Notebook
CCheltenham is a good place to spend St N—,Patrick's Day. In racecourse bars and hospitable tents convivial friendship rules Anglo-Irish relations. It is a long way from the Shankhill Road, or Fifth Avenue. Com- ing home is to come back to gruesome reali- ty — if reality it is. Almost more depressing than the continued violence in Ulster is the fantasies that flourish in Dublin and in the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic there are to be `new initiatives for peaceful unification' of Ireland. This comes from benevolent, not malevolent, Irishmen and Irish-Americans, from Dr FitzGerald and Senator Moynihan rather than from Mr Gerry Adams or Mr Michael Flannery. What is one to say to this impervious bour- bonism from decent and intelligent men Who have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing? There can be no peaceful unifica- tion of Ireland. The phrase is a pure con- tradiction in terms. To that extent the Pro- vos are the political realists. They at least envisage shooting and blasting a million Protestants into — or, as one of them has said, maybe out of — Ireland: a practicable Possibility if an unamiable one. Dr Fitz- Gerald is too close to his own country's history to understand it. What he, in- telligent and thoughtful as he is, cannot grasp is that while a peacefully united, autonomous Ireland was merely unlikely in the days of Parnell and constitutional na- tionalism, it became quite impossible after republican nationalism had triumphed in 1916-22. That triumph ensured that there would be two Irelands thereafter. For how long? I don't say 'for ever', which is a long time. But it can be predicted with complete confidence that in our lifetimes, while the union of Northern Ireland with Great Bri- tain may be broken — that is another mat- ter — it will not be followed by a 'united Ireland'.
AOscar said of the death of Little Nell, a man would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the defenestration of Mr Peter Jay. (A friend of his said, 'Peter's been lecturing us about economics for years and now he's failed the whelk stall test.') I have no views as to the rights and wrongs of the struggle, not so far as it concerns the clUality of 'Good Morning Britain', as I
ave not seen breakfast television. This isn't the usual blase (and usually un-
truthful) 'I-never-watch-that-rubbish': television critics apart, I have yet to meet anyone at all who watches it, which of course is part of the problem. Anyway, the Inalicious pleasure is of a fairly harmless kind. It is hard to believe that either Mr Jay
Or Mr Frost if he follows — will be ap- PlYing for supplementary benefit, and they will no doubt find other positions before long: ambassador to Buenos Aires and estate manager at Arundel, perhaps.
Seriously though, as Frostie used to say, as soon as the boardroom battle began there was a threat of intervention by the IBA. Why? Because that is the way we order these things. But why do we order them so? To grasp the full strangeness of commercial broadcasting in this country you have to imagine an Independent Newspaper Authority appointed by the Government to grant monopolistic fran- chises for newspapers, to regulate their con- duct, to intervene in internal disputes, and to exercise general supervision of what they publish. We should think that very odd in- deed. Speaking to a broadcasting seminar last year, Peter Jay foresaw the day when radio and television would be information media bought and sold just as freely of government restriction as books and papers. He is right. The technological revolutions — cassette and cable — have brought the day nearer and it may yet be a consolation to Mr Jay that his adventures at Camden Lock did too.
The silly season is months away, but it has been a fortnight of rum happen- ings. Did I really read that illegal betting on mouse racing is a growing problem? Did I really hear the band of the Grenadiers greet the Arab League delegation with a medley from The Magic Flute — starting with the 'March of the Priests'? Did a pub landlord 'known as The Sage of Fleet Street' really win £44,000 in slander damages after an altercation with a bookmaker? Part of the evidence in the action was that his stock fell so low that he 'even had to buy his own drinks in El Vino' with the curious sugges- tion that they were free before. It is easy to become obsessed by the laws of defama- tion; I merely add this remarkable result to a long list of recent defamation cases, usually libel rather than slander: Mr Telly Savalas, Princess Elizabeth of Toro and her fellow-countryman (in a separate action), Dr Obote, Mr Desmond Wilcox. It is just possible that if the caprice of juries is unabated — that if six-figure damages become commonplace — we may see the necessary statutory reform; but then MPs themselves are among the keenest libel litigants. Quite apart from damages, the mere threat of the law can be oppressive. Publishers are forced to suppress books, sometimes for good, sometimes until the book has lost its interest, and with no redress against the gold-digging plaintiff. Newspapers are harried into insincere retractions by really formidable an- tagonists. I was ruefully reminded of this by the death of Rebecca West. A remarkable woman and a wonderful writer, of course, but touchy, suspicious, conspiracy-minded and litigious to a degree, as we learnt a few years ago at the Spectator. Those who think that journalists whine too much about the libel laws may not know the experience of being sued — or pursued — by someone who is utterly determined, enthusiastic to use the law to resolve a literary dispute, and to whom time and money are no object.
Two birthdays fall, of exact contempor- aries. On Monday Rudolf Serkin will be 80. Always a tiny, delicate man with the look of an ascetic saint, he seems nowadays more frail than ever. Age has left its mark. At his Barbican concerts last week there were moments when a listener — especially one suffering from the modern obsession with technical perfection — might have wondered why, since I first heard him play in his sprightly early sixties, Serkin has seemed to me the greatest of pianists. At other moments the question was answered. They are still there: the nobility and delicacy of phrasing, the poetry, the sense of someone talking easily and directly to Mozart. That is greatness all right.
Our other octagenarian is of course Mr Malcolm Muggeridge. Not everyone reverences Malcolm. According to Mr Clive James, 'Hacks think him a good writer because he writes a refined version of what they write', which ought to put us in our place. Still, Evelyn Waugh thought Muggeridge an excellent writer and said so. Perhaps Mr James thinks himself a better judge than Waugh. For me, Waugh's praise is high praise, and in this case deserved. At the same time, unlike some of his younger chums, I can't take Malcolm very seriously as a mixture of Aquinas, Savonarola and Pascal. He is not a great philosopher (I'm glad to say). He is a supreme satirist in the full sense, a jester poking fun at the follies of the age, a farceur, a mordant, genially malicious wit. I thought of Malcolm the other day. We had been talking once about Rebecca West and her husband. 'Well, Henry did the only thing you could do if you were married to Rebecca,' Malcolm said. 'He went deaf.' Malcolm claims to long for death. I hope not; and I can't say that he behaves like a man weary of life, however much he may scoff at it. Many happy returns, and more to come.
Geoffrey Wheatcro ft
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