Brighton Notebook
'What will happen, then?' In my experience nothing ever happens'. The exchange was, I think, betWeen Churchill and Balfour. It is the epigraph for all party conferences, especially Labour ones, mostof all this one. After the elaborate build-up (Which way will the party swing? Can Jim hold the Left?) nothing happens: nothing that is going in any serious way to affect our lives one way or the other. Labour conferences always have about them an air of Pretence, of shadow-boxing; or rather, of an elaborate, ossified religious ceremony. There are no more real surprises to be had than in any other liturgy, and the congregation knows it. Mr Callaghan's speech — outstandingly pedestrian even by his standards — received a standing ovation. It would have done if it had been delivered in Latin or Old Slavonic or Church Armenian. Like a curious traveller in some exotic place of worship I enquire civilly of the natives What is going on. Late at night a kindly man from Transport House attempted to explain to me the arcane of compositing, agreeing to remit to the National Executive Committee, and moving the reference back. I even, I think, came to understand why it was SO important that the composite resolution on re-selection of MPs should be debated as it stood, without being moved back and reworded. Having acquired this mystic secret, I shall carry it with me to the grave.
The debates had, though, their good moments. Monday's left me wondering When a Freudian slip is not a Freudian slip. The answer would appear to be, when Hugh (or Hughie, as the Chancellor calls him) Scanlon is speaking. It seemed the perfect parapraxis when he said, 'We need to get inflation — (grunt) — reflation going again.' But three sentences later he repeated the Phrase, without this time correcting himself.
The social round of conference life is in theory more diverting. In practice it has its Own conventions of behaviour and conversation. The ASTMS party was as usual the highlight. And, as usual, that didn't say much for the other entertainments. The drink had run out before the foreign secretary and his gorgeous wife arrived. At least the bar of the Grand Hotel stays open until two in the morning, providing scope for much bad, or at least eccentric, behaviour. The principal ever-uninteresting topic of conversation is how bad and how expensive one's hotel is. I was harrowing the wife of a Cabinet minister with the failings of the Metropole when she dismissed her own hotel with the definitive line, 'Not the place I'd ever choose for a dirty weekend.' More interesting was the question of whether Sir Harold would turn up. One of the conventions of the game is that former Labour prime ministers make a brief turn on the platform to receive the ovation of the throng. But as one of his former colleagues said, somehow I don't think it would work this time.
The saddest conversation I had during the week was with Neil Kinnock, the clever, (and honest) Welsh, Tribunite. MP. 1 was complaining about the feeble standard of writing on the Left — 'serious' journalism as well as pamphleteering. 'You must understand', he said, 'the collapse of standards of literacy and. above all of respect for education within the working-class movement over the last twenty years.' One was used to hearing the point made by my colleague on the following page, but it is rather more alarming to find the admission coming from a loyal adherent of proletarian politics. However, one of Neil's friends is doing his bit to keep the flag of Left bookishness flying: Brian Sedgemore, Mr Benn's PPS, has written a novel which he claims contains ferocious portraits of many of his Parliamentary associates. Publishers should be fighting their way to his agent.
The talk about left-wing journalism was naturally in my mind when we heard Norman Atkinson's poignant — no, let me not be ironic, his ludicrous — speech on behalf of Labour Weekly. His claim that there was a wealth of talent within the Labour movement which could be used by LW was one thing: when he promised a revitalised paper that would 'thrill the movement' he. went beyond the acceptable limits of hyperbole. My own not unfriendly advice would be to wind up Labour Weekly. Good journalists, however strong their political convictions, do not like to seem to serve as party hacks; the phrase 'official publication' has an odious ring. Specialist writers are more likely to serve their cause writing in independent papers of the Left — or for that matter of the Right — than in puff-sheets.
Yet another left-wing Member (I seem to have been seeing no others; perhaps they are quicker at buying their round than social demotrats) was speaking bitterly about The Times's coverage of the Conference. I could not but agree. The Times is a delightful paper, the only one I cannot do without (Crossword, Court page, Levin on bishops, leaders on the new Ice Age). But I would seriously suggest that no other paper in the country, not excluding the Morning Star, is more consistently tendentious in its presentation of the news. Last week The Times headlined, in a type size which it once reserved for the outbreak of war: 'Liberal pact depends on PR pledge in European election' — at the least a pompous way of putting what was in any case a political event of the greatest insignificance. And on Saturday it led: `Mr Callaghan lays down Britain's lasting commitment to the EEC'. The story that followed — 'Callaghan gave the Labour National Executive and Conference its (sic) marching orders' — was at best a misleading version of a complicated if characteristic Labour Party compromise. The Times's political editor regularly writes about those to the left of Mr Callaghan in a tone that can only be compared to his cricketing colleague's on the subject of Kerry Packer. Of course The Times's approach makes sense, or internal consistent logic to the extreme moderate and the Eurofanatic. But so presumably do lzvestia or Neues Deutschland to their devout Marxist readers.
Tuesday's private session of Conference conveniently coincided with a meeting at Brighton racecourse. I found there a politically aware bookmaker who was free with advice about the odds currently on offer for the next general election. The Tories are scarcely enticing at 2-1 on. But since, in his view, Mr Callaghan's promise that there will be no artificially engineered boom before the next election made such a boom a certainty he thought that 6-4 against Labour was at least a good hedging price.
The conference opened on the seventy-third birthday of Graham Greene, to whom our fondest greetings. He is to me the presiding genius of Brighton. Thackeray wrote well about Brighthelmstone; no one but Greene, though, has caught the essence of this shabby, elegant, vulgar, lovely town. Even the dullest conference is tolerable when it is held there. Pity the poor scribblers, then, who have to leave — in the last words of Brighton Rock 'towards the worst horror of all', a week in Blackpool with the Tories.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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