The press
Playing the fool
Paul Johnson
During the recent so-called sterling crisis, the Tory government received the worst press, all things considered, since it took office in 1979. Even normally friendly papers like the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail turned venomously hostile. Some of the comments on Nigel Lawson, and still more the cartoons lam- pooning him, were unusually savage, and to my mind grotesquely unfair.
There were, I think, two reasons for this particular assault. One is that Fleet Street is rightly fed up with the incompetence of the Government's PR machine. The Downing Street people simply do not know how to handle an episode of this kind. Equally, Willie Whitelaw, as the PR man inside the cabinet, is not up to it. I have Pointed out these facts in the strongest language I can muster, on many occasions; so have other people, some of them better qualified to judge than myself. Mrs Thatcher does not take the slightest notice, and one can only assume that she wants her government's PR to be in a mess, in striking contrast to her own, which she handles so skilfully herself. The second factor, which made the assault on Lawson so personally vitupera- tive, is Fleet Street's apprehension, reflect- ing the publishing world's as a whole, that the Chancellor is about to slap a 15 per cent VAT on the printed word. I hope Lawson takes this point. I have written here and elsewhere that for the Govern- ment to make such a frontal attack on the media, which would beyond any doubt lead to the loss of titles and jobs, possibly on a large scale, would be virtually an act of suicide. Mrs Thatcher has had a square deal from Fleet Street; rather better than a square deal, I'd say. There are some editors and journalists who would almost go to the stake for her. But even she would not be forgiven if the VAT assassination takes place; and her Chancellor, not least because he is an ex-journalist himself, would become Enemy Number One for the media.
He is, in my opinion, a fine Chancellor; certainly the best since Roy Jenkins. He has the chance to become the most success- ful Chancellor since the war, for he has a long-term strategy which is both compre- hensive and comprehensible, and a Prime Minister who believes in it, and who will back him to the hilt, other things being equal. But other things will not be equal if Lawson alienates the newspapers, Tory and Labour alike, and provokes them into hunting him down, as they once hunted down poor old John Strachey, when he was Minister of Food. Lawson should take stock of his press coverage in the last fortnight and grasp the fact that this is only a tiny foretaste of what will happen to him if the VAT plan goes through. He will face the fury not of genteel lady novelists from the Society of Authors, but of a wolf-pack of hard-headed and cold-hearted Fleet Street professional killers, determined on revenge. Let him never say he has not been warned.
As for the Government's actual handling of the crisis, it does not seem to me to have been particularly inept. There has been a sterling crisis in every government since the war — almost my earliest adult political memory is of a smiling Hugh Dalton telling obvious lies about the pound — and cabinets always appear fumbling and in- competent, and inconsistent too, when speculators all over the world gang up against us, the intensity of their attack varying unpredictably from day to day.
The real reason why sterling is so weak has nothing to do with the strong dollar or oil prices. It is because we are a nation of . appeasers. Consider the facts. For the last 11 months we have allowed to take place a national coal strike which is undoubtedly inflicting damage on the economy, though not as much as Arthur Scargill claims and hopes. The strike took place without any attempt to ballot the miners, the great majority of whom would have rejected it. It is sustained partly by industrial terror- ism, on a scale never before seen in our history, and partly by masses of money, carried around in suitcases, which the NUM has solicited from Britain's enemies, such as the Soviet Union and Libya. Nothing effective has been done by the
Attorney-General to stop the first, or by the Treasury to stop the second. Mean-
while, the official British broadcasting net- work, the BBC, does everything in its power to cheer on the strike, giving Arthur Scargill a nationwide platform from which to spread his nonsense, on every occasion when he asks for it. Indeed, it was the BBC (together with Yorkshire Television) which created this monster in the first place.
Financial experts, including our own, note these goings-on and rightly conclude from them that Britain is a joke nation, still bent on playing the fool. The international financial community does not like nations who play the fool, and has one obvious way of punishing them for their folly: it moves out of their currencies. So the real case against the Government is not that it has mishandled the financial crisis but that it has failed to tackle the insurrection in the coalfields at its root. In a serious nation, Scargill would long since have been behind bars, and the strike over. It is no answer to say that there is no legal case against the man. The whole point of having a huge parliamentary majority is its capacity to push through emergency legislation to deal with social enemies who threaten the pub- lic interest.
The truth is that the Thatcher Govern- ment, far from being an instrument of the hard Right, is in many ways wet, weak and ineffectual. Mrs Thatcher's heart is, I believe, in the right place. But the second she proposes to do anything rigorous to put our poor old country back on its feet, a fearful caterwauling arises from the liberal stage army which treats us like occupied
territory. Every bishop in the land starts to howl and shake his crozier. Left-wing
judges like Lord Scarman throw their wigs on the ground and stamp on them. The television waves crackle with phoney in- dignation. The Guardian breaks out in a cold sweat, the Telegraph loses its nerve, the Times begins its on-one-side-and-on- the-otherings. Ted Heath, old envious Casca himself, sees a chance to slip in his dagger, and the shambling platoon of the sacked — Pym, Gilmour and Co prepares for action. At such times the only ones to remain staunch, as they did in 1940, are the great mass of the ordinary British people, who would happily see Scargill hanged tomorrow. Alas, they can- not make their voices heard over the privileged whinings of the cowardly elite. So nothing is done, the Scargills remain at liberty and unchecked, the economy founders and sterling comes under press- ure. It is all very sad.
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