The Sodpal factor
Sir: It is distressing that an entire issue of the Spectator should have been allowed to pass without due tribute to Geoffrey Wheatcroft's brilliant acronym, SODPAL, for the Social Democrat Party Alliance with Liberals (17 October). This surely deserves to be standardised in current English usage for its convenience, and aptness.
Mr Wheatcroft is, I know, far too gentlemanly to have been inspired by any arriere pens& about the little local difficulties within the upper reaches, or nether regions, of the Liberal Party which diverted us all so much a few years ago, and which the great British electorate — in its customary warm-heartedness — has forgotten all about. So I assume he was referring chiefly to the Social Democrat (SOD?) factor.
Indeed, nobody could have sodded their pals more effectively than the Gang of Four, by pulling out of the Labour Party when the going got too rough and abandoning it to Benn and Trottery (what a refreshing contrast is made, on the other hand, by such dissident Tories as the unselfseeking Mr Heath, who continue to retain their dissent so loyally still within the confines of the Conservative Party!) Then, also, has any Minister of Education ever managed to sod up British education more effectively than the delightful Shirley? Roy, we know, sodded off to Brussels — thereby sparing himself the unwholesome taint of the Cowley proletariat on his way to the High Tables of Oxford. David Owen, as I recollect, didn't really do very much in office — except annoy Dr Kissinger and profile for the telly; and one forgets the name of the fourth of the Gang, but it probably has little to do with the matter in hand.
What is much more serious, however, in the light of Croydon, is that — come the next General Election — and much as we may approve of their philosophies (like those of all Utopians), they do threaten to sod us all by opening the door to Bennery, which the SOD Gang has left to flourish unchecked in their own abandoned party.
Alistair Horne St. Antony's College, Oxford
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