A Spectator's Notebook

The Watergate affair makes our own domestic political problems look very tame. There has been a good deal of smugness going around, to the effect that this sort of thing couldn't happen here and that if it did the Prime Minister whether ' guilty ' • or not would voluntarily resign. I am not so sure, on either count. The actual corruption in the original ' bugging ' was not excessive. Since then, the attempts to cover up have been corrupt enough: but they have also been very very inefficient indeed. A good cover-up operation is one which is never known about. I have no doubt at all that were a similar scandal to threaten, say, the entire structure of the Cabinet Office, the Tories' Central Office (or Labour's Transport House) and the Prime Minister and his closest aides, the instinct pf the British system to clam. up would be most powerful. The instinct of the American system is to talk, to ' come clean ' (which usually means to come dirty), to spill the beans. However, if the scandal could not be hidden, then certainly — but only then — would the question of the Prime Minister's resignation arise. He might well not take the crucial decision himself. It would not rest with him alone, or even, possibly, at all.

There are always people who, in a crisis, are able to tell the Prime Minister that he must go. The way this decision is reached, and then conveyed, is often extremely obscure, which makes people say that 'the es tablishment' is at work. But there is nothing obscure about the constitutional and political realities contained and expressed and em ployed in such a situation. The Prime Minis ter needs to command a majority in the Commons. There are people who can deny him that majority, or who can threaten to deny him it; and these are the people who can tell any Prime Minister that it is his duty to re sign. The United States' eighteenth-century constitution, a fine piece of whiggery, abhorrs the idea of a President responsible to Congress. Who can call President Nixon to order? Who can tell him to resign? He cannot even offer himself again for re-election.

Above suspicion?

To make matters worse, it so happens that there is really no one in the United States at present who is sufficiently eminent and above suspicion, that he could be entrusted with an inquiry into the Watergate affair and that his eventual findings would be acceptable to one and all. There are no living ex-Presidents. Members of the Supreme Court will not dip their toes in murky waters such as these, not since the unhappy experience of Chief Justice Warren's commission to investigate President Kennedy's assassination. I was chatting along these lines with Louis Claiborne, the former deputy Solicitor-General of the United States (who is very thankful that he is not in Washington and particularly not at the Justice Department during these very nasty days); and although he was able to tease me for my previous support of Nixon, he was none too corn-. fortable when the question arose of who was fit to head a tribunal of inquiry. He writes on the Watergate affair with as much optimism as he can summon, on page 552 of this issue. I see that Senator Charles Percy has suggested that President Nixon should take the case out of the hands of the Justice Department and entrust it to a special prosecutor " of impeccable integrity." Such a man, to command public confidence, would also have to be him,

self a public figure. Who is there? Averell Harriman? Too old. David Bruce? Can't hire a car. We could always lend the United States the Lord Chief Justice, say, or Lord Denning (who would love the job), or even the Lord Chancellor.

Close to tears

I stayed up on Monday night until the early hours of Tuesday morning to hear the Nixon broadcast. It embarrassed me. I shudder to think what it did to the American colony in London. Before the broadcast there was an interesting film which contained excerpts from old interviews with five post-war presidents. I found Eisenhower the most impressive, and Truman easily the next best; Johnson was perhaps just to be preferred to Kennedy; and Nixon — from an earlier broadcast — the worst. Television appearances are not everything. I still thought that Nixon, when he came on 'live,' would show a capacity to rise to the occasion. I suppose the occasion was dirty and deep, for instead of rising to it he fell into it. He had a very hang-dog look, and it would not have surprised me had he wiped away a tear. I gather that afterwards he was near to tears. I had great hopes of Nixon's presidency. His foreign policy sounded about right. It was a very miserable business, watching him on television at two o'clock on Tuesday morning.

