THE SILVER AGE
ALTHOUGH he is remarkably old, Lord Stockton may have embarked on his attacks on the Government a little too early in his career in the House of Lords. The spell-binding charm which had grown men weeping last year for the wonderful miners who, according to the Earl, beat Hitler and the Kaiser, will begin to pall with repetition over the next three years. Stockton speeches, after all, are essentially the same speech. There is the sweep of history bit (things were better when I was al charge), the snobbish jokes about nan- nies, nursemaids etc, the passage about the importance of governments spending lots of money on everything, the moving appeal of an old and frail man and the curiously dull peroration about the new dawn of the Microchip, the whole drama- tised by some beautiful stage business with his stick and his deafness and his stoop. We May well have had enough of this by the time when it is supposed to have its greatest effect — at the next election. The latest version of the speech (and another is promised this week) concerned privatisa- tion, and provoked even Mr Peter Walker to public disavowal. Lord Stockton thinks that the selling of state assets is like selling the family silver. It has already been pointed out that nationalised industries are rather more expensive to run than silver; one should also question whether the Government can properly be compared with a family (although it is true that when Lord Stockton was Prime Minister a great many of his relations held office). And one might also point out why silver has become so extraordinarily valuable in modern times — it is because it is a hedge against the inflation initiated by Mr Harold Mac- millan.
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