Personal column

George Gale

All the amateur prophets of nature's behaviour have been saying for months that we're in for a hard winter. On the whole, I hope they are right. I like weather of most kinds provided it is not boring. The year just dead was a year of very boring weather indeed; and Christmas day as usual, was damp and undistinguished. I enjoy the sense of season and a cold winter enhances spring.

Anyhow, let us please suffer a hard winter. We have earned it with our fecklessness. It is appropriate that we be punished. We want a hard winter, preferably with some power cuts thrown in and a touch of the three-day-week beside. There are even some extreme masochists within the Tory party who are still thinking of Ted Heath as their leader, perhaps on the ground that 1974, although bad enough, with two lost elections, one of them unnecessary, was not as bad as could have been contrived and that, with any luck, 1975 will be, goody goody, much much worse. I detect, conversationally as well as in articles and speeches, a shrill welcome to a presumed approaching apocalypse. People hear the voices of sirens and cry out, in response, "Keep singing, darlings, we are coming towards you with all our eager speed!" The same people have become very bitchy about class and very scary about reds under the bed. City chaps get into their commuter trains earlier (and often drunker) than ever, and moan continually about the power of the unions and the working class not working and that terrible fellow Senn. These City chaps may not exactly want a hard winter if it keeps their share prices down; but they'd love a hard winter otherwise, wrapped up cosily at Frinton-on-Sea and Haywards Heath, and strung along railway lines in between.

I want a hard winter because I like the beauty of a cold white winter and because I feel, foolishly no doubt, that it has a cleansing effect. You want a hard winter because you think we all deserve it. They want a hard winter to punish the idle working-class of communistridden layabouts, and to weed out the geriatrics.

Sir Edward backs out

Peregrine Worsthorne received a characteristic pre-Christmas present of news from one of our press proprietors. At the invitation, and with the backing, of the very wealthy Sir Edward Hulton, he has edited the International Review (incoporating European Review) since its inception last spring. It is a quarterly and the idea was to produce on this side of the Atlantic a magazine fit eventually to be compared with the United States' authoritative Foreign Affairs. With issue number 3 out, and preparations going ahead for further issues next year, Perry has received, out of the blue, a letter telling him that Hulton is withdrawing from the enterprise.

This is not only a withdrawal of subsidy. The title page lists, as Editor-in-Chief (an absurdly overweight title for the publication in question), Sir Edward Hulton himself. Continuing the new fad for fancy titles, Perry himself is called Editorial Director, and there are two associate editors, one of whom is Nika Hulton, Sir Edward's highly continental wife, and the other, friend of the family Bertram Hes mondhalgh, ex-Foreign Office and now in public relations. The quarterly also claims two art editors as well as Jim Spey — "Production." This is a lot of people to produce a small magazine once every three months and Sir Edward has been coughing up something like E20,000 for the first year to do so. Thinking, I imagine, that he may be in some danger of actually feeling the pinch, he is ditching the enterprise almost immediately after Perry had sent out thousands of letters to people who had received the first two issues free, asking for them to become subscribers.

The enterprise has been run with excessive extravagance: lush offices, generous fees to contributors, too much 'editorial' staff, not to mention substantial emoluments for its parttime editorial director, not that as a journalist I am complaining about this. But had the enterprise been more modest, it might have lasted.

Now, Perry is searching for new backing, for he is anxious that International Review should not sink without trace. He is also reconciled to a quarterly which will manage to live a good deal nearer to its probable income than Hulton's latest effort did. I wish Perry well, but think he would do better with a political fortnightly, or weekly, than with a quarterly which, by its very nature, cannot be topical. The political life, both international and national, is very fluid at the moment; and during such times, there is not much demand, I think, for views which must, of necessity, be fairly distantly removed from news.

John Stonehouse

John Stonehouse has at last done some service to the community at large, for the papers over the holiday would have been duller without him than with him. As I write, he still has not applied for the Chiltern Hundreds, and I suppose that if he has been imagining that he can remain a member of Parliament, there is some prima facie evidence of mental collapse or severe disturbance. However, the meticulous planning of his escape does not square with a breakdown and the reports I've seen from Australia do not suggest that he is anything like as contrite as might have been expected. Parliament does not enjoy a particularly high reputation. If he has not applied for the Chiltern Hundreds before the House of Commons re-assembles, its first substantial act should be to expell him from its midst without any further to do whatever. I note that John Junor is continuing to write the Current Events column in the Sunday Express, a column which was started by John Gordon when he ceased to be editor and went upstairs as editor-in-chief. John Gordon was, I suppose, Beaverbrook's favourite editor: certainly he was the one who gave him least trouble and probably the one who shared the largest number of his master's prejudices. During recent months, when the old and dying John Gordon was still clinging, with characteristic courage and pertinacity, to a life which was effectively concluded, it was realised in Fleet Street that John Junor was in effect writing John Gordon's column; so it has been no surprise that the initials JJ now appear at the foot of the column which for so long proclaimed the idiosyncratic, frequently irritating, but almost always readable, opinions and prejudices of John Gordon.

I met the old man a few times. He was ill-tempered and very mean about money. He also possessed more than the average Scotsman's share of cant and hypocrisy (which is saying a lot for the Presbyterian Scots are a canting and hypocritical bunch, by and large). The sort of thing that pleased John Gordon was when the Beaverbrook press gave him a new Rolls-Royce for his eightieth birthday.

I wonder whether, if John Junor (another Scot, but without the cant and the hypocrisy) is to continue, as I expect, to write the Current Events column, this means that he, or Sir Max, is toying with the idea of a removal upstairs, into the Editorship-in-chief vacated by Gordon's death? I incline to think not; or at least, not until Alastair Burnet is well and truly settled into the editorial chair one floor down, at the Daily Express. Burnet seems to be moving slowly; which is sensible, and I hear that the internal mood of the Express office is now better than it has been for very very many months.

Head for houses

I admire the intellectual graces and social ill-graces of Tony Crosland very much — I once remarked in a different context that he is the sort of man who wouldn't bother to shave on Sunday morning if he was a weekend guest and I might have added that he wouldn't want to be asked, or be at all likely to accept the invitation, by a host or hostess who'd be put out by his dark stubble over breakfast. That, however, is not my point.

What, I want to know, is he going to do about housing? And in particular, what is he going to do to prevent accommodation being withdrawn from the market by landlords who now fear, rightly enough, that to allow anybody to occupy a flat or house is to give them something like total security of tenure. The tragedies of the homeless will not be improved by reducing the number of dwellings available. Security of tenure against improper eviction or against landlord's harrassment is one thing. To prevent a contract being struck between a landlord and a tenant, to the disadvantage of both, is no way to solve the housing problem. If leases with, say, three months' notice to quit, were to be made possible again, then at once a good deal of accommodation would become available; and nobody would be worse off. Tony Crosland is a theoretician, but he is also a practical man; and I think that the quickest way to improve housing in this country (apart, of course, from the doctrinally unacceptable but eminently sensible abolition of all rent control and all subsidies on bricks and mortar)

would be, first, to make new contracts possible,

and, second, to instruct local councils to stop all slum clearances and to embark instead upon the modernisation of all pre-1914 property as a matter of top priority. It is here where the resources available will yield the greatest harvest.