If the McCarthy of the shires is going to name names, he should leave me off the list
FRANK JOHNSON
Mr Peter °borne, this magazine's political editor, adversely criticised me in this magazine last week for my not going on the Countryside March. According to Mr Andrew Marr, the BBC's political editor, Mr Oborne is 'a sanctimonious shit'. Nonetheless, Mr Oborne adversely criticised me.
That 'nonetheless' is inspired by the late Donald Wolfit. The story goes that Sir Donald announced from the stage at the end of one of his touring company's performances: 'Next week, my wife and I will be appearing in Hamlet.' The cry came from the gallery: 'She's an old bag.' Sir Donald imperturbably replied: 'Nonetheless, next week my wife and I will be appearing in Hamlet.'
Many Spectator readers will already have learned of Mr Marr's opinion of Mr Oborne. Mr Marr launched it into the world when both were at the Blackpool Labour conference this week, and in the hearing of various politicians and journalists; hence the wider audience which it later commanded. But for anyone who has not heard about it — and before I respond to Mr Oborne's strictures against myself — it should be explained that Mr Oborne had written an article in the Mail on Sunday denouncing the BBC for the absurd vastness of its reporting of Mrs Edwina Currie's reminiscences of Mr John Major. This reportage included a contribution in which Mr Marr reassured the nation that Mr Major, as a result of Mrs Currie's efforts, was now 'a more interesting, rounded and complicated person than we knew already'.
Perhaps 'interesting', `rounded' and 'complicated' will now become euphemisms for 'adulterous'; as in such phrases as 'How many more Tory politicians did old Edwina get rounded with? Their complications seem to be coming out of the woodwork.' But my main purpose here is not to take Mr Oborne's side against the BBC and Mr Marr on the Currie question, which I do, but to defend myself against Mr Oborne on the subject of myself and the Countryside March. In doing so. I would deny being self-serving. I like to think that I speak on behalf of simple urban folk throughout the country. We just want to be left alone to continue our traditional pursuits of going to the opera, dining in South Kensington. and, in the case of some people, becoming rounded and complicated.
It may be remembered that in last week's article Mr Oborne listed people who were not on the march but in his view should have been — because of their Conservative or traditionalist disposition. As far as I could tell, most deserved their inclusion, but not me. All of them, especially the Tory MPs among them, had been at pains to identify themselves with country causes. But among my friends and relations, the only country cause with which I have ever been identified is Glyndebourne.
Are all Tories or traditionalists expected to put on tweeds and Barbours in the face of intimidation from the Countryside Alliance ruralist demagogues such as Mr Oborne? Mr Oborne has become the McCarthy of the shires.
Most have our causes. I could imagine marching in favour of higher state subsidies for the performing arts. But hunting! My attitude to hunting is the same as that to other minority practices. I have no objection to those consenting participants who do it, but I have never had any desire to do it myself. I was born and brought up in London. Proportionate to the time I have spent in the city, I have hardly ever been to the countryside. Suppose I had gone on the march. What if any non-rural friends had spotted me on the television? Worse: what if any non-rural enemies? I would have been accused of being an urbanite aspiring to a world not his own and into which he was not born. This monstrous accusation would have been even more galling because, on the day, what might be called the South Kensington end of the march did engage my interest and amusement.
I walked from the west, to Rotten Row, to see the great crowd assembling. In rustic attire. all Chelsea seemed on the move with me. The rustic attire tended to come from Knightsbridge, but no matter. The march seemed immobile for miles ahead. 'The other end is practically in Fulham,' a passing
acquaintance assured us. My friends and family — country people, some, though also rooted in west London — sought information via their mobiles. 'What? It's not moving at Harrods? . .. But we heard there was some movement at Harvey Nichols.' Alt! Those names — so ancestrally familiar to the ruddy-faced, Hardyesque people in countless villages across the counties: 'M'missus swears by ole Jeb Fayed's foie gras at 'arrods. Hands off our shops, Mr Smilin' Blair!'
Only one aspect of the march worried me. Labour supporters flocked to CND marches in the early 1980s, given new hope by the apparently huge numbers. Even the young Tony Blair, aspiring to be an MP, had to say he supported CND — in order to get a seat. Is the Countryside Alliance the Tories' CND? Was the next Tory prime minister, not yet an MP, lurking on that march in his green wellies? I had not intended to end depressingly.
Spectator readers of a few years' standing tend not just to know that the Schlieffen Plan was Germany's idea for quickly winning the first world war. They also know why it went wrong, and the pros and cons as to who was to blame (not necessarily, as the layman might think, Schlieffen). This is because something that Mr Corral Barnett wrote about it in a Spectator book review occasioned a correspondence almost as long as the war which the plan so momentously failed to shorten. A participant in the correspondence was an 'Alice von Schlieffen', who skilfully defended her ancestor until Mr Stephen Glover's investigative reporting revealed her to be an ex-British officer turned-something-in-the-City, Mark Corby, who now works in history television to where, as readers of that correspondence would know, his talents are not wasted.
But there has now been some drastic revisionism. A retired US army infantry officer, Terence Zuber, has written Inventing the Schlieffen Plan — which OUP will publish and is summarised in History Today. It argues, formidably, that, as an excuse for losing the war, the plan was fabricated by certain German officers after 1918. Their motive was to make it be thought that Germany only lost because the plan was not put into practice properly. We must think again about that long struggle, not just the one in our correspondence columns.
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