I)IARY
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER Iam surprised there has not been more stir about the recent article by John Grigg in the Times, summing up the great debate over Harold Macmillan's role in the illicit handovers of White Russians and Yugo- slays in 1945. Since the article appeared on 23 August there has not been a single letter. And yet, to those of us who have followed the ins and outs of this story over the past ten years, Grigg's thoughtful piece seemed to carry the weight of public argument a significant stage further. De- spite taking judicious issue with Nikolai Tolstoy on various points, Grigg came down firmly behind the view that he has established his central point beyond doubt — that Mr Macmillan played a crucial part in a very dubious affair. Grigg even went so far as to say that 'what was done would have been treated as a war crime if it had been perpetrated by the losing side', and concluded that Lord Stockton is unlikely to sue for libel because 'what he did was wrong, and in his heart he probably now knows all too well that it was wrong'. After such a magisterial judgment it will be hard to obfuscate this aspect of the complicated story again. What remains, as I have argued here before, is to establish just how far the plan to act illegally was already in train before Macmillan arrived at Klagen- furt on 13 May, in the two days which followed the Soviet demand for the White Russians to be handed over. During that time no signal went up the line to indicate that V Corps had been presented with a problem of the first magnitude. Was V Corps already preparing the ground for illicit action even before Mr Macmillan knew about it? The only person who can tell us is still Lord Aldington, who as Toby Low was the key figure on V Corps staff, and who must have read Grigg's article at least with relief that his own name was not mentioned.
The death of Henry Moore removes the very last major figure of the Modern Movement in any of the arts. Like, I am sure, many other people, I found him something of a puzzle. He was obviously a splendid, lovable man, with an immense natural gift. He seemed firmly rooted in the tradition of Western art, so that he could unaffectedly speak of Michelangelo and Rembrandt as colleagues. Unlike so many modern masters, his work seems to be in no way just playing around iconoclastically with disintegrated images, but solidly rooted in the timeless forms of nature. And yet I shall never forget the open air exhibition in Kensington Gardens a few years back, when the lawns around the Serpentine were strewn with his sculp- tures. Against the setting of trees, bushes, clouds and water there was no getting away from the fact that these huge lumps of stone and metal seemed jarring, so that eventually one turned away with a sense of discord. Perhaps the consciousness of 20th- century man is so far separated from the harmonies of nature that the gulf can no longer be bridged by any artist, however great.
The melancholy fiasco of the attempt to add insult to injury to the inhabitants of Birmingham by turning their streets into a racing-car track prompted Richard West last week to another of his eloquent di- atribes against the architectural suicide of that once proud city. I was once making a television film about the way Birmingham had been turned into a concrete nightmare by the idiocies of the Sixties. Having shot a sequence of horror pictures from one side of the city centre we thought we would cross over to a tower block on the other side for some more. The problem was, how do you get across Birmingham city centre, through the maze of underpasses and pedestrian walkways? We asked a dozen or so inhabitants, all of whom seemed as bewildered as we were. Finally we stopped a lady who at once gave us a brilliantly lucid series of instructions (`down the third underpass, through the second tunnel on the left, across the piazza' and so forth). We asked in astonishment, 'How come you `It's got "compromise" right down the middle.' seem to know it so well?' Because I was the architect's secretary,' she replied.
Last Tuesday was the final deadline for the public to object to some of the county boundary changes made in 1974 by what Peter Simple memorably calls 'the in- famous Heatho-Walkerian reforms'. On paper it seemed a fine thing that the 1972 Local Government Act should offer a chance to review these changes after ten years, particularly when it turned out that some of them, such as the creations of Avon and Humberside, were so hugely unpopular. In fact this review, carried out by the Local Government Boundary Com- mission, has proved to be little more than a thoroughly cynical and pointless exercise in bureaucratic self-preservation. Despite the evidence of local polls in such places as Yorkshire and north Somerset that public opinion is still overwhelmingly in favour of restoring the old counties (in Weston- super-Mare a referendum of 23,000 voters showed 98.6 per cent wanting to leave Avon), the Commission has shown that it is not interested in public feeling — only in the evidence it has received from the new local authorities themselves who, surprise, surprise, want to stay in business. It is hard not to conclude that the Government has missed a golden opportunity here to win a little honest democratic popularity (and to take another swipe at Mr Heath at the same time). But perhaps hope beckons from an unexpected quarter, in the ludic- rous new Labour proposals to replace county councils with 'regional authorities'. If the county councils are to be abolished, the counties will no longer have anything but a sentimental identity anyway. There will then be no excuse for not simply resurrecting the old boundaries.
Lady Longford is an estimable figure, but her 80th birthday certainly brought Fleet Street out in an excessive gush of adulation towards the literary talents of her family. Faced with yet another sycophantic tribute to 'Britain's first family of letters', I realised that I had never read any of the books by Lady Longford's daughter Lady Antonia Fraser. Spying a copy of Mary Queen of Scots on a nearby shelf, I pulled it down to see how the much-acclaimed historian's prose style measured up. The first sentence I lit on (p.175) read:
It will be seen in the civil government, as in the ecclesiastical structure, that the possibili- ties of the crown under Queen Mary were extensive, if the potentialities of her royal position were ever converted into actualities.
The temptation to read further was not overwhelming.
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