Another voice

Reflections on Enoch

Auberon Waugh The earth has existed for about 4700 million Years. Our species has inhabited it for less than a ten-thousandth part of that time_ Possibly 400,000 years. Human civilisation dates back about seven thousand years, Christianity two thousand and democracy two hundred (at any rate since the Athenians found it didn't work even with women and slaves disenfranchised). In Western journalistic circles it is conventional to regard as Slightly unhinged those who prophesy the disappearance of democracy, the collapse of civilisation as we know it or the end of human life on this planet. Reasons offered for these unhappy developments are, it is true, seldom very closely related to each other—at one moment it will be a nuclear holocaust ; then black men who crawl out of rivers running with blood and gobble us up: the contents of lavatories will suddenly jump up in our faces, or the effect of American women using under-arm deodorant will be that we all cook slowly, like steak in a microwave grill. Obviously, they can't alt be right about the reasons but I should have thought that from a balance of statistical likelihoods, some of them must be right on timing.

The greatest single absurdity of Marx is his view of history as a continuing process, a single inexorable wave. In fact, it is a number of fits and starts, all of very short duration, culminating in the modern age of Mass production technology which any fool can see is destined to be particularly shortlived. But we continue to treat prophets of iMPending doom as mentally disturbed for two reasons. The first is the familiar, self-' Protective instinct whereby we tend to shun any awareness of our own' mortality, of the Precariousness of human survival from day to day, of impermanence, discontinuity, change and decay in all around. , The second reason is that many mentally uisturbed people, or people with unpleasant bees in their bonnets do, in fact, make a habit of prophesying doom—whether to dl attention to themselves (which is why, am convinced, a large number of people, esPecially women, go mad), or to promote their own idiotic causes. So I have always turned my back on those who impugn Mr Powell's sanity simply because he appears as a prophet of doom. In °Ile of Muriel Spark's earliest and best novels, Metnento Mori, a mysterious voice on the telephone speaks to the elderly characters one by one with the simple message:

emember You Must Die.' They decide ulat a Madman is at work, an anarchist, they call in the police and a private detective, as if the statement of this obvious truth constituted a threat to the peace. Something of the

same reaction may be seen in a letter from six lady journalists, describing themselves as 'Women in Media' which appeared in The Times last week, complaining about the amount of publicity given to Mr Powell.

As soon as tread that peevish, bossy letter from Women in Media ( Mary Stott and Nikki Doyle were the first two signatories. Gillian Tindall was not among them, but I thought of her as I read it) I decided that the time had come to write a Tribute to Enoch.

Although I must admit to a preference for the company of those from a similar background to my own, I don't share his ob session about blacks. If I had any say in the matter, as I monotonously reiterate to suitors who come to my door, I would prefer my daughters to marry middle-class Catholic black men than working-class English atheists, all other things being equal.

Sometimes, Enoch's terror of the blacks seems to go beyond the bounds of rational discussion, but all good men have these

foibles. Bernard Levin, after all, has his regrettable passion for Wagner. The great

Anthony Burgess has an absurd reverence for poor James Joyce which leads him to no end of silliness. Kingsley Amis (father of the gifted Martin) is said 'to have a 'thing' about jazz—far more destructive of social harmony, I would have thought, than improper opinions about race.

But then I find Enoch beginning to tangle in my own set of prejudices. At the time of his dismissal by Mr Heath from the Shadow Cabinet 1, in common with all other perceptive and independent political com mentators of the time (there must have been at least one other), deplored this vain, petulant, ineffective gesture by a vain, petu

lant, ineffective man, and felt mildly sick at the thought of Heath and Whitelaw holding hands in the°PPosition Leader's apartment,

their eyes swimming with tears as they repeated, 'It is a far, far better thing that I do now But then I happened to look out of the windows of the Palace of Westminster (where I then worked) and saw a procession of dockers go past. As they marched, they shouted in unison 'Oof! Oof! Oof! Oof or words to that effect. I should admit at this point that dockers have much the same effect on me as blacks do on Enoch. By any standards, however, it was not a pretty sight, and when interpreters present told me they were in fact shouting 'Enoch in, Heath out,' I found myself growing thoughtful.

Which brings me to his Granada lecture, reproduced in last week's Spectator under

the heading 'The humbug of "compassion":

At first glance, it bore an amazing resemblance to an article I wrote in the Spectator

almost exactly ten years ago under the heading 'The Compassion Industry*—one of the first pieces I wrote here, as a matter of fact, some months before joining as political correspondent. Or it may have been called Waugh on Want. It is hard to keep track of so many thousands of articles churned out over the years but jolly encouraging, nevertheless, to find one that has been taken to heart.

Close scrutiny reveals a significant difference between my attitude and that of Mr Powell. Our prophet Enoch has great faith in Democracy. While admitting that it inevitably produces overcrowding in prisons and shabby treatment of the mentally ill (because neither prisoners nor lunatics have much voting power) he thinks this absolutely right, and democratic politicians absolutely right to ignore the claims of such people.

In fact, of course, prisoners and lunatics are the least significant of democracy's casualties. In Switzerland (where universal suffrage is a very recent development indeed) there was a referendum last month on whether to cut the working week to forty hours. It was defeated by a ratio of four to one. Can anybody see such a referendum being held in Britain ? If held, I dare say it would produce the same result, but this is not my point. The question, as put by our devilishly clever rival politicians, hungry for any advantage, would be something along these lines: shall we work fewer hours and have even more money, or shall we have more money and work even fewer hours ? This is what democracy has reduced politics to in Britain and this is why I say that the only sane attitude for an intelligent Englishman to take towards the government of this country is to laugh whenever it falls flat on its face. This is also the system which Enoch wants to preside over. If, as l say, you should always examine the motives rather than the matter of political debate, then one begins to suspect that Enoch's stand on immigration and related matters is no personal eccentricity at all, but a calcu • lated, crab-like move towards the soiled throne of James Callaghan, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. If lam right—and I am afraid I am—then there need be no more discussion of the matter and he can be put in the same dustbin as Michael Foot, Quintin Hogg, Denis Healey, Wedgwood Benn and all the rest of them.