Weekend laughs
Mr Geoffrey Rippon has never been noted for his tact, nor Lord Longford for his commonsense, but it was a ludicrous and comic weekend that included major efforts by both of them to capitalise on present middle-class and middle-aged unease about the way things are going in the country. Whether Mr Rippon was embarrassed by the inaccurate way his wife read a speech he was about to make over the telephone to the press department of Central Office, or whether he was traduced by such as Mr Jones, his scheme for another civilian reserve never had much to commend it, even when it was first mooted by Sir David Renton and others in Conservative Political Centre pamphlets five or more years ago. As for Lord Longford his gathering, with its odd admixture of religious revivalism and tub-thumping claptrap was predictably and not unreasonably the laughing stock of weekend comment. The irritating thing about gimmicks such as these is not that they need to be taken seriously (we do not suspect that Mr Jones takes Mr Rippon very seriously, though he sees the chance of exploiting an error of judgement) but that they divert the attention of the nation and its citizens from the real nature of the very serious problems we now face and, in doing so, they make mock of the decent patriotic impulses they are pretending to harness.
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