Political Commentary
And so to Brighton
THE most memorable thing about the Liberal Party Assembly at Southport was the breakfast bacon at my hotel; crisp without being burnt, correctly apportioned be- tween fat and lean, of excellent flavour and efficiently served. This is not an, oblique way of saying that there was nothing memorable about the Liberals themselves, though there wasn't very much; it is a spontaneous and unsolicited tribute, and it sums up for me the difference between charming, gentle, dignified Southport and the unspeakable horror just down the coast (you can see Blackpool Tower from the front at Southport), where the waiter at the vast, echoing prison in which I stayed came up and bellowed "Oo Seated you 'ere?' in my face . as I took my seat for a breakfast which was (eventually) served cold.
Cold breakfast, cold conference; warm break- fast, warm conference. At Blackpool, they cheered only Mr. Walter Reuther; at Southport, they cheered practically everybody at the slightest provocation, and frequently stamped on the floor. What is more, they had a card vote, Which is more than the TUC could boast, though the figures (145-142) were a trifle damaging to the official estimate of 800-odd delegates.
Enough of this shilly-shallying. What you are agog to hear is whether Taper thinks that Mr. Grimond will ever be Prime Minister. (En passant, one may perhaps remark that he would make a far more glamorous holder of the office than the present incumbent; that profile and that forelock had the youngsters swooning all over the Floral Hall, and a series of Rooseveltian fireside chats on the telly would have every Mum in the land rooting for him.) Well, TAper fears that there is at present little likelihood, and consider- ing the possibility that if the Promised Land were to be reached Mr. Philip Fothergill might be a Cabinet Minister, Taper's sorrow is not pre- cisely choking him. The Liberal Party's problems are, it seems to me, three in number; I shall enumerate them, and suggest solutions.
First is the inadequacy of their resources. Not merely their material resources; obviously they are short of money, offices, committee rooms, per- manent officials and all the other items that are so handy in a political party's kitbag these days. But once the snowball begins to roll (assuming that it does, of course) this problem will solve itself; Mr. Grimond can therefore safely leave it to the firm hand of time. No, where the shoe is liable to continue pinching is in the inadequacy of the human material. In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king; the party is so small and weak, and the charming matrons who sat knitting in the front roW so far from being able to serve as shock-troops, that it is possible for almost anybody to rise to staff-officer level. There are far too many perpetual undergraduates (quite apart from those who actually are under- graduates) in the Liberal Party, and far too many of them were listened to in a respectful silence, broken only by respectful applause. There is a young man on the Liberal Council, for instance, just down from Cambridge, who spoke for the Executive on Commonwealth policy; the onlY thing I cared to remember about him is that he was badly in need of a haircut, yet the delegates applauded as though he had just returned from Sinai with the Tablets of the Law. He polled, 7,000-odd votes at the last General Election, and in the hall there were dozens of him.
The second problem the Liberals face is the one I outlined last week. They lack aggressive- ness. It is all very well for Mr. Grimond, forelock cascading thrillingly over his eye, to announce in ringing tones that he plans to 'split the vote and unite the nation.' He would be better emploYed splitting a few heads. (I am still hopeful. by the way, that my offer to write his speeches will he accepted. Don't ring up and ask me when 1 pro' pose to start; you'll know without being told.) And the first thing he has got to do is to tale his waistcoat off. -I know Mr. Macmillan wears 1 a waistcoat, and so does Mr. Gaitskell; but theY are sitting on 300 Parliamentary seats apiece. And his waistcoat is typical of the diffidence of f. Mr. Grimond's approach; another trivial example (but it is the trivialities that make up the mosaic of a politician) is the fact that when he was due to make his big end-of-conference speech he Sat on the platform throughout the session which preceded it.
But the -third problem that the Liberals face; and the thorniest of all, is the amount of dean wood with which their frail shoulders are loaded' What on earth, for instance, is Sir Andrei McFadyean doing in the inner councils of the Liberal' Party? It is difficult to think offhand of ° more crustedly Right-Wing Tory in the country, except possibly Lord Waverley, whom he re' sembles in other ways too. His crab-apple face' looming down from the platform whenever he took the chair, bade fair to turn the milk in the tea-rooms sour at a distance of ninety paces, and, his manner was perfectly in keeping; he snaPPeu and growled at delegates, held up a hand iniPeei' ously when he thought the applause had gone nil long enough, and in general struck the most lurid contrast with the charming, gentle, milk-and' honey approach of Dr. Nathaniel Micklem, the new President of the party. And yet, for all his white hair and blue eyes and uprightness, Pe' Micklem is as incongruous at the head of a Pall fighting for power (or survival, depending (I° which way you look at it) as Sir Andrew. The snake must shed its skin. Was I dreaming: or did Mr. Grimond glance out of the corner at his eye at one or two of his colleagues on the platform as he came to his peroration on Satyr da'y? We have passed the point of no return. erbe, old lifebuoys which have kept this party afie°' so long are dropping astern, and in the next teld) years it is a question of 'Get on or get out,' an let us make it 'Get on.
No prizes are offered for naming the old life' buoys, or even the old lifeguirli; but drop aster° they must. Meanwhile, we who live out of our suitcases at conference-time are flinging the 'Brighton labels about with a carefree hand. Personally, 1 proP°' to find the Labour Party conference uproariously funny. For here they are, hammering on the very gates of the castle, with the defenders on top desperately short of boiling oil, stopping to debate whether, once inside, they shall rape the women before they rob the men, or vice versa. What Mr. Gaitskell, who is, after all, an intelligent man, thinks of some of the thunder-on-the-left brigade I do not know for certain (nor, if I did, would the printers of the Spectator agree to put it in type), but at a guess I would say he is itching to thrust Babs, for instance, head downwards into one of the slot machines on the pier and leave her there. For the frightful thing is that, if the Power to count on my seven fingers (remind me to tell you one day how I absent-mindedly patted the Attorney-General) has not wholly deserted me, Mr. Gaitskell and his plan are safe. The Minority for old-style nationalisation may be two million or even more; but a minority, I prophesy, it will be.
Yet it is this precise moment that the Left Chooses to start sniping! Somebody is going to rise and denounce the Executive as a row of
disused slag-heaps that ought to be tidied up, and if Mr. Macmillan, when the news is brought to him, does not choke to death laughing I shall be greatly surprised. What curses the Labour Party is not the fools (for they have no greater quota than their opponents), nor the Communists in the constituency associations, for their power is much less than King Street and the Tory Party would like to suppose, nor the necessity that has made strange bedfellows out of trade unionist and in- tellectual (quaere: is Mr. Cousins the first pro- duct of this marriage?); their trouble is simply copybook Freud. They have got the death-wish up to here; a large number of them suffer from a subconscious belief that it would be wrong to win an election, that the Socialist Party can only re- main simon-pure if it remains in Opposition, for all Government tends to corrupt, and a majority of 300 corrupts absolutely. The solution to the Labour Party's troubles, if there is anything in my belief, is not to be found in the block vote of the unions, but on the psychiatrist's couch. Unless, of course, the death-wishers are right?
TAPER
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