SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

ANTHONY KING

My wife and I believe we own the only dog in East Anglia named after Hubert Hum- phrey. He was named Hubert because, like his namesake, he is loyal, affectionate and likes the sound of his own voice. One weekend a Member of Parliament came to stay the /tight, bringing with him his wife and three small daughters. Hubert, who is not used to the company of small children, was very excited. He rushed about. He stood on his hind legs. Finally he trotted up to the MP and, before anyone could stop him, peed on his leg. Our guest surveyed his trouser leg with some dismay, but said only, 'So that's what he thinks of politicians'.

Appalling frankness

Most people seem to think of politicians as pompous and self-important. I have found them, in America as well as here, astonishingly prone to self-depreciation. It is partly, I suppose, that it is hard to be too conceited if your job depends on the good opinion of thousands of people, almost all of them strangers, most of them knowing less about your job than you do. (I once met a California state senator who had six million constituents.) Also politicians are trying so much of the time to control events that are intrinsically uncontrollable. The Tory slide of the last few weeks, for instance. Can any Labour politician honestly claim credit for it? Does any Conservative really feel that his own party (or its leader) is to blame? It is like watching the tide come in, or the flight of birds.

But what must really induce self-irony in the politician, especially during elections, is his knowledge that a great deal of the time he is talking nonsense. I would guess there are two reasons for this (neither of which is that politicians are stupid or dishonest: rather the contrary). The first is that there are certain motives in politics—notably am- bition and the desire for partisan ad- vantage—which animate almost all politicians but which none can publicly admit to.

Of course the Prime Minister was being less than candid when he claimed the other night that the opinion polls hadn't influenced his choice of the election date. But imagine the astonishment if he had actually blurted out the truth: 'Yes, Mr Scott, the polls were crucial. I was afraid to have an election before because I was sure we'd lose. Now that the polls have come Our way, I'm going to have it straight away since anything could happen over the summer. My main preoc- cupation, as you know, Mr Scott, is to re- main Prime Minister.' No politician, who- ever he was, could conceivably talk in this fashion. .

Righteousness

The second reason is of course that, if politicians were open about their motives or did admit their mistakes, their opponents, filled with ersatz righteousness, would crucify them. I sometimes fondly wish politi- cians could agree among themselves to give up facile point-scoring and admit publicly that a lot of the world's problems can only be nibbled at around the edges. The trouble is that all politicians are truly righteous much of the time and a few of them all of the time. It would take only a few of the perpetually righteous to undermine the whole arrangement.

In a perverse way, one of the things I find attractive about British politicians—as dis- tinct from (say) American or German—is how physically unprepossessing so many of them are. A few years ago at a party con- ference E found myself standing at the foot of a staircase waiting to catch a glimpse of the Cabinet as they emerged from an important meeting.

Eventually they came down the stairs in twos and threes. They made no particular impression on me. but the American, who had never seen the British political elite en masse before, was amazed. 'They look,' he said, 'like rather seedy carpet salesmen.' And sure enough. looking at them with his eyes, one noticed for the first time the baggy trousers and jackets, the bad posture, the red faces, the epaulettes of dandruff. It made me rather proud to think that we in Britain choose our political leaders on other, better grounds than good looks.

Hidden treasure

This is a time of year when I particularly en- joy being a university teacher, also when I'm particularly happy to be at Essex rather than one of the ancients. The reason certainly has nothing to do with marking exams. It is a job loathe and, although Essex weights three- hour examinations less heavily than most places, we still have hundreds of them. No, the reason is that it's in the late spring that final-year students submit their research pro- jects—pieces of work, that is, which they have done on their own largely without supervision.

These projects are probably the best sheep-from-goats separator ever invented. They tax, not a student's memory or his ability to write fast, but his initiative, imagination and (as much as anything) his ability to do sustained work on his own. And the gratifying thing is how many of our students turn out to be sheep. The other day I was marking the project of a student I had never heard of: he has never been in one of my classes and I don't know him personally. But there the evidence was on paper: he was absolutely first-class, someone I would recommend without hesitation for graduate work or to an employer looking for certain qualities of intellect. It is this sort of thing that makes it all worthwhile.

Signing off

I am intrigued by the way people sign their letters to the Times. I may be wrong. but I sense that people begin confidently enough with `Sir,—' but then don't know how to finish. Twenty-nine letters were printed in the Times last Friday and Saturday and, being of a quantitative turn of mind. I analysed their subscriptions (is that the right word?). There were fourteen 'Yours faithfully's'. seven 'Yours. &c.'s and, to my astonishment, three 'Yours truly's'. I had always assumed 'Yours truly' to be an Americanism which was unknown in these islands.

None of them, however, could compare with the way the father of a friend of mine always concluded his letters to government officials: 'You are, Sir, my most humble and obedient servant.'