SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
NIGEL LAWSON
It's impossible not to feel deeply sorry for Vice- President Humphrey, one of the most liberal, articulate and, above all, likeable figures in world politics today. All Vice-Presidents have an un- attractive role to play, since the chief qualifica- tion for the job is the candidate's willingness to submerge his personality and image totally in those of the President. In personal terms this may not be too difficult: Humphrey and John- son have long been close political allies. But what really hurts is that a man whose whole political life has been one great moral crusade now finds American politics dominated by an issue—Vietnam—in which nearly all the other liberal moral crusaders are on the other side. Just to turn the knife in the wound still further, the ex-Humphreyites (and ex-Stevensonians) are increasingly acknowledging the leadership of the most calculating and unemotional member of Humphrey's long-time enemies, the Kennedy family. Increasingly, Hubert Humphrey seems to see himself as a latter-day Harry Truman : the gutsy little man of the people, vilified by every- one when in office but handsomely vindicated in the fullness of time. And, as with Truman, it looks as if his future holds no middle course: either he will succeed to the Presidency of the United States with the death in office of the present incumbent, or else he will drift away into an insignficant footnote, a forgotten failure.
Ombudslaw
It's easy to be churlish about the newly created Parliamentary Commissioner's office, whose powers are pretty severely circumscribed under the Act. But quite apart from this a basic need has not been met; perhaps it hasn't been sufficiently identified. When a civil ser- vant makes a decision of an executive nature (behind the well-known fiction 'The Secretary of State directs me to say that he regrets . . .1), he is exercising a discretion which the English judiciary has been trained from time im- memorial not to disturb unless Parliament says so in clear terms. The Ombudsman has a limited power to investigate injustice. But what's missing in the contemporary scene is a power- ful tribunal continuously concerned with ad- ministrative decisions and giving judgments
which brick by brick rise up to become a massive structure of administrative law.
A sensible way of meeting this need would, I believe, be to set up a standing committee in the House of Lords, composed of a civil ser- vant peer, a number of Law Lords and others, who would in effect be fulfilling the functions of the conseil d'etat in France, thus at a blow revitalising the Upper Chamber and filling a serious lacuna in the somewhat weak apparatus at present available to invigilate the Executive.
Five farthings
Trollope's Duke of Omnium was, unhappily, never permitted to see 'his great scheme of a five-farthinged penny and a ten-pennied shilling' crowned with success; but after a lapse of a hundred years it seems as if posthumous vic- tory is at last within his grasp. For the essence of the Duke's driving passion was to divide the pound into a thousand parts. (farthings)— the recommendation also of the original select committee on decimal coinage of 1853. And now the present Government, battered by the massive opposition to its original plan to divide the pound into a hundred parts, looks as if it may beat a judicious and wise retreat to the Omnium plan.
The mystery is why this wasn't done right at the start. The Treasury rejected it simply because the Halsbury Committee had done so; but the Halsbury Committee's reasons (para- graph 35 of the report) beggar belief. The crucial passage reads: 'Under the most commonly suggested three- place system to replace sterling [sic], the £-mil system, 3s 9d would be expressed as 187 mils and 18s I ld as 946 mils. It would not be easy for people to do mental arithmetic with such sums. Three-place systems fail, therefore, be- cause they are not sufficiently simple. In- cidentally, the very few in use in the world occur in the Middle East and North Africa: Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Libya, Iraq, Tunisia and Cyprus.'
In other words, we are being asked to believe, first, that mental arithmetic would be incomparably easier if only 3s 9d were 18.7 cents and 18s Ild were 94.6 cents; and, second, that you can't expect the benighted British to grasp a system peculiar to the sophisticated Sudanese, Libyans, et al. Of course, the real reason why these clever Afro-Asians divide by a thousand is simply that they have a `heavy' major currency unit. An appendix to the Halsbury report (whose significance apparently escaped its signatories) shows that every single country that divides by a hundred has a main currency unit worth less than 10s, and that every country whose main unit is worth more than 15s divides by either 240 or 1,000. Since the Chancellor is determined to keep the pound, to divide it merely by one hundred would, in the words of the White Paper, be 'against the economic logic of history,' giving us the most expensive (and inflationary) sub-unit in the world. By contrast, the Trollopian system would allow us to keep both the id and the Id (approximately) and the 6d (exactly)—all of which disappear in the White Paper proposals. It would even enable me to explain to my children the deep significance of the rubric, `I owe you five farthings.'
Financial Observer
It is sad news indeed that the Statist is to close down at the end of this month. Since its resusci- tation five years ago under the aegis of Mr Cecil King and the editorial guidance of Mr Paul Bareau it has been a completely new weekly paper in all but name—and a very good one, too; but not, alas, a profitable one. But I suspect it would be wrong to see the move simply as Mr King cutting his losses. Indirectly, the Financial Times is involved as well. For the Statist's offices are to be used by the new paper to be created by the merger of Mr King's Stock Exchange Gazette and the F.T.'s Investor's Chronicle— which Mr King is to print. Indeed, one way and another the Financial Times seems to be getting out of magazine printing altogether.
Which I find rather interesting, since shrewd newspaper proprietors normally like to keep their printing capacity as busy as possible. What can it mean? Well, before the Observer signed its contract to be printed by The Times in the new Printing House Square building it entered into abortive negotiations to be printed by the Financial Times. Now, of course, since the take- over, the Observer finds itself in effect printed by its deadly rival, the Sunday Times, and bitterly resents this unhappy twist of fate. What more natural, then, that it should resume talks with the Financial Times—but this time not merely with a view to its being printed at the latter's pink palace, but even perhaps leading to a still more intimate association between the Sunday and the daily newspaper?
Entente cordiale
As Mr Wilson gets ready to take the awful plunge and actually apply for membership of the Common Market, General de Gaulle has fired a telling warning shot across his bows by naming France's first nuclear-missile sub- marine, launched last week, the 'Redoutable.- The significance of this is, of course, that it was from the rigging of the original 'Redout- able' that a French sailor with his musket shot our national hero Nelson dead at Trafalgar. This cannot be allowed to go unanswered. My suggestion for the name of Britain's next Polaris submarine: 'HMS St Helena.' Mrs Healey, please note.
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