Notebook
The Conservative Party seems to be losing its collective nerve, something which hapPens to it from time to time. There are no doubt reasons for this but it is still puzzling that Tory self-confidence should be ebbing. Although nothing in life is certain, least of all in political life, it remains highly unlikely that the Government will win the next election. This view stems from my simpleminded theory of English politics, increasingly strongly held: That every boy and every gal that's born into the world alive is either a little Socialist or else a little Conservative. Either sort has his (or her) form of protest vote. When Conservative voters are fed up with the Tories they vote Liberal; When Labour voters are fed up with Labour they don't vote. Present circumstances are thus highly favourable to the Tories. Labour abstentions, I suspect, will continue at their recent rate: Mr Denis Healey has been punishing the working class as only a Labour Chancellor knows how, and the Memory dies hard. At the same time the Liberals have clearly had it for the foreseeable future. Having bet at 9-1 that the Liberals would win fewer than twenty seats In February 1974 (remember? That was the heady moment when the polls suggested they might win more than fifty) I shall back them in October (or next year) to win fewer than five seats. Even if this forecast proves too bearish there will be, without any doubt, a large number of Liberal votes for the Tories to pick up. It is the Liberal collapse Which holds the key to the general election.
There can scarcely be an Englishman who did not experience a thrill of Schadenfreude O n Saturday night when Mr Ally McLeod came on television wearing the tragic face of defeat. The commentators treated Scotland's defeat as an event standing on the scale Of calamity somewhere between Dunkirk and Singapore. That, in a way, was the reason for one's ill-conditioned pleasure when Peru Won. The whole thing is taken so seriously. There was an unparalleled display of 'media' hysteria, nationalism and hubris. The Scottish team had no serious chance in the World Cup. Even had they beaten Peru, and Iran, they would have gone on to meet Brazil, or Possibly Sweden, and that would have been that. Scotland is not a bad side but, by current international standards, it is not a very good one (nor, of course, is England). The final display of hysteria had to wait until Monday and the nonsense about Willie Johnston. If he was taking drugs for some Other reason than hay fever (and hay fever sufferers will have, instinctively, initially sYrnPathised with him), he deserved better treatment. But even if he had taken half a
gram of coke before the match it was a denial of natural justice for the Scottish FA to ban him forever without a further hearing.
People in Moscow are thronging to an exhibition by the artist Ilya Glazunov. His shows have repeatedly been banned by the Soviet authorities. The last was allowed on condition that one painting was excluded. Besides that, the artist has been condemned by the orthodox Artists' Union. Mr Glasunov is clearly a brave man; but is he a good artist? At his new exhibition the central work — one of 'the most politically daring paintings ever to be shown in public in the Soviet Union' — is called 'The Return of the Prodigal Son'. It shows a young man in blue jeans kneeling before Christ; above them are portraits of Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy. Stylistically, to judge from an inadequate photograph in the paper, it is the sort of thing that gave socialist realism a bad name: Pre-Raphaelite-naturalistic, highly detailed, lifeless. This is the tragedy of totalitarianism: in Soviet Russia, after sixty years, even 'dissident' art is no good. The standards of the commissar's culture are all-pervading and fatally infectious. Mr John Berger, then the nearest thing we had to a Communist intellectual, once wrote a bobk called Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist in the USSR. Neizvestny was politically adventurous, though a 'loyal socialist' (of course), and at
the same time a progressive avant-garde sculptor. Mr Berger's task was to show that the independent artist and his art could flourish in Soviet Russia. This was all right in an abstract way, but he made the mistake of including some illustrations of Neizvestny's work. It was the sort of kitsch that might be seen at the Hampstead open-air exhibition on Sunday. The only appropriate words for it, I thought in a cynical moment, were those of that well-known art critic Nikita Khrushchev: 'We will not give a kopek for your dog's dirt.'
According to most of the actors and actresses I know, the affairs of Equity have been misrepresented in the press. It is by no means the case that, as Mr Bernard Levin has implied, those who favoured the 'branch and delegate' structure were playing into the hands of the Trotskyist cranks. The real issues were the domination of Equity by an unrepresentative and unenergetic Council; that and, of course, the continuing economic problems of the theatre. Equity's problem is not the danger of an ultra-Left takeover. That would anyway, inevitably, lead to the break-up of the union. The problem is the union's internal disunity and its external weakness. A 'union' which contains some people earning scores of thousands per annum, and others on the pitiful minimum of £45 per week, clearly has difficulty in representing a common interest. Equally, with a huge 'unemployment' rate Equity is not well placed to stand up to employers such as the BBC, which is what many members would like to see. I use inverted commas because many of those unemployed do not merit the name: many Equity members are part-timers, or semiprofessionals, resigned to making their living elsewhere than on the stage. The truth is that show business may be a business but it is not an industry, as it is sometimes absurdly called. And acting is not a craft or a profession, least of all one where the usual forces of the free market and of free collective bargaining can sensibly be applied.
The best thing in Time Out is the Lonely Hearts column. 'Handsome hairy healthy hippy seeks laughing leftish lady'; 'What's a nice Jewish girl doing on a page like this? I'm attractive, intelligent, warm, sincere, young-looking 32 . . .'; 'Shy, gay, artistic vegetarian needs caring relationship'. Not all of the advertisers belong to the alternative society (or what is left of it). There is 'Christian lady, warm personality, many interests especially classical music' and a professional man, 'interests include sport, bridge, dinners'. I smile, but I do not sneer. On the contrary, I have no doubt that these people are the paragons that they describe themselves as. As Orwell said, writing on exactly the same subject thirty-five years ago, the fact that they need to advertise in print only demonstrates 'the atrocious loneliness of people living in big towns'.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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