• Personal column

George Gale

The general theory amongst the marketeers is that Harold is in the bag, and Jim Callaghan along with him. It is a comfortable theory for the marketeers, and I have to confess that neither Harold nor Jim has said or done anything lately to discourage it. The general presumption is that the negotiations are going along very nicely, thank you; that Harold brilliantly outflanked Giscard d'Estaing at Paris, of all places, that Big Jim is being all Jims to all men; and that nothing can prevent a Cabinet recommendation to accept the Market terms so cleverly and successfully renegotiated.

Well, it is a very nice little scenario. It does, however, involve one very large assumption indeed. This is that Harold Wilson (and Big Jim, come to that) is prepared, as the late W. H. Auden said, "to sit on his arse for forty years and hang his hat on a pension"; or, to put it more precisely, that he is ready not only to give up the leadership of the Labour Party but also to become reviled in Labour Party mythology as the second Ramsay MacDonald.

Harold Wilson never minded the fourteenth Earl calling him the fourteenth Mr Wilson. But to be called the second Ramsey MacDonald is a different kettle of fish indeed, and a very stinking kettle of very stinking fish at that.

Breaking records

Now I incline to agree with those who are now betting that Harold Wilson will not fight the next election as leader of the Labour Party, provided that his present administration runs Its due course and that no freak wave (the kind yachtsmen like to talk about, by way of exculpatory explanations) upsets the ship or apple-cart. My reasoning is that by 1978 or thereabouts he'll have broken most of the records and that his place within the Guinness Book will thereby be assured; that by then he will have put the BBC, the Times and Ted Heath in what he regards as their appropriate places (which is what he really wants to do, so I was once authoritatively assured, although in words less elegant than my periphrasis); and that Mary will finally have had her way and dragged him off to that collegiate Oxbridge life which she has always thought would best suit them both. (Incidentally, those who, quite ignorantly, suppose that Mary Wilson hasn't much influence on her husband, have no knowledge of either and have never witnessed the sharp and tough edge of Mary's tongue.)

What to do?

To resume. Is Harold Wilson prepared to sacrifice his party political reputation for the sake of the Market and of the marketeers?Lbeg to doubt so. I believe that he made his first application to join (and all his brave stuff about "We will not take no for an answer") by way of Pinching the Tories' clothing: he could not resist the temptation. Instinctively, he is no more a marketeer than I am — or indeed than anyone is who has the great good fortune to be born north of the Trent, or, come to that, outside of Kent, parts of the other Home Counties, north of Potters Bar and without the Holy Roman Church and other kindred continental superstitions. Right, then. What will our 'Arold do, when it comes to the crunch? He may well try to stop it coming to the crunch, but I think he's stuck on this one. He's also stuck, so recipients of private but publishable letters assure me, on the Principle of equal air time for the pros and the antis. Obviously, some Cabinet members are going to be pros and others antis, unless the negotiations break down, in which case all, or virtually all (and certainly all who will subsequently matter), will be anti. Supposing, however, there were to be a concluded renegotiation, with a Cabinet agreeing to disagree and no collective Cabinet decision or recommendation possible, what does the Prime Minister do?

Any takers?

I do not think he can say "Vote 'Yes'," for that would be to divorce him from his party and at the same time to risk defeat. To say "Vote 'No' "is safer, but still carries with it the second risk. Better, surely, to stay above the battle; to say to one and all, "I am Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party; 1 must remain above the battle so that, whichever way the fight goes, I remain to carry on the Queen's government and to keep together the Labour Party. my colleagues are entitled to argue. My duty is to be the umpire and to ensure that things do not fall apart and that the centre holds, come what may."

I have won many political bets this year which now draws to a close (and not before time, as many will be saying). I will carefully consider any bets based upon the above argument. On the whole I have found it most Profitable to put my money where my mouth is; Which, in these inflationary days, is no bad place to put it.

Broken heart

It sometimes happens that when a husband dies, a wife fairly soon follows. It used to be called "dying of a broken heart" and these days the phrase sounds very sloppy and awkward and altogether wrong. But I remember that when Alice Fay died, a year or so after her husband Gerard (a fine journalist and a good man and a firm friend, treated, characteristically, by the Guardian with a nastiness only such sanctimonious establishments are capable of), the only sensible way to describe her death was that she died broken-hearted. It is two years since Tibor Szamuely died. His death was remarked; but insufficiently, many (myself among them) thought. His posthumous book has received less than its due notice. Last week his widow was buried. She, too, came like him out of Russia, escaping via Ghana: she, therefore, shared his courage and his enterprise. I do not think that had he not died his untimely death, his widow would now be buried, mourned by such friends as Elizabeth Jane Howard, Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest and John Mander. • There is a will to live and a will to die and, too, a will not to go on living; and this last plight can bring about death; and whatever be the name on the death certificate, a broken heart may better describe the truth of the situation than any medical diagnosis, however expert and skilled. Too many people die, one after the other, the one having loved the other, for coincidence to provide the explanation.

Good!

I have always despised that rich and successful Hollywood scriptwriter — Ben Hecht I think was his name — who once boasted, during the closing days of the British mandate in Palestine, how his heart leaped up whenever he heard that the Irgun Zwei Leumi or the Stern Gang had shot another British soldier. Last week I saw a newspaper billboard on which the headline had been written: "Price Sisters on Death Fast." Underneath someone had written: "Good." And I found myself mentally applauding, for all the world as if I were somebody like Ben Hecht.

A wretched year

We have had a very sudden autumn in East Anglia. It so happens that for about four or five Thursdays running we have driven up from Essex to Norfolk. One week there was immense colour in the autumn trees. Not to equal the New England fall — nothing can do that — but as splendid a colouring of trees as I can recall in this country. Then came winds and rain, and within a fortnight the leaves and the colour had all gone and all was, and of course remains, bare and bleak. Winter or whatever it was, came after only a fortnight of autumn. But then, we had no summer, either. We need a new word to describe those times of year which are neither seasonal nor are already named. It is not as if we had had an Indian summer. Instead, we have had hardly any summer, and hardly any autumn either; and although the experts promise or threaten us with a hard winter, wintry is not how I would describe our present dreary clime. .

A wretched year, anyway, by any names.

Who's for peace?

It's better than nothing. I suppose, that the churches in Ireland are getting together to have a peace campaign. The idea is that if everybody thinks and talks and prays about peace, and sticks "Peace" stickers in their lapels and on their cars, peace will, or may, come suddenly or gradually about, much like Yeats wrote that it dropped slowly into Innisfree. I don't see peace dropping into Ulster myself; but if the churches are really serious about it, they should realise that the best — perhaps the only — way to start preparing for it is to stop preparing for war. Here, the churches could certainly help. Instead of agreeing to pray and to have joint lapel stickers arid that sort of tomfoolery, they could, or at any rate should, agree to get out of education and the brainwashing of the children of the island. Secularisation is the only long-term solution for Ireland (as, indeed, to my mind, it is the only long-term solution in the Middle East). This, I realise, is tantamount to saying that if the churches actually mean what they are saying, they should set a good example by putting themselves out of business. This, like much else in this troubled world, is too much to hope for.