BOOKS

Batten Down the Hatches

By BERNARD LEVIN

A VERY distinguished political lady once button- holed me at a cocktail party and told me that I was a menace to democracy; so, she said for good measure, was Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge. I could not, of course, speak on Mr. Ivluggeridge's behalf, but on my own I asked her why. She told the that it was because I implied that all politicians Were self-seeking crooks (I threw up my hands in Protest and sent my gin over a particularly crooked member of the Government) and that the system itself was corrupt. There was, she admitted, Plenty to criticise in our political institutions; but to generate a feeling of contempt for the whole sYstem and all its practitioners could not but sap the foundations (I don't know that she actually Used those words, but they were hovering near by) of democracy itself. When I told her, as gently as I could, that I had no great love for democracy, and that I didn't think Mr. Muggeridge had much either, a great light shone in her eyes. 'That,' she said, 'explains it.'

I have no reason to suppose that she has become any less suspicious of me and my works since, but in case she is reading these lines I should like to say that at any rate I have never described the Prime Minister as a 'faded, attitudinising, Turf Club bummaree,' which is what Mr. Muggeridge called him on Sunday. Which is not to say that I disagree with Mr. Muggeridge's estimate; but I don't see why I should get his share of the blame as well as mine when the mobs go howling through the streets, and the lamp-posts are black with bodies (there is one of those concrete dying-swan ones just outside my house that Dr. Hill's corpse Would mightily improve the look of), and the beer- Pumps at the St. Stephen's Tavern run blood, and Universal Darkness Covers All. But really! Can anybody with nothing to gain or lose from it contemplate with equanimity the circus that has just started, and will continue, three-ringed and strident, until October 8? Can anybody not securely encased in a diving-suit, with a clothes-peg on his nose, feel entirely cheer- ful about the floods of bilge that will pour un- checked through the now-open sluice-gates for the next three weeks? Can anybody's faith in demo- cracy be so strong that it does not at any rate quiver at the thought of the balderdash, the Imbecilities, the verbiage, the political ipecacuanha ane and the plain bloody lies that are going to be thout good enough for the voters between now and polling day?

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only asked. Before the dusty answers start rolling in, I am reminded that Sagittarius put it succinctly, once upon a day, when she asked the powers

• . . to ban, as a public abuse Such boosting, bamboozling and bluffing; We know we are only a goose, But we beg to dispense with the stuffing.

But as we all go down for the third time, here* are three slices of hokum that are cut from farther up the loaf than most of their kind, and that indeed bear practically no outward and visibie reiatit n- ship to the pabulum on which we must subsist from now until Der Tag. Or perhaps the thought of what is in store for us just makes me more charitably disposed towards them.

Anyway, here they are. First, there is Mr. Roy Jenkins, he of the bland and carefree countenance, the erudite dome, the wagging forefinger, the courteous approach, the gentle humour, the collar one point of which insists on riding up over his waistcoat (and frequently over his lapel). Mr. Jenkins, as many a Minister has reason to know, carries the fastest statistic in the West, and will shoot the pips out of an inaccuracy at ninety paces. But he is also a man who knows that holdfast is the only dog; the tenacity with which he clung to the fine and overdue Private Member's measure that caused him to be christened in a certain column nearer the front of the Spectator, Obscenity Bill, and the liberal mind in which it was conceived, were not the least admirable aspects of a man who offers much to admire.

But where does Mr. Jenkins go from here? Suppose the Labour Party loses the election, as is perfectly possible. For some of the party, that will be the end of the road; by the time Labour next has a chance of office, they will be too old for it. This does not apply to Mr. Jenkins; he is young enough to wait out another five years in the wilderness, and another twenty years on top of them, if need be. But to what end? He would not, of course, be better employed knocking some sense into the students at the London School of Economics (though he could certainly employ himself usefully in knocking some into the staff), but can he really think of nothing better to be than a politician? Is there not something badly wrong with a system (are you listening, my lady of the cocktail party?) that takes men like Mr. Jenkins and coops them up (not even, as far as I can dis- cover, against their will) in the kind of idiot miserable-go-round in which Mr. Jenkins spends his days?

What Mr. Jenkins ought to be, of course, is a full-time, instead of a part-time, author. Mr. Bal- four's Poodle and Sir Charles Dilke, with their combination of an historical sense, solid research and an elegant style, showed this well enough; and this little book ironically supplies further evidence.

