A Spectator's Notebook I have always believed that Portugal needed

a iGleneral de Gaulle to extricate herself from her African colonies. It seems likely that she as found one in General de Spinola. Of course, the General has not started his rule by arl,Lnouncing that he intends to withdraw from i`u}, gola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissoa. For e most part, generals do not talk like that. keneral de Gaulle came to power in a coup to ,eeP Algeria for France. It is still not 2eneraii Y recognised that he was the most , decoloniser of all time. Within two years enihis coming into power sixteen French sa-p43nies in Africa became independent on the , on-e day in 1960. Within four years he took tijjand beat his own army officers, and eria became independent. I have always Ten surprised that the members of the Mon41,

'ittb who stuck pins into the effigies of

Macleod and Harold Macmillan, should p've chosen the wrong target for their wrath. kerhaPs, however, they would have found it s't Possible to convince even their rather werange membership that General de Gaulle

a dangerous left-winger.

tah!le only thing to be said in favour of mili.Y rulers is that they generally know the Nita rY facts of life. Out of a total population 200"oli,e million, Portugal has an army of over 0 men, of whom 140,000 are waging a bud in Africa which cannot be won. Of her Forget 43 per cent is spent on the Armed t431128Her military commitment to maintar ;"8 an army of this size is proportionately Iiirger than that of the United States in iyos.„.31, am at the very peak of the fighting. Nor any democracy tolerate a budget of Thlen almost a half was military expenditure. t eve tragedy is that Eduardo Modlane, the fri`standing leader of Frelimo and a personal

end

tufa, ot mine, is dead, murdered by the PorEMese Whit • cru,,,-e rule in South Africa is starting to tule and in the most exposed countries, to Air east and west of the Republic of South bieLea. If Angola and Mozambique become re44. governed then the future of the Smith

seems bleak indeed.

biquo be denied access,to any port in MozamcitteRel.,°r Angola would be a severe blow. The Afri;sell, which then arises is whether South C`Will continue to help the illegal regime to euesia by sending police and army units desia, and whether indeed she will 1 breather own ports to be used for sanctions Srnith g. It is known that Mr Vorster urged pro nc„ to accept the Tiger and Fearless goli„:'als put forward by the last Labour kaic`nnient in 1966 and 1968 respectively. cowl", White Rhodesians assume that Rhodesia ; At .1u be incorporated into a larger South tica to The proportion of whites to blacks (1 , tionL) would offer no attraction to the Na: 4 blapi government in South Africa. Nor need he government in Rhodesia necessarily Nsiltliore alarming to Mr Vorster than the , 1.esottlhg black governments of Botswana, coin,"° and Swaziland. The most likely outthe overthrow of colonialism in f raciagi.Mbique and Angola and of white 4flienis,In in Rhodesia would be for South to withdraw south of the Limpopo 3 the and become a fortress state, strong at Niient but in the long term extremely erabi 111 e. Lipn:, Military coup in Portugal has an addigumgY beneficial by-product. It is often ar-4 by 1.

Liose who should know better that military coups are always happening in Africa because Africans do not know how to govern themselves. Greece and Portugal have shown that Europe too has its problems. To those who say that Africans cannot work a democratic form of government I would reply as follows. In 1939 when I was at my prep school a Nazi state existed in Germany, Italy was Fascist, Spain was Falangist. Dictatorships existed in Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Greece. The average length of a French government was six months and two world-wide wars started in Europe in this century. The two major war crimes were, in my view, the extermination of six million Jews and the dropping of two atom bombs on Japan with the knowledge and consent of our government. No act of violence in Africa has approached the horror of these events.

Just like us

I find myself somewhat puzzled when people whom I know entertain officially the Queen, royalty, Mrs Harold Wilson, Lady DouglasHome or other prominent women. "I was absolutely astounded," I am told, "she was so natural. She drank a cup of tea and asked for another. She said that the sponge cake was delicious and remarked on the beautiful summer we were having. She spoke to everybody she was introduced to. She blew her nose and even said goodbye. It was absolutely staggering, she was just like you or me."

Surely, however, it would have been much more astounding if the Queen or Princess Margaret (well, perhaps not Princess Margaret) had dashed her tea cup onto the floor breaking it into a thousand pieces; or if she had said that the sponge cake was like concrete, announced that she was emigrating because of our vile climate, and stalked out forbiddingly muttering that if she came again she would have to be dragged in as a corpse.

I can understand that people who found that the Queen was "so natural" being surprised fifty years ago. But in 1974 with the amount of television coverage that the royal family attracts, including that excellent film, The Royal Family, I confess that such

• remarks baffle me. It is surely because the members of the Royal family are "so natural, just like you and me" or at least behave as though they are, that the monarchy, a philosophical absurdity, is a highly popular institution and long may it remain so.

Natural and unnatural

When I obtained a second reading for the Sexual Offences Bill (1966) I received a sizeable post bag. The Bill, which is now law, made male homosexual acts committed in private by consenting adults no longer a crime. About 90 per cent of the several thousand who wrote to me, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, were in favour of the reform. Among the 10 per cent who were against the measure, about half sent anonymous and abusive letters, and in one instance I received through the post several pieces of used lavatory paper. The other half wrote polite signed letters expressing the belief that homosexual acts were "unnatural" and that an easing of the law might well result in a serious increase in the number of these practices, an occurrence which would seem to contradict the entire premise of the argument. In the sphere of sexual practices it is very difficult to say what is natural and unnatural. That the act of intercourse between a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation is natural would, I imagine, not be disputed by anybody. But even in the Church of England Book of Common Prayer procreation is the first among three reasons for legitimate Christian intercourse. The second reason given is that it should be a remedy against sin and fornication, and the third is for the mutual society, help and comfort between the two people joined together in holy matrimony. Even the Roman Catholic Church does not condemn intercourse between married couples where the wife is beyond the age of child bearing, or even if she is pregnant.

Most people in this country are neither Catholic nor Christian in the sense of regular worship. I am no encyclopaedia on sexual matters, but there are many acts committed by heterosexuals which have nothing to do with procreation, and which many would find repulsive. Homosexual acts are repulsive to many, but far from all, heterosexuals. I would hesitate to call them unnatural since they are practised by a significant number of people to whom they are certainly not unnatural. Unusual perhaps — but not unnatural. And yet many a stockbroker from Weybridge or Surbiton will get purple in the face with indignation at the mere mention of them. Happily in this country we now have in sexual matters a distinction firmly drawn between sin and crime, which even clerics accept, and were otten the first to advocate. There are still anomalies—buggery between a man and a woman is still illegal, as is incest and male homosexual acts between two minors (thus pushing the public schools into the front line of fire if the police wished to witch-hunt). For myself, as a believing Roman Catholic, I could have a number of battles with my hierarchy as to what constitutes sexual sin. As a member of the public I believe that the criminal law should be solely concerned with public decency and the avoidance of the corruption of the young. We have very nearly arrived at this desirable destination.

This is very different from the times of forty or fifty years ago when sex was seldom discussed. The late King George V was told during his reign that a certain Peer had left permanently for the continent because it had been discovered that he was a practising homosexual. "I thought men like that shot themselves," replied the king, which demonstrates how unnatural the monarch was. He was the grandfather of the present Queen.

Humphry Berkeley