Political Commentary
Preambulations
Ferdinand Mount
If you wish to succeed in politics, one of the techniques you must master is the Misleading Preamble. This is the little phrase with which you clear your throat, warm up the hall and attempt to blunt the audience's response to the less palatable aspect of what you are about to say. The oldest of all Misleading Preambles is the lawyer's 'With the greatest respect, m'Iud' -which is a timehallowed softener for 'You've got it wrong, you old fool.' We have had a bumper week for Misleading Preambles. For example; Only a deep sense of loyalty to the Liberal Party has forced me to speak out ... There follows a stream of allegations calculated to propel the Liberal Party even further up the creek and keep it stuck in the mud. This has the shameless unctuousness of the best Misleading Preambles and in a lesser week would have won the greasy palm hands down. However, the competition is strong, and I am almost equally fond of an old favourite: I am not in the least interested in Mr Thorpe's private life, my only concern is ... This of course means 'I am fascinated by every detail of Mr Thorpe's private life, I suspect you are too and I intend to dish as much dirt as I possibly can'. This Misleading Preamble is familiar to students of the Profumo and Lambton affairs, and probably to historians of the Dilke and Parnell scandals as well. The pretext varies — security, honour in public life, the sanctity of marriage — but the cant-count is constant.
It doesn't matter much whether the target is guilty or innocent — or even whether the categories of guilt and innocence properly apply to his case. There never seems to be a point at which he can make a final statement and clear up the whole business without being buried under a fresh layer of accusations. Yet if the leaves are not swept up as soon as they fall, they rot the grass. How short the time allowed was made clear by the visible impatience of most leading Liberals earlier this week when they heard that Mr Thorpe's statement would be delayed, might even not be made at all because of legal difficulties. Yet made it had to be. Once set in motion, the game rolls on until all the pinballs have gone out of play into holes marked Vindication, Sub Judice or Resignation. The final stages cannot fail to do further damage to the Liberal Party let alone to Mr Thorpe himself. The Liberals have suffered disproportionately from the affair because they are a small party inexperienced in fighting off scandal.
All parties are now and then pestered by oddballs — pathetic, malevolent or both — who claim to have been ill-used by some party notable and threaten to make trouble. The standard routine for reasons both of party advantage and of fairness to the notable is to deal with such plaintiffs at the lowest level in the hierarchy, remedy their grievances if possible and otherwise tell them to go away and stay away. Scott clearly belonged in the go-away-and-stay-away category. Yet because of some strange illstarred combination of unworldliness, naive meddling and panic, the Liberal hierarchy allowed his accusations to mesmerise them and committed more and more leading Liberals to coping with 'the Scott problem' thus adding weight to his allegations while purporting to dispel them. Leave aside for the moment Andre Newton's allegation of a plot to kill Scott. If only one quarter of Peter Bessell's most recent statements are true — a plausible proportion —Norman Scott seems to have become a kind of collective obsession within the party. It is possible that resolutely ignoring him might not have worked much better, but could hardly have worked worse. All that can be said is that Scott had been running around making the same allegations for ten years or so without getting anywhere and might have gone on vainly making them for ever if the Liberals had not seemed to lend them substance by setting up a three-man commission to grill Mr Thorpe and by approaching Home Secretaries of both major parties about the matter. Instead of providing their leader with a protective shell of loyalty and silence, the Liberal hierarchy undermined him with doubt and hubbub, leaving him defenceless against the first casual inquiry.
At this agonising stage, it will be hard for the Liberals to recognise that they have helped to destroy their own credibility by their equivocations and vacillations. Almost the only person who seems to have shown unwavering loyalty to Mr Thorpe was that old ex-Liberal, Sir Harold Wilson, whose temporary derangement about South African security happened to fit in with his natural kindness to anyone in distress. The Liberals can no longer blame the South Africans, but many will continue to blame public hypocrisy and the malice of the media.
Unfortunately, the fact that hypocrisy has been sloshing all over the place ever since Norman Scott first got his allegations into print does not allow the easy way out — to dismiss the whole business with the Macaulay chestnut that 'we know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality.' For this too is a line not devoid of cant, though cant of a different sort. From the start, the story has had several consistent features which the Evening News report of the alleged plot to murder Scott and its repercussions have only emphasised. First, far from this being a vicious, orchestrated witch-hunt by the media to destroy Mr Thorpe, the press (and only certain sections of it, notably the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and Guardian) took up the matter very gingerly and has alternated between long periods of distaste for the whole business and short bursts of activity in following a rival's story.
Until the moment when the BBC finally put the Scott allegations on its lunchtime bulletins, many Fleet Street editors still had doubts about publishing anything at all — although they had sent reporters down to the West Country The general outline of the allegations had been known for five years or more. It was only when Scott repeated the allegations in court for the second time that they even came near to being published. As in the case of Profumo and Poulson, it took a court hearing, however tangential to the allegation, to detonate the bomb. Partly no doubt, this is because of the qualified privilege enjoyed by court evidence; partly it's distaste. Most newspapers and broad casting stations have no real enthusiasm for this kind of investigation, or for most kinds of investigation. The police don't seem to have been over-enthusiastic. We need not suggest that their inquiries were sat on by one or more Home Secretaries in order to conclude that they might have shown more persistence if the case had had no political dimension.
Oh, I nearly forgot. This was mini-Budget week. It often is these days. Why the hurry? After all, there is no crisis on, for once. And the new Parliamentary session doesn't begin until next week. The reason, it seems, is to give the government time to shove the tax concessions into the Christmas pay packet, likewise the old folks' Yuletide bonus, and• thus nestle more securely in the hearts of the people. It is rumoured in government circles that senior ministers are also working on a scheme to provide free mince pies. Meanwhile, the majestic sweep of this macroeconomic strategy has revived other well-loved Misleading Preambles: I believe there is room for a modest stimulus to the economy consistent with prudence... which, being interpreted, signifies: Start the printing presses and to hell with the money supply, there's an election round the corner. A somewhat newer preamble to reflation/inflation is: The people have a right to share in the fruits of steady sustained growth ... Growth, you may ask, what growth? The growth that is to come, says Denis, the jolly holly-wreathed Ghost of Christmas Present. But suppose it doesn't come? Do you want to condemn the British people to permanent stagnation, the Chancellor enquires, his voice throbbing with compassion, are you prepared to sit idly by and watch unemployment continue to rise? Mr Healey's cheek is so bottomless, his intellectual dishonesty so ripe yet unsquashable, that one can only silently hand him the greasy palm.
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