eagerly-sought advice il/a 8 to how Parliament should conduct its Affairs, and with a brand new theory as to what Would be found inside Dr Charles Hill if you triscrewed him (tagliatelle alla Bolognese). Like Vonner at the end of Das Rheingold I strike the if c'elts with my mighty hammer and the mists troll back to reveal Valhalla, SW1, in all its Tory, (Which reminds me; before I go any further have a complaint to make. This year the first IV cycle at Covent Garden falls on Septem- ' er 18, 23, 28, and October 2; the second 'cycle takes place on October 5, 6, 8 and 10. '1 cannot attend the whole of the first because the Liberal Party Conference overlaps with it, land I cannot attend any of the second because the Labour Conference coincides with it. Now, fascinating experience though it undoubtedly is to hear Sir Arthur Comyns Carr holding forth on the brilliant solution to the traffic Problem he devised in 1902, and passionately though I desire to hear Miss Alice Bacon tell Its how much the leaders of the Labour Party dislike the Public Schools at which they were educated, I think on balance I would rather be at Covent Garden at the moment when they are doing so. A little foresight on the part q the political machine-minders and the Covent Garden Board of Management would have solved the problem for me, and in view of the more or less nationalised status 'of the Royal Opera House I should have thought 4 Close liaison between the two was only to be expected. I trust that by next year some joint committee will have been set up to deal with this; I need hardly say that my services are entirely at any such committee's disposal.)
And now, what have I been missing all these long weeks? (What you have been missing it would hardly be proper for me to dwell upon.) Even had I been in the country, I may say, I would not have set foot inside Westminster while the indescribable glories of the Liberace case were half a mile away providing enter- tainment unmatched even by the House of Commons on a wet Thursday night at the - end of a session. Still, the fact remains that for five weeks I have not been to Parliament, and it behoves me to find out what they have been doing in my absence. The first thing I did, therefore, after my return, was to turn to the Spectator to read the exciting and detailed accounts of the debates and questions con- tributed in my absence by a dazzling array of Parliamentary stars of all hues.
Certainly I cannot complain that the five- week debate lacked substance. Mr Roy Jenkins (after gently pointing out that Parliament does not exist in order to amuse me, but failing in the excitement to tell us what it does exist for) gave us a most learned disquisition on the state of Parliament in 1909; Mr David Price painted a touching picture of the present-day inmates being flogged through airless corridors by ruthless slave-masters ; Mr Leslie Hale spoke up for back-benchers, and democracy, and other such noble animals; Mr Peter Kirk found Parliament not such a bad place after all; Mr Mark Bonham Carter, a latter-day Henry V, protested against being compelled to sheathe his sword, for lack of argument. I read them all with enjoyment and profit, and determined to model myself more closely upon them in future.
And then, as if in celebration of my return, the House last Thursday put on one of those hilarious shows that might have been expressly designed to ruin my resolve. The Navy Estimates cannot, as a rule, be relied on to produce much in the way of good cheer. A little muttering about public-school officers on one side, a tear-stained reference or two to Gibraltar on the other, and Britannia, for another year, rules the waves. This time the rules were waived, and a debate took place, at the shortest possible notice (which was not nearly as short as some of the tempers in- volved) on the proposed sale of the Watford firm S. G. Brown Ltd., at present owned by the Admiralty, which is a most unlikely haunt of businessmen, if the thirty-eight million jimmy-o'goblins they were wasting on obso-
lete warships a month or so ago is anything to go by. It seems that S. G. Brown Ltd. was taken over during the war under the appro- priate Defence Regulation, and somebody in the Admiralty having just noticed it there, the decision has been taken to off-load it. Now this seems to me to be a fairly reasonable, though perhaps belated, decision. After all, the Conservative Party has been saying for years that it is dedicated to the cause of free enter- prise, and although this is a howling lie, it is obviously necessary to make some kind of gesture in its direction every now and again. S. G. Brown Ltd. was this year's gesture, and the result was a row which might almost have convinced a casual visitor to the House that something important was being discussed.
Mr Frederick Lee set the tone for the Opposition when he quoted the Chancellor of the Exchequer as saying earlier, 'I certainly do not think that because a firm is expanding or well managed that justifies it remaining in public ownership,' and then added, 'In my fourteen years in the House of Commons, I do not believe that I have ever heard an answer which so reeked of political bias as that.' From then on, as you can well imagine, the sky was the limit, and some of the contribu- tions from the Opposition indicated that the speakers were even more in need of the products of S. G. Brown Ltd. (the firm makes gyroscopes) than Mr. Lee. Mr. Bevan, that grizzled old sea-dog, was much in evidence, for instance, maintaining with such witty gibes as 'Let us sell the Navy' the quarterdeck's reputation for repartee, and Mr Lee, even when he had finished his own speech, seemed determined to make everybody else's as well. But what made the whole affair even more comic than the Opposition's hysterical rage was the fact that the Tories themselves were far from unitedly happy at the transaction. Mr Farey-Jones may perhaps be excused his trepidation; he sits for the constituency in which the firm is situated, and held it last time by a mere 201 votes (though surely, if the electorate is so passionately opposed to nationalisation as we are always being told, vigorous support for the move would increase that majority ?), but the Tory misgivings expressed privately before the debate were a rich and comic appetiser to the feast.
The debate ended in what is known technically as uproar, but what I always like to think of, in Mr Forster's description of the end of the Fifth Symphony, as 'the vast roarings of a superhuman joy.' And once again the Opposition had demonstrated publicly its unerring flair for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick and then poking its own eyes out with the other. The Admiralty may exist, as its inhabitants maintain, to run the Navy, or it may exist, as the sailors main- tain, to prevent them running it. But for the best part of a day and the best part of a million decibels the House of Commons debated whether in fact it existed to manufacture gyroscopes. I was home. TAPER.
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