Mercurius intercepted

Although we pride ourselves in 99 Gower Street upon our own small intelligence service, which has become adept over the years in intercepting the communications of the old gent. from Turl St., styling himself Mercurius Oxoniensis, to his brother academick in London,'we have not been so successful in laying our hands on the rest of his correspondence. However, by a stratagem which I am not free to reveal, last week a copy of his latest letter to his brother in California came our way. It contains a most excellent description of the Great Fire at Oxford and of how the Warden of All Souls lost his lodgings. 1 grieve for Warden Sparrow who once, in those lodgings, when I was bitterly complaining that I was being forced to drink champagne while he was drinking whisky or brandy, told a servant to fetch me what I wanted, and only afterwards admitted that what 1 had taken to be whisky and soda in his hand was merely ginger ale.

Suckers

Ever since' Skinflint' first drew my attention to the dangers of eating sugar, sweets, confections and processed bread, I have been attempting to cut down. We cannot ban people from eating these things, any more than we can ban them from smoking or drinking; but the arguments in favour of heavily taxing such goods are extremely strong. Refined carbohydrates may really be the great poison .of all time. If so, it will be the poison we brainwash ourselves to love to eat. Even if the refined carbohydrates do not turn out to be a_ prime cause of cancer and of major organic disease, there is no doubt that sugar-based sweets damage and destroy children's teeth. The latest lunacy dreamed up by the advertising world — in this case by a promotional outfit called the World Development Move-. merit — is to persuade children to suck sugarcane on the ground that it will do good for the depressed sugar-cane industries of the Commonwealth. Full marks for Professor John Yudkin: "Encouraging children to eat sugar is criminal. This campaign is like urging people to take opium because it helps the ' poor farmers of Asia who grow it."

Blob boob

The idea of a device which will ' warn ' television viewers that a particular programrne contains scenes of explicit violence and sexual antics is a daft one, which will please only the growing sub-porn industry. The Independent Broadcasting Authority is to experiment with a system of showing a white blob in a corner of the screen to indicate that it is of an X-certificate nature. Lord Aylestone, the chairman of the IBA, says: " I have personal reservations about the scheme. It would be a pity if the symbol became an attraction to watch a programme rather than acting as a warning." Obviously it would act both as warning and as attraction; the trouble is that it would attract those most likely to be harmed, and warn off those least likely to suffer damage.

Sir Lew Grade, boss of ATV, comments: "We as a company, said we would not mind being the guinea-pig." I dare say not.

Station management

For years I have been travelling in and out Of Liverpool Street station. I congratulate the station manager on two aspects of the station's management. It is being given a welcome coat of paint. Its fishy smell has all but disappeared. That is the extent of my congratulations. Trains to my part of the world sometimes leave from one side of the station, sometimes from the other. They likewise arrive irregularly. I accept that because of the original design of the station, this is unavoidable. But there ought to be an indicator in between the two halves of the station, telling people which side their train is at. Frequently I walk round to one side, only to discover that I must walk all the way round to the other side. This can involve missing trains, which is annoying. Also annoying is the taxi system, or, rather, the taxi non-system. Both halves of the station have their taxi-ranks. Neither rank has an orderly queueing system. People will

queue for taxis sensibly and quietly, provided it is made quite clear to them and to the taxi drivers where the queue is, which is its head and so forth. Many things about Liverpool Street station are, no doubt, outside the re sponsibility of the station manager. But Sure: Iv he could arrange for two orderly tag' queues. After all, he manages to see the Queen off to Sandringham without difficulty.

Tin-pot dictator

The wretched metrication people have latelY, been bleating about the general reluctance 01

public and of government to come to teirs with the new measurements. Everybody is out of step but the metrication people. The

present Government at last is recognising that people do not like these continental measurements, which are not even efficient. They also know perfectly well that just as the decimalisation of our currency (to which veil many people, including myself, have not yet accustomed themselves) provided an opportunity for us to be swindled, so, too, will metrication of weights and measures. When I am told what the temperature .ter morrow will be in centigrade, the information is useless to me. Some unknown man in Ang" ha television has had the gross impertinence to decree that weather forecasts will now O.' clude fahrenheit and be given only in centigrade. This man's behaviour angers me (and, thousands more); and also I despise him, 1°' he thinks he has been clever and progressiv and instead he has been another little tin-P0