Political Commentary

Holiday reading

Colin Welch

In his tender last farewell to readers of the Spectator, Ferdinand Mount regretted his failure to provide on that sad occasion 'ripe assessment of the past five years, an olympian appreciation of the state of the nation and the tasks that lie before us, possibly even a message to the nation's youth. It would be the sort of task requiring a knobbly pipe and a pouchful of St Bruno'.

Something of the sort is clearly desirable from his successor — a memorable in- augural, an overture in which the main themes are first deployed. But really!

When Otto Nikolai first saw The Merry Wives of Windsor in Berlin, a friend sug- gested he should turn it into an opera. `Ah,' he mused wistfully, 'but that would take a Mozart.' I feel like that: it would take a Mount. It would take all his wit and balance and perception. Above all it would take what he had and I now lack: an in- timate and profound knowledge of recent years in Westminster. You and I will both miss him sorely.

When I did report Parliament years ago, it was my good fortune to witness the Pro- fumo affair — you remember, when Sir Harold Wilson and all the rest of us were so high-mindedly concerned solely about the security rather than the more prurient aspects of the unfolding drama.

Drawn doubtless by the loftiest curiosity, my old and revered editor, Maurice Green of the Daily Telegraph, visited the Press Gallery. He leant forward over the rail, sub- jecting the members self-righteously assembled below to a minute scrutiny, his lips working appreciatively as if he were in- specting some particularly ripe, active and odoriferous cheese.

`Ye-es, ye-es,' he finally observed with a certain dry relish, `ye-es, I think I see some adulterers down there.'

Well, adulterers there must still be 'down there', as well as others impelled by stranger and more aberrant fancies. But I have been away for some years and I doubt if I could now tell you, as once I thought I could, who they are. Even the hoariest of them may by now have repented and turned their minds, like Malcolm Muggeridge, to higher things.

With former colleagues I have recently maintained a discreet silence, fearful of revealing that I suppose Mr Kinnock to be that fat Harrovian Tory who sits for — is it? — Abingdon; or that I can't precisely remember which of all those Tedbitters and 11!beloveds have been born again as Social Democrats.

Bear with me, I beg you, as I learn and re-learn: perhaps we may learn something together. One tiny cheering omen: Nikolai did compose The Merry Wives after all, not

Mozart to be sure, but not too bad either.

Meanwhile I have done some homework. Among the many changes which have taken place while my back was turned is the emergence of the Social Democrats. Not all of them, mercifully, have marked their defection from Labour with a book. If it were obligatory so to do, one would beg further potential defectors for the love of God to stay where they are. But books by Dr Owen, Mr Rodgers and Mrs Williams* I have manfully perused — and this, mark you, on holiday in Carinthia.

With every page the mountains, the lake, the sun, the waitresses seemed to sparkle more alluringly. The attention wandered ir- resistibly, resting now on beer-bottle labels, now on the regulations governing the entry of drunkards, the lousy and the indecently dressed into the swimming pool. Yet resolutely I struggled on — about 1,000 pages in all, with never a laugh nor a smile save those involuntarily evoked, nothing novel, witty or profound, only the sluglike onward movement of progressive bureaucratic prose, 'enlightened', 'compas-

sionate', cliché infested, leaden, `moderate', abstract, heavy with all the quasi-modish cant, claptrap, errors and half-truths supposedly current in Hamp- stead — or should I say in Hampstead and Heath? For the booming tones and flat sen- timents of the great organist and sailor re- sound frequently amidst the general dron- ing.

Plainly they rather like him. Does he like them? Will they shack up together?

Dr Owen usually quotes people without naming them in the text. Much-needed fun springs from guessing who, without follow- ing the reference number to the end of the book. For instance, who is quoted here: 'We face, therefore, not merely one, but several crises: the crisis of relentless infla- tion and increasing energy costs, the crisis of dwindling energy availability, the crisis of . . .' and so on, crisis after crisis after crisis like the camels of some slow-moving caravan? Yes, of course: but there, I gave the game away.

Dr Owen's book gives the false impres- sion of being written not by a machine but by a whole committee of machines. Its pro- digious length (526 pp.) argues against any single maker no matter how vain or prolix. It has further the frustrating committee habit of calling witnesses (myself of all peo- `Stay out of my fallout shelter.' ple among them) first on one side, then on the other, of solemnly weighing their evidence, of failing to choose between them, of reaching amidst clouds of waffling jargon a conclusion in which nothing is concluded, before ploughing ponderouslY on to the next unsolved problem. Dr Owen on the box usually seems cold, clean, clear, attractive, shallow, slightlY menacing, highly ambitious, like a moun- tain torrent surging irresistibly uphill. yet his book by contrast often suggests an almost Hamlet-like indecision, a Habsburgian hesitancy and taste for con- flicting half-measures. It is as if he had a `hung' mind (in the sense of a 'hung' parlia- ment), equally divided within itself, with nothing to hold the balance or tip it this way or that. To find in him a certain sentimental/0' must seem perverse. Yet Belloc said, 'we call "sentimental" a policy or theory which attempts to reconcile contradictions. The sentimental man will equally abhor crime and its necessary punishment, disorder and an organised police . . . He likes to imagine an impossible world of mutually exclusive things. It makes him comfortable.' And certainly Dr Owen desires mutually exclusive things: decentralisation and cen- tral planning; decentralisation and, 3 statutory incomes policy; decentralisation and a 'sense of interdependence' and a responsibility from (sic) the individual t°, the state'; rapid technological advance and industrial democracy and work-sharing; higher taxes and less resentment among tax- payers; consistency and continuity and prompt cancellation of costly failures; re- spect for individual freedom and jehads against private schools, private health, smo- king and drinking. On p.146 Dr Owen com- mends to our rulers 'intellectual humility and political sensitivity, a willingness to learn from our past mistakes'. By p.218 he is roaring for 'ruthlessness', 'more self- confidence and assertiveness'. And so on.

Sentimentality? Well, if so, the sentimen- tality probably of a man whose taste for power exceeds his grasp of what to do With it, of a man who knows that naked anthl" tion is unattractive and has covered it too hastily, thoughtlessly and indiscriminatelY with a medley of incongruous garments picked up at Fabian jumble sales and the like. For instance, he wears 'participation% I guess, much as a cannibal, unaware of the implications, wears a top hat. Did I find in Dr Owen a message for the nation's youth? Maybe, but rather clearer is Mr Rodgers's message to the nation's senior citizens. I interpret it — Mr Rodgers would say most unfairly — as 'drop dead' or `flY for your lives'.

I hope it will not detract from the urgen- cy of my warning if I postpone considera- tion of this and other Social Democratic threats till next week.

* Respectively Pace the Future (Cape, £12.50), The Politics of Change (Seeker and Warburg, £7.95) and Politics is for People (Penguin £2.50).