Notebook
While the country celebrated the Jubilee in appropriately British fashion with a form of four-day general strike we left London to walk along the Ridgeway. There were no butterflies yet — after last year's extraodinary butterfly summer — but far more Plovers than usual. For a June holiday there were not many walkers, although there were one or two Land-rovers and even a pair of motorbikes. Those people we did see all seemed to be dressed in a style which would have been exaggerated in the Alps, covered head to toe in fluorescent orange costumes, with huge packs and heavy climbing boots. I wear everyday clothes: if it rains You get wet. The Berkshire Downs in heavy rain is anyway better than London undergoing the Scotch football invasion.
Back in London on Tuesday morning we went to Fleet Street to watch the Royal Procession, which flickered past the end of Fetter Lane like a magic lantern. Among the loyal throng I was pleasantly surprised to see Mr James Fenton of the New Statesman who enjoyed himself so much that he stayed to watch the party return some hours later.
Dr David Owen is getting a deservedly bad Press for his prim and prissy manner. Pace Mr Alan Watkins, he is not so much parsonical as scoutmasterish as he implores the South Africans, or the Labour antiMarketeers, to be purer in political thought, word and deed. He is of course, in a wellestablished tradition. A. J. P. Taylor wrote of the unfortunate Simon that he was unfit ,to be a British foreign secretary, lacking the air of puzzled rectitude which enabled a Grey or a Halifax to lapse from the highest moral standards without anyone comPlaining or even noticing'. No-one will say that Dr Owen shares Simon's disqualification.
In any case the South Africans are their own worst apologists for racialism and for capital Punishment. There was an intriguing detail about last week's execution in Windhoek. The condemned man had been shot during arrest and was paralysed in the legs. He was hanged in a wheelchair. How do you hang a man in a wheelchair? I mean how practically? Is he deposited in a heap on the trapdoor; or does the chair fall free beneath him; or is it attached to him, no doubt adding to the problems of the hangman who has anyway, as I understand it, to make a nice calculation of weight; or does someone stand behind him to pull the chair away at the critical moment? Perhaps one of our own enthusiasts for making an example of terrorists can provide the answer. The David Frost programme about Kerry Packer and his cricket circus struck me as rather rum. Packer put up a very fluent performance but he might have had a more forceful and cogent opposition than was provided by Robin Marian The studio audience seemed to be filled with teenage girls who cheered Packer and booed Marlar. And Frost himself was not a wholly impartial ringmaster. Like anyone who loves cricket I wish Packer ill while hoping that cricketers can improve their dismal financial situation. (It is a long time since we heard an excuse as feeble as the Test and County Board's claim that it was bound by Phase II.) The circus may last a season or two — there are good reasons for thinking that it will be no longer than that — and it may do much harm to the game. In the long run the whole Packer episode will have little to do with the real question hanging over • cricket and particularly English county cricket. Sooner or later we are bound to have a championship with fewer players, on a 'semi-pro' basis, playing for fewer clubs.
Mr Peter Jay's reported decision to refuse the knighthood which normally goes with a top ambassadorship has been applauded by progressive opinion (including the editor of Private Eye). It seems to me the ,purest pharisaisism. The argument is that knighthoods — honours in general — are outmoded, ostentatious, irrelevant trappings. Of course, but so are ambassadors. There is little to be said for public men who scorn the dressings of office while, less amiably, relishing the power. One can respect some people who refuse honours — Stanley Morison, who is said to have thrice declined a knighthood, Houseman who refused the OM because 'such a thing would be most hateful to me', or just recently Francis Bacon who has refused the Companion of Honour (perhaps he remembered that the last recipient was the Right Honourable Lord Glenamara of Glenridding). They are all private men, all in their different ways truly despising Vanity Fair. Our Washington ambassador, like the Attorney General, stands in the middle Of the Fair and should act as though he knew it.
Even Michael Tippet's warmest admirers must have felt that he made a mistake in The Knot Garden when the soprano sings 'Die liebe Farbe', one of the lovliest songs ever written: the quotation rather showed up the surrounding music. In the same way it was surely a mistake for the Guardian to print a Jubilee double spread of selections from twenty-five years ago. One had forgotten what a good newspaper the Manchester Guardian once was. The two saddest newspapers in the British Isles are the Guardian and the Irish Times, both nowadays odiously trendy. They once had the two most clearly defined newspaper audiences: liberal Lancashire and the Protestant Irish upper-middle classes; two societies which have vanished without trace.
There is good news from Oxford: Anthony Quinton is to be the new President of Trinity. It is said that he would have been head of his own college, New College, but for a ruffling of feathers three or four years ago. Jilly Cooper descended upon Oxford and wrote a frivolous, slightly silly piece for the Sunday Times, quoting several of the more interesting dons. So angry, or envious, were the unquoted that formal recantations were sought and obtained; and the memory lingered on until the time came to elect a new Warden. Knowing the socially febrile atmosphere of Oxford and the morbid touchiness of dons, I can just believe the story. I have no doubt that Tony Quinton and Trinity will enjoy one another; and I hope he doesn't find the social duties of Head of House too tiresome: yeais ago I was much struck by his saying that the only rational purpose of parties was to facilitate the exchange of sexual partners, and that once his had become undesirable or unnecessary party-going became a chore.
One of the most persistent myths among non-racing people, not necessarily although often of a pink tinge, is that the Morning Star has a particularly good racing tipster. It is true that Cayton, as he is called, has a reasonable record during the steeplechasing season (which I cannot explain in dialectical-materialist terms); but on the Flat he is in a calamitous class of his own. He is lying comfortably at the bottom of the SportingLife's naps table,based, that is,on a single daily selection. And he got there with what must surely be a record: a run of forty-seven losing naps. To go for eight weeks, picking a horse a day, without finding one winner, is a feat which deserves a special salute.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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