Notebook
My picture of Norfolk Conservatives is somewhat one-sided, my acquaintance with them being on the whole confined to the landed gentry. One thing I can say with confidence about those I have met is that they are not 'wet'. During the last Labour government, one got the impression that Preparations were underway for UDI. Such was their aversion to anything smacking of dependence upon the state that many . gentleman farmers were installing expensive generators so that they should not be b. eholden to anybody even for their electricity. .Even when they go on expensive holidays in far-away places, they somehow manage to avoid British Airways and fly instead on a mysterious local airline to Holland and thence to their destinations, buring the winter, when their enormous and profitable farms make fewer demands Upon their time, they are able to spend several days a week shooting. Between drives they often like to discuss politics. They may make some mild criticisms of the government — of the bailing out of lame duck industries, of a tendency to weakness on the question of immigration. But on the Whole, whatever social gulf they may feel to exist between themselves and Mrs Thatcher, they are united in loyalty to the Iron Lady. They like her guts and they believe that she is there to be supported. Loyalty, indeed, is a habit of mind nurtured by the Proximity of Sandringham; nowhere in the country can it be more highly regarded as a virtue. So the feeling of the Norfolk gentry towards Mr Christopher Brock lebankrowler, the MP for Norfolk North West and first Tory convert to the Social Democrats, May be quite easily imagined.
Mr Brocklebank-Fowler, on the other hand, is not merely 'wet'; he is dripping. You could, to employ an old-fashioned e_xpression, shoot snipe off him. 'I hope to form a new party and to develop a programme for stability, national unity and national renewal which I judge to be vital if our Feuntry is to become truly one nation at ome and is to play a leading part in international efforts to solve the problems of P.overty, malnutrition and disease which afflict a wholly unacceptable proportion of mankind on whose prosperity we depend so Much for our own future'. What could be wetter, what could be more unrepresentative of Tory opinion in Norfolk, than to make the extent of British participation in international efforts' to combat poverty, malnutrition and disease an issue of princiPie over which to resign? You immediately W. ander how he ever got selected by the local Conservative Association in the first place. His wetness was no secret even in 1970 when he first stood as the Conservative candidate for King's Lynn (a constituency that was later enlarged to become Norfolk North West). He had been Chairman of the Bow Group and was on some panel or other to do with helping Commonwealth immigrants, a group with which Norfolk Conservatives may not be personally familiar but towards which they nevertheless harbour feelings of considerable distrust. He seems, however, to have been the beneficiary of the then fashionable feeling among Conservatives that gentlemen were no longer suitable candidates to offer for election. It was the idea that he was a 'career politician' that appealed to the selection committee. Even his open opposition to capital punishment, while hardly a popular view, was taken as a sign of his personal integrity and honour. He became, indeed, quite a popular MP, at least until he was divorced from a wife whom everyone liked and married instead to a local divorcee with too much purple pencil around the lips. Most of the time he liked to look the squire with labrador at his side, though at elections he became plain 'Chris Fowler'. But even this was forgiven as politically expedient, and he was sometimes still invited to shoot, Despite Mr Brocklebank-Fowler's frequent attacks on the government, his local association remained loyal almost to the end. He was given a vote of full confidence last January after blaming 'personalities and not policies' for local disagreements and claiming that 'the policy gulf is not wide'. Only last Friday, the chairman of the Association, Mr Kenneth Bush, felt able to declare: 'He is not going to leave and join the Social Democrats, so for goodness sake let us be a little more tolerant. .this does not mean he is not a true Conservative.' Only three days later, invoking honour and principle, he crossed the floor of the House.
Mr Geoffrey Dickens is a different kind of Tory nightmare. Since he entered parlia ment only two years ago, he has found himself unable to support the Government on practically anything. This makes him sound rather endearing, but any such impression is dispelled by his very disagreeable appearance and by his statements this week to the press. 'I won't be leaned on by the Establishment because I like to do what I think is right. I am not worried by the Establishment. I am not the sort of guy who can be pushed around'. All this depressing bluster was, of course, in response to the efforts of the Attorney-General to dissuade him from naming, under the protection of parliamentary privilege, the retired diplomat referred to in the recent Old Bailey 'corruption of public morals' trial. It is possible to imagine circumstances in which Mr Dickens's stand might be justified — circumstances, for example, in which the name of the diplomat concerned had not already been published. Last October, however, the magazine Private Eye both named Sir Peter Hayman and gave a detailed account of his sexual proclivities. It also drew attention, long before Mr Dickens, to claims that he should have been prosecuted along with the other defendants in the case. This was enough to persuade the Attorney-General and the Director of Public Prosecutions, of the need to review the position and confirm that there were no legal grounds for prosecution. If Mr Dickens was still dissatisfied, there was nothing to stop him pursuing the matter without exposing Sir Peter to the horror of having his name all over the newspapers without any possibility of legal redress. Mr Dickens has chosen a cheap and nasty way of drawing attention to himself.
'There is no way this is normal procedure for us to deal with someone's overdraft'. Mr Alan Knights, general manager of the Midland Bank's London area division, was referring to the case in which a girl student was locked in a bank office and then held for six hours in a police cell after calling at the Midland to discuss her bank balance. She had become 1300 overdrawn because the payment of her grant for a polytechnic course was five months late. On Monday a judge at Snaresbrook Crown Court directed a jury to acquit her on 12 charges of deception. There is obviously much enjoyment to be had in this catastrophic blow to the image of the Midland, which wipes out at one stroke all the good will it may conceivably have earned through its distasteful television advertising campaign. Janice Campbell, being only 20 years old and possibly impressionable, may have been influenced by these televised invitations to 'come and talk to the listening bank'. In any event, she appears to have dropped in of her own free will. She may be feeling distressed, but she should take comfort in the fact that for all those who have reason to fear their bank managers she has won a great victory.
Alexander Chancellor
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