DIARY
Whatever the real circumstances sur- rounding the return to Moscow of the Americans' prized defector Mr Vitaly Yur- chenko, the Russians can look upon the public image of the intelligence community in the West with unmixed satisfaction. The works of John Le Carre, together with the much publicised real-life bunglings of the British, American, German and French intelligence services in recent years, have combined to create an impression that spying is a pastime for overgrown idiot children. 1 remember once ringing up Professor Hinsley, the official historian of wartime intelligence, to ask him to confirm an impression I had gained from his first volume before I reviewed it: that the wartime amateurs of intelligence had Proved far more effective than the peace- time professionals. Of course, he answered. Would you really like to think that the nation's best brains were em- ployed in intelligence in peacetime? Christ- opher Andrew's excellent new history of the British secret services underlines the Point Legendary pre-war and wartime intelligence professionals such as Stewart Menzies and Claude Dansey were skilled Whitehall intriguers, but pretty crass organisers of agent networks. For those who believe that it is important for us to have strong intelligence and counter- intelligence operations against the Rus- sians, the current picture is depressing. The sillier the public image of intelligence, the more difficult it becomes to recruit good people to the services, the more prone to Bettaney-type disasters they be- come, and so on. One immediate step could be taken to help matters. A senior intelligence figure should accept responsi- bility for explaining and justifying the role of the services. This does not mean that he should discuss in public the workings of SIS and MIS, but that he should seek to tell the public, when necessary, what the intelli- gence services try to do, and why. At present, this is a case entirely lost by default. Sir Antony Duff, perhaps the most credible Foreign Office figure of his gen- eration, is uniquely placed to make a start in this direction. If somebody does not do so, the intelligence services will become victims of permanent public derision.
It was delightful to behold the speed with which the Spectator's editor rushed a proof of last week's Diary to the Prime Minister, in time for her to include a Promise of legislation on salmon poaching in the Queen's Speech. Drunk upon that triumph, one might now demand similar speedy action to change the dates of the shooting season. Pheasant-shooting offi- cially opens on 1 October and closes on 1 February. For some years now, with winter coming later and later, nobody has shot
MAX HASTINGS
pheasants seriously before November. This season, it is scarcely worth trying to do more than give birds flying lessons until later this month, with the leaf so late coming off the tree. One January pheasant is worth six of the November variety. It would hurt nobody to change the official dates of the season to 1 Nov- ember-15 February. As matters stand, February is a dreadful month in which there is nothing to do in the country but tease the foxhunters. The Home Office might care to take the matter up as a law and order issue likely to discourage hooli- ganism among members of the rural mid- dle class, at present unemployed from 1 February until fishing starts again.
0 ne of the most disagreeable specta- cles of the week has been the first skirmish about compensation between Boeing, Brit- ish Airways and the survivors and relatives concerned in the Manchester Airport dis- aster. It is always difficult to sympathise with an airline or a manufacturer writhing on the hook to minimise the amount of money they have to pay out. But I am also revolted by the spectacle of parents claim- ing financial compensation for lost child- ren. A father appeared on television, declaring sanctimoniously that his objec- tive was to get enough money out of those responsible to discourage them from ever allowing such a tragedy to happen again. The loss of a child is one of the most terrible misfortunes that can befall anyone. Yet what possible role can money play in assuaging grief? If one of our own children was killed and we extorted, say, L200,000 from an airline, what would we do with it? Take a holiday in Jamaica to help us get over the nightmare? Buy a bigger house? Get into Château Latour in a serious fashion? The gold-digging by those who lost sons with no dependents in the Falk- lands war was even more contemptible.
'I'm not a walrus, I'm a gay sea-lion.' The only possible rationalisation is that one is extorting money in order to punish those responsible for causing such pain. It is a form of revenge that seems uniquely sterile for all concerned except the lawyers.
Iam one of the last idiots to attempt to use a car for getting around central London on my weekly pilgrimage from the country. But at last I am admitting defeat. Throughout the daylight hours, movement across the city by road has become intoler- able. If taxis and public transport are to be kept going, draconian measures have be- come essential. The most obvious is a dramatic extension of the clamping of illegally parked cars. This is the only effective deterrent, and one of the few sensible ideas for which we can thank the GLC. But the Council is also seeking to curtail severely the movement of goods vehicles in the city at night. This seems upside-down logic. The most serious cause of daylight jams is the illegal parking of delivery vehicles. It makes far more sense to adopt sanctions to encourage deliveries either early in the morning, or after closing time. Shopkeepers' complaints about the overtime costs of keeping staff to load and unload out of hours are fair enough. But they pall before the desperate need to do something about the traffic. One no longer needs to be a socialist to recognise that the days of the private car in London are numbered.
Hearing the other day of a friend in trouble with the law, I was rather gloomily totting up a list of acquaintances whom one has seen come dramatically to grief by my not very advanced age. I got as far as one charge of gun-running, one indecent expo- sure, one indecent assault, three suicides, two fatal car smashes, two battlefield deaths, two fatal climbing accidents — one of the latter, on the credit side, a school- master I particularly disliked. Put like that, it sounds pretty grim. But I suppose most of us could make up a similar tally by the age of 40. Some skeletons from the past are also beginning to rattle. At a shoot a year or two ago, one guest, who was paying solicitous attention to a middle-aged and extremely rich widow in the party, turned visibly grey at the sight of the Hastingses. You may murmur that this is not an uncommon reaction. But in this case the man had good reason, for my wife knew him years ago, shortly before he was sent to prison for passing bad cheques. In a quiet moment, he implored her not to spill the beans to anyone. She did not, and he soon afterwards married the widow. Time alone, and close study of fatal accident reports in the Daily Telegraph, will reveal whether silence was the decent thing.
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