Another voice
Toady toady toady
Auberon Waugh
Some weeks ago I suggested that Mrs 'Thatcher's foolish decision not to resume the creation of hereditary peerages was not only responsible for the collapse of loyalty in the Conservative Party but was also helping to destroy the whole pyramid of deference on which our social order rests, at any rate in its higher reaches. Even I, as a typical professional man, was no longer tempted to smirk and rub my hands together whenever I met a Cabinet Minister, I revealed, for the good reason that there was no obvious advantage in it.
Since then the Queen's Birthday has come and gone, marked by nothing more than a deserved knighthood for William Rees-Mogg, a sprinkling of life peerages for various political time-servers and placemen and a serious attempt to frighten the Queen with a toy pistol, possibly by the well-known teenager Mr Marcus Sargeant. Obviously, one does not expect the Prime Minister to jump like a puppet on a string every time one makes a suggestion to her. She did not leave her grocery shop in Grantham for that. Possibly she has her own reasons for refusing to give Mr Peregrine Worsthorne a knighthood or to create hereditary peers. I merely observe that if she ignores my advice she will regret it, but if she wishes to put me in my place — at any rate for the moment — she can point out that by no means all journalists have overcome the habit of smirking and rubbing their hands together whenever they meet a Cabinet Minister.
A classic illustration appeared in this week's Sunday Times, although I doubt whether Mrs Thatcher can have found much comfort in it. A whole page of the newspaper was devoted to building up a credible alternative leader of the Conservative Party in the oily and absurd person of Mr Peter Walker. In an adulatory profile of him by the obliging Mr Peter Dunn — 'Focus: Portrait of a Wet' — we learned that 'Walker has matured into a formidable politician in the 20 years since he entered parliament . . . Adrenalin might be a bit low in most ministries these days, but not in Walker's [Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food]. Events may yet draw his kind of Tory Party back to Macmillan's Middle Way.'
That is plainly what the Sunday Times, with all the political know-how and intellectual megawattage at is disposal, wants. It takes as its starting point the speech Mr Walker made before the British-American Chamber of Commerce in New York last week, 'when', in the newspaper's words, Teter Walker assaulted his government's own monetarist line'.
Oddly enough, when I read his speech, I could not see that he had done anything of the sort. It consisted of a string of platitudes such as might perfectly well have fallen from the lips of Mrs Thatcher herself on an off-day. Government should be 'free of any doctrinaire approach', he said. It was 'time for sane and pragmatic decision-taking'. He quoted from Mr Macmillan that 'instead of working downwards from the realm of abstract theory, we shall work upwards from the simple needs of mankind'. The purpose of economics, he ventured, was 'to conserve life and provide abundant scope for human variation'.
Never mind that this last platitude is untrue. Economics has nothing to do with conserving life. Human variety may produce the economy, the economist merely studies the process. But the press had been told that this boring drivel added up to a swingeing attack on Mrs Thatcher's policies, so they obediently reported it as such.
'In fact', the Sunday Times's editorial introduction concluded, 'many observers believe that Walker is deliberately risking his political career in a bid to pull the party back to a more moderate position'.
Who on earth, one wonders, are these 'many observers', and how could they possibly believe anything so idiotic? Mr Walker has only to show Mrs Thatcher the text of his speech to convince her that there was nothing remotely controversial in it. And yet, without saying anything out of line, he has somehow succeeded in dissociating himself from the Government's policies so that if the electorate rejects them next time round, he will be the beneficiary. Is it really a serious newspaper's job to help him in this sneaky operation?
Peter Dunn opens his profile by revealing that unlike Mr Prior, Mr Pym and Sir Ian Gilmour, Mr Walker has 'declined to . . . endorse the last Budget'. If there were any truth in that, of course, his hero would have been thrown out of the Cabinet. But with all his political know-how, Mr Dunn may even have an explanation for this discrepancy: 'He was too talented and too dangerous to leave on the back benches. His ability to organise, his popularity with grass-roots Tories, his knack of selling the notions of a decent society even to right-wing audiences, was [sic] self-evident.'
In all my years in political journalism I do not think I ever read such a grovelling passage as that. Anybody in the business knows that Mr Walker has virtually no support in the Tory grass-roots outside the tiny and largely despised PEST and Tory reform groups. His only nuisance value on the backbenches would be as a lieutenant to the demented Mr Heath. For all that, I think it is time he was sent there.
But of course I do not expect Mrs Thatcher to accept my advice. There is nothing so ridiculous as the posture of journalists who see themselves as part of the sane and pragmatic decision-taking pro cess. I might even be wrong when I urge her to start creating hereditary peers as a cure for this particular ill. There is a quality of blubbery granite in Mr Walker's ambition which makes me doubt whether his loyalty could be bought for the prospect of a barony; nor am I sure that his son Jonathan would make a suitable member of the House of Lords, with his particular problem which Mr Walker once revealed to a Tory Party conference. But on the main point I am sure I am right.
She may take comfort from the fact that the art of political toadying is not yet dead, as Mr Peter Dunn triumphantly illustrates, but the awkward fact remains that he is not actually toadying to her. Nor is anybody else that I can see. I warned her this would happen if she obstinately persisted in her refusal to grant Peregrine Worsthorne a knighthood ,but she chose to ignore me.
Perhaps she thinks it might be interpreted as a sign of weakness if she adopted suggestions from this column, but she should take comfort that practically nobody reads it and even I have the greatest difficulty in remembering what I have written from week to week. The truth is that her relations with the press are at a dangerously low point, and it is still not too late for her to change her mind. Possibly the life barony she awarded to 'Lord' Matthews cannot now be cancelled without a special Act of Attainder, but the knighthood given to 'Sir' Larry Lamb, as we now know, can be removed with the flick of a wrist. Let her start the ball rolling with an earldom for Lord Butler and a knighthood for Perry, and she will see how we all round on Mr Walker and denounce him for the odious, oily little creep he is. But time is running short. One of the most interesting and significant things I learned from Peter Dunn's article was that Mr Walker's father, Sydney, kept a small grocery shop in his later years. The writing is on the wall.
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