Another voice
Towards a commitment
Auberon Waugh
Some years ago I was told — although I have forgotten who told me, and so can't judge how much weight to give the information now — that it was Mr Roy Jenkins who inspired the knighthood given by Mr Wilson's government to P.G. Wodehouse in the New Year Honours of 1975. Mr Jenkins was Home Secretary at the time, on his second tour of duty in the Home Office, and it seems by no means improbable. I suppose one could always telephone the fellow and ask him if it is true, but telephone calls are expensive nowadays and I don't see why we should not give him the benefit of the doubt. Another thing to be remembered in his favour is that in one or other of his Budgets, as Chancellor, he reduced the price of a bottle of angostura bitters by more than half, cleverly recategorising it as a flavouring rather than a liqueur. I don't suppose I buy a new bottle of angostura bitters more often than once every three years — it is amazing how long they last — but every time I do so I think warmly of Mr Jenkins.
To have achieved two credit marks of this sort is no mean achievement in the life span of a politician. Against this impressive score, we must sorrowfully record his behaviour in the Budget of, I think, 1969, when he imposed a tax surcharge on unearned income which took the form of a capital levy in the higher brackets, charging more than 100 per cent tax. Since he did not distinguish between unearned income deriving from realisable investments and unearned income from other sources, like a literary estate whose receipts may fluctuate wildly, this brainwave of his had the effect of ruining one or two individuals — among them, I believe, the late Mr Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde's son.
But we all make the occasional mistake in our professional lives and even the most pernickety curate should argue that Mr Jenkins is, on balance, a pretty good egg. He may not have got the languid aristocratical bit quite right, but he alone of any Chancellor since 1959 handed the economy over to the new government in a reasonable shape — it seems incredible now, but in 1970 the budget was actually in surplus before Wilful Teddy was let loose on the scene — and there is no reason to think he would make a worse mess of things than anyone else. There is no alternative to the policies which Mrs Thatcher's government proclaims, even though Sir Geoffrey Howe does not actually pursue them, and it is quite possible that a government led by Mr Jenkins would be able to pursue them without proclaiming them — or rather proclaiming something quite different, like a middle-of-the-road-responsible-to moderate consensus, while he got on with the job.
Similarly Mr David Owen is not really such a bad egg. He irritated the Foreign Of fice by suggesting they should all drink less and making other fatuous left-wing suggestions of that sort, but one must remember he had the rapidly curdling Labour Party all around him and in those days the lad honestly thought he might lead it eventually. People tend to concentrate on his unfor tunate hair-style and nasty habit of comb ing his hair in public, but we must also remember that Mr Owen went to Bradfield, joined the Labour Party without becoming homosexual and is basically One of Us. When he speaks he usually talks sense and he doesn't often tell blatant lies. Or that, at any rate, is my experience of the man.
Even Mr William Rodgers, on the few occasions I have met him, has always struck me as a perfectly respectable sort of person and, to the extent that any politician can be so described, fairly trustworthy. He does not have the horrible Conservative habit of trying to find out which side you are on before discussing anything. He seems intelligent, capable and reasonably sober.
If these three men comprised the Social Democrat Party, and their ideas were to prevail and be accepted as its policies, I might even be tempted to vote for them, in the by no means impossible event of Mrs Thatcher's having abandoned any pretence of responsible government in the meantime. The great pre-election Bingo boom is not due to start for another nine months and if she starts printing money before then it will be hard to make any coherent case for her management of the economy. But the Social Democratic Party already has the seeds of its own destruction on display, many of them the size of conkers.
Its first and most obvious implausibility is the members' insistence on its being a ge nuinely democratic party. This may sound all right to its members and to anyone who has not studied what is meant by party democracy, but even a passing glance at the people who have joined must raise terrible doubts. Mr Ferdinand Mount who, if his commentary of last week is to be believed, actually attended the SDP conference in Bradford, identified two characteristics of the membership — a yearning for leadership, even punishment, and an absence of any new ideas.
Both these attributes seem commendable enough. Like the Liberals, the SDP is bound to attract that huge floating population of garruous, bony, halfwitted women of both sexes and of none, whose idea of political debate is to utter self-evident, often contradictory, platitudes with an air of the greatest conviction. If these people can be cowed into obedience before the mighty intellects of Jenkins, Owen and Rodgers, the prospects look good. British politics has no need of new ideas; it just needs some old ones sensibly applied, but I fear it may have been Mr Mount's rebuke which produced Mr Jenkins's supremely fatuous New Idea of an Inflation Tax. AnY child of six could see that in existing circumstances an inflation tax, as proposed, would speed the process of wage inflation. So might a Bennist government decree that any wage increase agreed by 'free bargaining' should automatically be doubled.
And there's the rub. The demand for some New Ideas was presumably a democratic one — although given powerful impetus by Mr Mount's support — and Mr Jenkins responded. What other fatuous ideas might come up from that assembly of bony, garrulous, idiotic women? Behind them all sits the toad-like divinity of Super Woman Shirley Williams, pledged to destroy the public schools as the only remaining places of secondary education, just as she once put a stop to all secondarY education for the lower classes. The SDP policy on education, as announced by Mr John Roper, is now to squeeze the public schools until they are forced to integrate with the state system: 'If the strength of some of our independent schools could be used to the advantage of the whole community that would be no mean achievement.'
What on earth does this drivel mean? That the local authority would pay for them while leaving them as they are, open to competitive examination? Or just that fewer and fewer people could afford them and more would be forced to submit to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator? Can we trust an enfeebled Roy Jenkins and a still slightly under-age Mr Owen to keep this frightful woman in her place? The P.G. Wodehouse centenary falls in the middle of the Conservative Party conference, just as the old boy's 90th birthday came while they were conferring. at Brighton in 1971. On that dismal occasion, under the lamentable leadership of Mr Heath, they refused to send a telegram or acknowledge the event in any way. This, I think, must remain at the crux of our voting intentions at the half-way stage of Mrs Thatcher's administration: when the general election comes, we will discover which party Mr Heath supports and then vote for the other one.
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