Another voice
To be a Liberal candidate
Auberon Waugh
Unlike Mr Thorpe, 1 decided not to attend the Liberal Conference this year, reckoning it unkind to go and gloat. But I rejoiced in absence over descriptions of the opening day, when Lord Evans (another of these ubiquitous Evanses) had his opening speech interrupted by carpenters, bricklayers and plumbers banging away to get the Conference Hall ready in time; when, as a charmingly democratic gesture, the top table had been put down on the conference floor so that nobody could see the speakers; when the Press was put in a special corner where it could neither see nor hear anything; and when the refreshment stall was put immediately beside the top table, so that, as Hugh Noyes wrote in The Times, 'the clang of cash registers and the jingle of coins clashed in joyous unison with the words of party leaders.'
Of course the Liberals have been celebrated for as long as I can remember for their dotty, almost sublime incompetence. It is one of their most endearing characteristics. The cheap, political jibe about politicians who could not be trusted in charge of a whelkstall has no relevance to them, because there is no possibility of their ever being put in charge of a whelkstall. If they were, they could almost certainly try to site it in front of the Speaker's Chair in the House of Commons, or possibly on a raft in the middle of the Thames. Or they might send it to relieve protein deficiency among the savages of French Equatorial Africa, bless them. But there is no danger of any of this because, as I say, Liberals are not in the whelk business. They are in the ideas business.
And so, in a manner of speaking, are we all. Perhaps we all felt a twinge of anxiety when, on the day of the debate devoted to internal Liberal Party affairs, a Liberal candidate called Mr John Smithson (again in the words of Mr Noyes) 'roared to the rostrum with the announcement that most Liberal candidates were rubbish and of an appalling standard and not enough care was taken in their selection.' If so, this may have been because we all have a little something of the prospective Liberal candidate in our make-up. Only last week I found myself in a heated exchange, late at night, urging that university leavers be required to do eighteen months national service as nursing assistants in a mental hospital. My arguments were cogent, my reasoning faultless. It was not until next morning that I saw I had been suffering from that easily recognisable form of insanity which afflicts many educated people nowadays and which might be called liberal candiditis. In its more extreme forms witness Vanessa Redgrave, even Paul Foot liberal candiditis can destroy promising careers and inflict terrible boredom on all around.
But it is hard, very hard, not to rally to the Liberals' call to stop the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. If only one was prepared to make the effort, to commit oneself, to stand up and be counted as a Liberal candidate one might, with a sudden burst of inspired oratory, persuade the Liberal Conference to ban all games everywhere: football, cricket, rugger everything except Wimbledon and, of course, the Croquet Championships at Hurlingham. Failing that, one could at least demand that Hurlingham be given parity of television time with ballooning or the National Front. Or one could demand a progressive tax on pet animals by weight of excrement, or a bati on old ladies with blue hair sitting in the back of motor cars. The animal excrement measure should appeal to urban voters without pets, while all countrymen will recognise the blue hair menace for what it is.
But the chief joy of the Liberal Party (which, like the Church of England, I sometimes think of joining) is surely its incompetence to do any of these things. And in this general incompetence it exactly catches the national mood. Remanding a blonde female blackmailer last week, Judge Neil McKinnon QC said he hoped he wouldn't have to jail her: 'It wasn't a very wellthought out plan, to blackmail a solicitor. It wasn't a sensible way of starting a blackmailing career.'
The solicitor, who was called Mr S, had the poor girl in court practically before she could get her clothes on. But even apart from the obvious mistake in choosing a solicitor as her victim and it was on this point that the kindly judge, apparently, based his inclinations towards leniency the plot never really had a chance of getting off the ground.
Those who read of the case may have missed its most poignant feature. Miss Judith Warrell, 34, decided to set a 'sex-trap' for the solicitor, Mr S, as a result of which he was blackmailed by her boy-friend, Mr Monte Shoemaker. Miss Warrell, who does not seem to be a Liberal candidate, although she has every appearance of one, claimed in her defence that she wished to expose Mr S for the way he treated his clients. Accordingly, Mr Shoemaker hid in a wardrobe while Mr S and Miss Warrell undressed. When they were lying on the bed together, Mr Shoemaker (described as a professional gambler) burst out of the wardrobe taking photographs and demanding money with menaces. But the most poignant part of their failure in this dastardly scheme was to emerge later. The photographs which were intended to show Miss Warrell and Mr S naked turned out, when developed, to show a refrigerator in the corner of the room.
Yet we have no solid reason for supposing that Miss Warrell and Mr Shoemaker were even Liberal supporters' let alone Liberal candidates. This level of incompetence to carry out the simplest of intentions has become, as I say, a national characteristic, embracing all classes and all political persuasions. But the Liberals represent and encapsulate the national mood in a way which neither of the other two parties is capable of doing. Let us examine how they might turn this historical accident to electoral advantage. It is here, alas, that we must declare our, more sombre reservations about this year s Liberal Conference. Incompetence is, as I say, the moving spirit of the times. A few professions are still expected to avoid it journalists, for instance, are still heavily penalised if, through incompetence, they publish an unprovable defamation, although if I were a Liberal I should certainly expect Conference to pass a vote against this. The idea that someone's reputation can suffer as the result of an inaccurate word in a newspaper seems slightly absurd when (if we follow Mr Levin and the cheering Liberals at Southport) it remains unblemished after he is formally charged with conspiracy and incitement to murder.
Other professions have even higher standards, as is testified by the tragic suicide of Professor Bedson, in Birmingham, after a smallpox vaccine escaped from his laboratory. But these standards are largely self imposed. When an ancillary worker in Westminster Hospital accidentally gave 3 patient anaesthetic gas instead of oxygen, with fatal results, the other ancillary workers threatened to come out on strike if 3 report critical of this behaviour was published. In the event, the coroner enquiring into Professor Bedson's death chose to blame the Press, just as the Liberal Party, after suitable conferring, decided to blame the Press for Mr Thorpe's debacle. But I still maintain the Liberals are missing a golden opportunity. The one unifying force in the country at this moment is desire to hold on to our traditional incompetence. We are threatened with ruin by Labour, and, however implausibly, with efficiencY and stern choices by the Conservatives. Never before has the past seemed so cosy, the future so bleak. Liberals offer the one tenuous hope of keeping things as they are. So the Liberal Party in conclave its elder statesmen, its prospective candidates, its homosexual activists, flat earthers, believ ers in a grapefruit diet, bimetallists, its atheists, Methodists and anti disestablishmentarians decides on 'Break with the Past' as the slogan which will sweep the country in March. I despair. For the next two weeks I shall be in Morocco, studying conditions there. Perhaps some bright ideas will occur to me.
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