Mr. Jenkins, in fact, is the last surviving mem- ber of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He really does believe that we needs must love the highest when we see it—because he does--and that if he patiently and lucidly explains the merits of the Labour Party's policy (though he is careful * THE LABOUR CASE, By Roy Jenkins. THE LIBERAL. CASE. By Roger Fulford. THE. CONSERVATIVE CASE. By Viscount Hailsham. (Penguin Books, 2s. 6d. each.)

to point out that this book consists only of his opinions, and does not commit his party to his views), all men capable of understanding the arguments will inevitably agree with his conclu- sions. He is fond of phrases like 'it may be objected,' and fonder still of following them with a crisp and unanswerable reply to any such objec- tions. He has, too, a fine eighteenth-century way of sliding the dagger in without the victim know- ing that anything out of the ordinary is going on; Sir Godfrey Huggins, for instance, 'now sits in the House of Lords under the softly patrician title of Lord Malvern,' and his famous assertion that all Africans are liars 'did not sound like the best basis for belief in an effective partnership.' For the rest, how fair and moderate and gentlemanly Mr. Jenkins is!

Gravely, he points out that to make it a criminal offence for parents to send their children to fee- paying schools would be 'undesirable.' Solemnly he draws up 'a rough and ready balance sheet of the position at the end of the next Parliament,' a most inviting document Con the one side would be the £3,500 million of extra national product'—but what if the national product decreases by Some extraordinary mischance?). Carefully, unexcitedly, all passion spent, he goes through his case, tidying up Britain economically, culturally, educationally —the very model of the new Labour Party. I have heard Mr. Jenkins called `donnish'; to anybody familiar with the illiterate gibberish which most dons write, and the narrowness of their minds, the charge is absurd. Yet there is some truth in it. Mr. Jenkins approaches his Socialism along neither of the roads that have hitherto led to the Labour Party—Marxism and Methodism; yet there he is, and it is impossible to imagine him in any other party. Mr. Jenkins is a member of the Labour Party because his reason tells him to be, and while the Labour Party can continue to attract —and hold—such reasonable men, it will survive. But will it thrive?

That, of course, is the question asked even more insistently about the Liberals, and Mr. Roger Fulford is the man who has attempted to answer it on this occasion. Messrs. Penguin Books rather charmingly described him, in their advance publicity for the book, as a 'well-known Liberal MP,' but he is rather better known as a dis- tinguished author, particularly of books about the Royal Family (Mr. Dermot Morrah is known as the Roger Fulford of The Times). Mr. Fulford is in a difficulty that Mr. Jenkins escapes; the Labour Party may lose the election, but at any rate has a chance of winning it. The Liberals, however, are not going to win it in any circumstances. What, then, does a sensible man (and Mr. Fulford is very nearly as sensible as Mr. Jenkins) do? He cannot offer a concrete programme for action, in the absence of any possibility of being called upon to carry it out. He cannot merely offer a critique of his opponents—one does not need a carping manual. What he has done in the end is to swallow hard, pretend that the Liberals might find them- selves holding the balance in the next Parliament, outline the Liberal programme in as much detail as their position will allow him, and for the rest uphold the banner of Liberalism as best he may.

The trouble is, it is the Campbell-Banner of Liberalism that he is upholding. Mr. Fulford is not really representative of the new Liberal Party, in the sense in which Mr. Jenkins is typical of the Labour Party under Mr. Gaitskell. 'The present writer (if he may be forgiven a personal remin- iscence) . . .' is the sort of diffident approach he has to his task, and the apologetic tone persists throughout. Mr. Grimond, doubtless spurred by Taper's appalling offer to write his speeches for him, has been laying about him with a will this last year or two; Mr. Fulford shuffles round his opponents in a manner that would (at least I hope it would) horrify his leader.

You may say that Mr. Jenkins is gentle, too; but Mr. Jenkins is sitting on a small but safe majority, and his party will return 200 members even if they are hit by a tornado next month. Mr. Fulford's will be lucky to increase its six; but where is the evidence, as he goes through the Liberal pension plan, and patiently explains again why we ought to have Proportional Representation (somebody ought to explain to Mr. Fulford exactly why we are never going to have PR in this country—and it has nothing whatever to do with a mistaken idea that PR has been responsible for the downfall of French democracy), and fits 'Disraeli's policy of sewage' into his survey of social legislation, that he realises this?

Two rationalists, then; one who does well to be a rationalist, one who does rather less well. And now for the third of our authors. That, at any rate. was how I proposed to begin my look arLotd Hailsham's controlutioti to this trio. But alas for good in!.—dons! I began to read it in a sleeping- ,ar taking me to Edinburgh, my favourite city in all the world. I got as far as page 49—you can't say I didn't try—where I read the following: Conservatives are neither militarists nor paci- fists. They reject . . . the doctrine that might is

right . . .; their principle is law, and the objec-

tive standards of right and wrong. . . .

They therefore support the United Nations. . . . Where the immediate task of preventing international disaster was beyond the existing powers of the United Nations, at Suez . . . their intervention has been limited in scope, humanely carried out, reported at once, and suspended when the necessity for it disappeared.

I closed the book gently, and slept a dreamless sleep all the way to Waverley. And Edinburgh had never looked lovelier.