POLITICAL COMMENTARY

PETER PATERSON

I had intended this week to write about Lord Gifford's attempt to secure asylum in Britain for United States soldiers who have deserted to avoid service in Vietnam: it is the kind of liberal, humanitarian and hope- less cause that, thank God, still finds pro- motors in Parliament. Since then, however, I have lamed that this is to- be the, last `Political Commentary' I shall write for the SPECTATOR, and, therefore, the last public opportunity I shall have to reply to the attack made on me a week ago in this journal by 'a Conservative'.

Normally one would ignore any assault from this quarter, the anonymous command post of Mr Enoch Powell's most passionately woolly supporter, whose bleat is infinitely worse than his bite. My reason for paying any attention to 'a Conservative', whose tire- some anonymity I shall respect so that he can continue to enjoy at least a degree of respectability among his political friends, is that his criticism of me was yet another variation on the tired old tune he's always playing: what we might call the Enoch Emperor Waltz.

In his anxiety to clobber me, and pre- sumably in an attempt not to overstate his case (an unavailing precaution, as we shall see), 'a Conservative' allows a slight discord to interrupt his harmony on this occasion. 'Our difference,' he says, 'with Mr Paterson is partly that we believe, as he does not, that Mr Powell has a future, though not, obviously, as Prime Minister.' (My italics.) No one who has followed the contributions of 'a Conservative' over the past couple of months, a tortuous journey interrupted only by that brilliant master of literary pastiche `another Conservative', would have assumed that he had such modest ambitions for his idol.

My antagonist then takes issue with my `politicaLinstincts' which, he asserts, prevent my seeing that Mr Powell embodies 'the moderation, efficiency and modernity of Tory policies'—a phrase which he thinks I applied to Mr Heath. I did not. What ,I did say, in an article ridiculing the preposterous claim by Mr Powell that Mr Heath is afraid of him, was that at one time Mr Heath believed that Mr Powell's views on coloured

immigration would alienate the people that the Tory leader was trying to impress with such a picture of his party. That process of alienation did not go far enough to prevent Mr Heath winning the election and becoming Prime Minister, and I argued that he now has so many frightening problems that he could afford to ignore the challenge to his leadership from a politician he ha's 'civet!" taken and overwhelmed and buried.'

That does not mean, of course, that Mr Powell has given up, or acknowledged defeat, or thrown in the towel, merely that Mr Heath has no need, in my judgment, to • fear him. But the rest of us are entitled to harbour legitimate fears of Mr Powell and his intentions, and to wonder where his frustration and disappointment, harnessed to considerable resources of energy and dema- goguery, will drive him. Perhaps even 'a Conservative' shares such fears of Mr Powell in the wilderness for he appears to argue in his convoluted way that Mr Powell should be taken into the administration by Mr. Heath. `Any leader who survives a long time, like Baldwin or Macmillan, has a number of reconstructions, sometimes having to replace colleagues he knows and likes by colleagues he doesn't like at all ...', he comments wist- fully.

Is there the slightest sign that Mr Powell is preparing himself for a reunion with Mr Heath and membership of this Conservative government'? The tone of his recent speeches does not encourage such a view. Indeed, it is possible to detect a continued note of paranoia, a disturbing preoccupation with madness and insanity running through his pronouncements, on the lines of his 'We must bs mad, literally mad ...'-comment on the colour problem he helped, as Minister of Health, to create, and his repetition of phrases like 'We have lost touch with reality', his fondness for the hoary 'Those whom the Gods would destroy .. .' and last weekend's psychiatrically significant, 'The citadel which is under attack is our own minds - .

But it is not what 'a Conservative' is fond of calling Mr Powell's 'rhetorical resources' that worries me about this maverick and somewhat tragic politician, nor his penchant for street-corner psychiatry. Wittingly or not, the Member for Wolverhampton South West personifies a strong national tendency towards the idea of a Lost Leader—a new Churchill, or Drake, or King Arthur, or even for a British de Gaul's. Now, to me, the very idea of the existence of a single power- ful individual who can arrive, like a knight on horseback, a new St George, to deal— at a stroke, if you wish—with all the prob- lems of a complex industrial society re- presents an escape from reality, a deliberate turning away from the concept of respon- sible democracy. -

My charge against Mr Powell is that he feeds this vision, more than half hypnotised by the promise it holds out for him if only the right conditions develop, conditions in- volving racial war in this country on American lines, of a left wing conspiracy to disarm us all, of secret enemies in our public service, and so on. Having erected the targets, Mr Powell then snipes at them, and

in the process, the idea that they are real bogeymen, that our country .really is in

danger, begin to take root. What is more natural than for the simple-minded then to recall who it was who warned of these

terrible dangers, the only politician who could see beyond the end of his nose, the only man with the honesty and the courage

and the integrity to speak out when all the

others were engaged in their sham parlia- mentary battle, immersed in their conspiracy to conceal the truth from the British people? Mr Powell is a logician, certainly, but the logic does not apply to the difficult prob• lems he exploits and over-simplifies, but to the hoped-for progress towards power of a messianic politician unbalanced by failure.

The British parliamentary system is cer• tainly in trouble. The fashionable view of politics is the extra-parliamentary one, the

street demonstration, the sit-in, the unofficial strike, the carefully calculated weekend speech. Political journalism—and I plead as

guilty as anyone—has beCome accustomed to being hand-fed, daily, for nearly six years

by a Prime Minister to wham the publicity surrounding the shadow was _much more important than the substance, so it is difficult to get accustomed to Edward Heath's laconic and unstylish approach. The belief in an economic crisis—at a moment when for the first time in a generation we have no worries over the balance of payments—has been allowed to gain ground, and Mr Powell's portentous remarks about the dangers of inflation have joined the other scares that he is so adept at exploiting. Franklin D. Roosevelt, possibly plagiarising, said in his first inaugural address in 1933 that his nation had nothing to fear but fear itself. Fear. however, is a political commodity, and we should train ourselves to recognise its sales• men.

And so we return tti`a Conservative' and to the question of whether he overstates his argument. It probably doesn't matter very much anyway, and since no one would waste much time muzzling a sheep, it is worth allowing him one more bite: ... we [I do hope that is not the editorial we] regard its treatment of Mr Powell as a test cast of the present Government's integrity. We are sure that entry into Europe combined with a further rebuff to Mr Powell would be deeply resented and we doubt very much . . • whether we would go on supporting a Heath government if Mr Heath allowed this com- bination of things _to happen.' Vox poplin,

vox multonem! •

My final word of advice to 'a Conserva- tive' and my farewell to the readers of the SPECTATOR is a reply to his bewildered re- mark, 'We don't knots,- how Conservative Mr Paterson claims to be.' Vulgar abuse. Mr 'a Conservative', will get you nowhere.

Note: Mr Peter Paterson chose to make. and to mark, his departure. from this particular page in this fine, spirited way, as he was per- fedly entitled to do. Had he wished, he could have continued to write the 'Political Com- mentary' for a further few weeks. His disagreement with 'a Conservative' has nothing to do with his departure, so far as The SPECTATORls concerned. In view of one of Mr Paterson's remark,. it must be pointed out that when 'a Con' servative' writes in the first person plural he refers to his friends and associates and is not of course employing what Mr Paterson calls `the editorial we'. Mr Paterson need there- fore have no fears in this regard.r--Ediwr'

$P_ECTATOR, •-