Another voice
Away from it all
Auberon Waugh
Last week I journeyed up to the North East for what I supposed wouldbe another pre-election Geordie-baiting episode, sponsored by Newcastle's Tyne- Tees Television. For some reason into which I dare not inquire too closely, they seem to enjoy hiring me to go up there and insult them from time to time. The normal form is that they bring in a char-a-banc load of `workers' and plump Labour councillors from Tyneside and we spend an hour and a half or so abusing each other, grimacing and shaking our fists. It all serves a useful purpose, or so I like to think, of reminding the rich how much they are hated and reminding the `poor' that not everybody is as sorry for them as they are for themselves. On this occasion, however, the scene was quite different. Possibly this was the result of what I am convinced is an unconscious conspiracy by nearly everyone employed in the newspaper and television industries to secure a Conservative victory. Instead of the Newcastle studio we appeared in the drawing room at Floors Castle, Kelso, seat of the Duke of Roxburghe. Instead of furious workers from Consett and Tyneside, we had a succession of ruddy- faced peasants from various parts of the Duke's 60,000-acre estate who testified that there could be nothing more agreeable on earth than to work for His Grace, as their fathers and grandfathers had done before
them.
Perhaps the original inspiration for the programme was left-wing — an attempt to whip up clas8 hatred along the lines of John Pilger's article `Keeping in touch with the ruling classes' which appeared in the Daily Mirror that morning. If so, it horribly misfired. The one token leftie — Jimmy Reid, the former Glasgow Communist agitator — was far too polite to act as a spokesman for the angry emotions of the northern unemployed. Perhaps one needs to be a £50,000-a-year Australian phony to do this satisfactorily. In its final effect the programme might as well have been billed as a party political broadcast on behalf of the Conservative Party, like Sunday's pro- gramme on the Queen's first 30 years, which even went as far as to end with nearly two minutes of 'Land of Hope and Glory'.
Poor Mr Reid. Watching him being beaten at snooker by the affable young Duke as we waited for our camera calls in the Floors billiards room — I could have warned him never to play a man on his own table — I wondered if anyone at all was go- ing to vote Labour, apart from the doomed proletariat of the North, a handful of ex- hibitionists or misfits in the South and, of course, Mr Peter Calvocoressi. Whatever the programme planners may have intend- ed, Mr Reid seemed to bear the Duke no grudge for his 60,000 acres — or his gigan- tic palace with its unexpectedly good pic- tures. At any rate I, who had always been brought up to believe that these Scottish chieftains were eating porridge with their fingers 150 years ago, found the pictures unexpectedly good.
One might have supposed there would be something bogus or patronising in the sight of an admittedly rather nervous young duke playing snooker with a man who, on- ly a few years ago, was the terror of the Clyde. I do not suppose there is a duke in England — at any rate among those who take their jobs seriously — who would not jump at the chance of playing snooker with a notorious working-class radical. I am not, of course, talking about middle-class radicals like Pilger — no life peer in his senses wants to play darts with Pilger, and I am amazed that he managed to worm his way into a charity ball at the Grosvenor House Hotel in order to be rude about it. But it struck me as being unusually magnanimous in a left-wing working-class firebrand to be prepared to play snooker with a duke.
Perhaps it is true, as others have observ- ed, that class resentments in Britain exist only between neighbouring classes. Dukes are so far above the fray as to be immune. Certainly, it is not easy to be jealous of someone who has to have signs all over his house and grounds pointing to Toilets, Car Parks and other recreational facilities for the masses, even if his acres are broad, his wife rather dishy and his pictures unex- pectedly good. Far better live in a house a fifth the size and shoot at the beasts with an air rifle whenever they put their noses through the gate. Even from the socialist point of view, I suppose, there is a certain virtue in staying on as a glorified car-park attendant, rather than selling up and scarpering like the, wretched Lord Brooke or the beleaguered Lord Brownlow.
But the more 1 meet people like Jimmy Reid, the more I discover that class resent- ment is not a large part of the make-up of the more recognisably human British lef- ties. I am not, of course, talking about the psychopaths of the Workers' Revolutionary Party or about the middle-class intellec- tuals, social misfits or sexual incompetents who latch themselves on the workers' movement. I am not even talking about the average Labour voter. But it is my ex- perience of the more thoughtful working- class radical — Eric Heffer is one good ex-
ample; Stan Orme another — that the harder you scratch him the more you discover a soft-hearted, old-fashioned liberal underneath.
After a few hours scratching away at Jimmy Reid I discovered only a cer- tain obsession with power to distinguish him from your average Spectator reader or contributor. This obsession with power is not confined to working-class radicals one sees it in Tony Benn too, and in almost everyone to the left of Sir John Biggs- Davison. There is a feeling that someone, somewhere, is exerting power; whoever it is, it is not them. They feel this is wrong. Although they dress up their feelings in whatever rhetoric seems appropriate usually the rhetoric of democratic accoun- tability — the plain truth is they are deeply convinced they should be exerting it themselves. They feel cheated. Their jealously is directed entirely towards the idea of power, not towards the idea of wealth. The word 'privilege' is used by these people as an unconscious gloss, cover- ing both their own aspirations to power which are not shared by the Labour voter and the Labour voter's aspirations to more money which are largely unshared by them. They are talking about entirely different things.
Over 15 years ago, when I first became political correspondent of the Spectator, the first discovery I made about Tory MPs was that they could not believe — refused to accept — that I had no ambitions whatever to be an MP. So it was with Jim- my Reid, when I disclaimed any wish to ex- ert power over anyone. He said that this proved I already had enormous power.
It is my belief that practically nobody in Britain has any personal power at all — not Sir Arnold Weinstock, nor the Duke of Roxburghe, nor Arthur Scargill, nor the Editor of the Times. Even the power of the Prime Minister is rigidly circumscribed. Perhaps I am exceptionally lucky, but nobody, since I left the army, has tried to exert power over me, and I have certainly never tried to exert power over anyone else, apart from the ordinary give and take of family life. It is one of the more congenial aspects of modern Britain that personal power scarcely exists. It is an illusion, and those who pursue it are suffering, if not from a mental illness like schizophrenia, at any rate from a personality disorder accom- panied by delusions.
All of which may seem rather hard on Jimmy Reid, who struck me as a good man with one or two wrong ideas. But as we parted company, he said something which left a chill. Glasgow, he said, was still a city with a certain amount of life left in it, but Liverpool had died. Its people had lost all hope. We discussed possible reasons for this, then the terrible thought occurred to me that perhaps the people of Liverpool had been reading my articles about them in the Spectator, which sells at least three copies in the Liverpool area to my certain knowledge. I do hope not.
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