Another voice
Crying out for action
Auberon Waugh
No doubt I shall be accused of facetiousness at best, special pleading or unscrupulous opportunism at worst, if I ascribe the painful humiliation of the Conservative candidate at Crosby to Mrs Thatcher's obstinate refusal to grant Mr Peregrine Worsthorne the knighthood he so richly deserves. On the face of it, my critics might have a point. Few of the half-witted middle-class and Catholic voters who flocked under the banner of 'Two-Wafer' Shirley may have heard of him, and even fewer were aware of Mrs Thatcher's cruel refusal to acknowledge the grateful affection in which he is held by the intelligent middle class of this country. No one at all, I imagine, was influenced by my solemn threat that if Mrs Thatcher is thrown out of Downing Street without having honoured this blameless man — as the odious Mr Heath refused to honour P. G. Wodehouse on his 90th birthday — I shall persecute her for the rest of her days, losing no opportunity to belittle her achievement in office, mock her new obscurity and revile her memory after she is dead.
So it may seem absurd to blame the misfortunes of the Conservative candidate at Crosby — whose name we have all mercifully forgotten — on Mrs Thatcher's reckless and vindictive attitude towards the great conservative thinker of our day. To support my claim, I would draw attention to the general mood of the country, and more particularly to the failure of the Conservative Party to inspire simple loyalty among the country's natural conservatives. The direct influence of the press, as I say, is negligible. If every newspaper in the country — and the television companies, although they are not allowed to take sides — had solemnly advised the voters of Crosby to support Mr what-was-his name, the Conservative candidate, I don't suppose it would have made the smallest bit of dif ference to the result. In fact, we did our best. Most newspapers pointed out the flagrant inadequacies of Mrs Williams's platform, her shortcomings as an individual and the various contradictions in her political career. Most of them loyally pointed out how much more humiliating the result had been for Labour. A few went on to suggest that Mrs Thatcher's un popular policies were necessary and in evitable, and that any pretence to the contrary was a cheap confidence trick. But nobody believes what they read in the newspapers, and there can be no doubt that the prevalent mood is for everyone outside the Conservative Party to regard it with dislike and mistrust. Many if not most of us accept that its policies are, broadly speaking, the right ones, at any rate to the extent that they affect other people than ourselves. Yet nobody has any enthusiasm for them, and the greatest regret after Crosby is that they should have helped the hellish Mrs Williams back to Parliament and into a position of importance in SDP councils.
I am not of course suggesting for a moment that the Conservatives should listen to Mr Worsthorne or pay attention to anything he says, only that they should honour him for saying it. Politicians are understandably jealous of their own tiny areas of power and prerogative. There is no earthly reason why they should allow themselves to be influenced by journalists, none of whom has suffered the indignity of shaking the grimy hands of 'workers' in shopping precincts, kissing babies, taking multiple Communions and exposing their wives to the constituency selections board. Nor do journalists, like Conservative power seekers, have to accept the ghastly company of other Conservative power seekers. But a little gesture would work wonders.
Mrs Thatcher's relations with the press — by which I mean the particular field of opinion-formers — have been lamentable. First she decided to suck up, with a peerage for Victor Matthews, the cockney developer who bought Beaverbrook Newspapers, a knighthood for John Junor, grand old editor of the Sunday Express, and another for Larry Lamb, editor of the Sun. Since then Lamb has been sacked; 'Lord' Matthews, spending his shareholders' money at the rate of £10 million a year to support a new Labour newspaper, the worthless Daily Star. Now 'Lord' Matthews announces that Express Newspapers are up for sale again. I had some hard things to say when Mrs Thatcher ennobled this strange man, and don't want to rub her nose in them now. If she persistently ignores my advice, she will simply have to face the consequences. As for Sir John Junor, he is being threatened with a prison sentence (along with two other Fleet Street editors) under the new laws of contempt. In honouring 'Lord' Matthews, Mrs Thatcher may have been unaware how incredibly little control he has over what appears in his newspapers. Very few people in Fleet Street would have minded if she had decided to send 'Lord' Matthews to prison. But editors are different. Perhaps it is not Mrs Thatcher's fault that her Attorney-General, Sir Michael Havers, seems to hve run amok. It may have nothing to do with her policy on press relations, but it looks like a dramatic switch from the carrot to the stick and if the two of them honestly think that taking a stick to the press will help they must be mad. Macmillan was never forgiven for sending a couple of journalists to prison over the Vassal! affair. The pretext of public interest wears very thin when one considers that it is only in Britain that juries are supposed to be so unintelligent as to be influenced by what they read in a newspaper rather than by what they hear in court.
Few London juries, in my experience, show signs of being able to understand a newspaper, let alone be influenced by it. Which brings us to the Government's latest and most stupendous failure in public relations, enshrined in the Scarman Report. I don't know who was responsible for this drivelling document — whether it was Mr Whitelaw or Lord Hailsham who decided that what the country wanted was an inquiry into the behaviour of the police — but nothing could have been better calculated to exacerbate race relations or bring liberal conservatism into disrepute. The country was simply not in a mood to be told that West Indians need to be given priority in housing, employment and education. We have been through all that, and everybody knows it is rubbish.
The only intelligent and articulate voice yet to be raised against the crass assumptions of the Scarman Report was, by coincidence, that of Mr Peregrine Worsthorne in last week's Sunday Telegraph. Everybody else has treated them with respect, not to say reverence. The plain lesson of the Brixton riots was what everybody already knew, that large sections of working-class West Indian youth are not only less assimilable than any other ethnic group but also noticeably stupider, lazier and more prone to criminal activity even than the English working class with whom it was hoped they would assimilate. Where does one go from there? Build more prisons? Pay them to go away? Strengthen the police? Leave them to run their own ghettoes?
The West Indian ethos may well present problems for us all. A neighbour of my brother's in Notting Hill found that burglars had taken his television set, an electric guitar and some amplifiers. Rather than trouble the police, he took his problem to the local black community leader who arranged an interview with the thief. After some discussion, it was agreed that he could have his guitar and amplifiers back, as these were necessary to his livelihood, but not his television set. That was the deal.
Perhaps this concept of West Indian justice might be applied to the Government's response to the Scarman Report. The Sunday Times hailed the report as 'Crying out for action', but the only action indicated, I should have thought, would be to award Peregrine Worsthorne his long-awaited knighthood.
If Mrs Thatcher finds it too undignified to accept my suggestion, I have a compromise. Peregrine has a widowed mother of 82 call ed Lady Norman who has devoted a long life to good works. If she were made a Life Peeress, Peregrine would be an Honourable which is nearly as good and in fact ranks higher than any knighthood except the Garter. Shall we call it a deal?
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