Another voice
Telegraph days
Auberon Waugh
Ten across. Militaristic toy in its older form (3,7). Obviously Tin Soldier, but I am afraid it won't do. By this I do not mean that it is not the correct answer. The first fits with Amin ('what he said when he threw Obote out); the second T fits with Agin ('convivial offer to which a teetotaller is commonly opposed); and the 'r' fits with Tartare ('sort of sauce expected of a low wench when age is raised'). Obviously Tin Soldier is the correct answer, but the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle is simply not good enough to engage the more intelligent, better educated minds of what was once an intelligent, highly educated country. Soon our wives will all start going mad for lack of intellectual stimulation. We will then have to start playing acrostics with them, and once again, national productivity will suffer.
Perhaps, once again, this is what the proletarian movement hopes to achieve by forcing us all to read the Daily Telegraph. Or it may just be that anything so excellent as The Times was seen as an insult to the less privileged, a calculated provocation in the class war. Why, then, did they close down the Sunday Times, too, a monument to proletarian triumphalism if ever there was one? Even now it has gone, poignant little reminders of its former horror come thumping through my letterbox for the favour of review: The Sunday Times Bedside Book (Deutsch 15.50); The Sunday Times Book of Body Maintenance (Michael Joseph f5.50). Disgusting; disgusting. There we are. Now let us turn back to the Daily Telegraph.
With a few honourable exceptions — perhaps a dozen — its staff writers do not appear to possess the sensitivity or even the intellectual grasp of their colleagues on The Times, although their hearts are generally in the right place. On Saturday, a curious leader appeared, at any rate in my edition, which has been causing me much trouble. It was headed 'The Snowdons' and started thus: 'WE OFFER CONGRATULATIONS to Earl and Countess SNOWDON [sic I and our best wishes for the happiness of their marriage.'
At first glance, this might seem -a harmless enough sentiment, if only WE could have got their names right, although I was brought up to believe it was indelicate to congratulate a woman on getting married. One congratulates the man, if that seems appropriate, and felicitates with the woman in other ways. But at any rate, the intention of this faux pas was kindly. If any of us feel that a woman of LADY SNOWDON's beauty, charin and talent might have done slightly better for herself, this is plainly not the moment to say so. Let us now examine the congratulations offered to LORD SNOWDON.
Well, yes, there would appear very good cause for congratulation here. At the age of forty-eight SIR ANTHONY CHARLES ROBERT ARMSTRONG-JONES, whose acknowledged talent is for taking photographs, has achieved a GCVO, an earldom, a viscounty and a beautiful sweet-natured wife some eleven years his junior. Many people find it hard enough to secure a pleasant and attractive wife nowadays; to secure an earldom is virtually impossible. SIR ANTHONY JONES'S was the last, coming just three months after SIR ANTHONY EDEN'S. To have achieved both under present conditions is well-nigh incredible. One looks at the situation of his nearest challenger, CAPTAIN MARK PHILLIPS CVO, and gives a hearty guffaw. Obviously, at moments like this, we wish LORD SNOWDON well and can even find it in our hearts to forgive him for the revolting bird cage he put up in Regent's Park during his first, heady months of power and influence. My only hesitation is on the point whether it is tactful at this stage, or would be congenial to his undoubtedly sensitive nature, to point out quite how well he has done. Rather than shower this small, victorious figure with compliments and congratulations I should have thought that the most fraternal posture would have been one of tactful, appreciative silence.
But the Daily Telegraph is seldom silent and never tactful. Its coverage of the industrial scene is admirably full, devoting almost as much space to exposing the brutality and stupidity of the unions as the Guardian and other left-wing newspapers devote to the National Front. How otherwise would we learn of events in Camberwell, where welldocumented allegations of brutality against workers in a reception centre for homeless people have led to threats by the Civil Service Union to close down all reception centres for homeless people throughout the country if these allegations are investigated? This is the sort of thing we should be reading at Christmas time, I feel. But pickets on all stables and wrecking of all mangers against homeless blacklegs will not be enough in the new mood of union militancy. The union is also demanding the instant dismissal of Professor David Don nison, chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, for suggesting that there might be an investigation. The union's secretary, Mr Leslie Moody, put it that the Professor has now become a 'fullyregistered non-person grade one'.
An arresting expression, I think we must agree. This, I suspect, is the true voice of workers' power, stripped of the half-baked Spectator 30 December 1978 Marxist rhetoric with which it is served up in the revolutionary press. But one finds It only in the Daily Telegraph. Speaking to a Sunday Times journalist a week ago — we were suitably dismayed. to see a National Front demonstration outside the Minehead magistrates court, with banners reading 'National Front against Buggery: Keep Perverts out of Politics' — asked why his chapel did not go and argue with the NGA Imperial Grand Wizard instead of wasting their time shouting at the management. He replied, reasonahlY enough, that nobody on the editorial side could talk to the machine room men, there was abarrier of mutual ineolly prehensibility. But this does not excuse _or so it seems to me — a failure of economic and class analysis which afflicts almost the entire journalistic profession. Our struggle is rwt against the management, whose profits are, up for grabs, but against the technical and blue collar unions, who not only take the greater part of the cake but also throngll their unchecked greed and crooked habits, are threatening to destroy the entire industry. The logical alliance is not between NGA and NUJ against the management' but between management and NUJ against the technical and blue collar unions. Yet the NUJ seems to sustain itself on the pathetic illusion of a common cause het.ween journalists and printing workers. Itl.s on this incompetent and outdated analrls of the class struggle that the NUJ's left-Wing leadership has allowed journalistic earningsf to slip catastrophically against those ac technical workers, and the editorial slice. u` the budget to slip against the production side's. This month my union's newsPaPer' Journalist produced a special issue to corn_ mem orate the NUJ provincial newspaP the ukTe. It A t stibllohratisorn onocomffoerreanlcoeng h report on which con tains the immortal sentence 'Abortioni delegates agreed, should be as vital a Labour policy as nationalisation or will, prehensive schooling,' and an even longei report supporting the 'Workers' Rev13 lutionary Party appeal to pay for its tins° cessful libel action against the Observer. t It is no good readingJ ournalist to find Or_ how many provincial weeklies are aPPen,„ ing without NUJ labour, often produced the editor alone. For that gloomy inf°,. mation we must turn to the Daily TelegraP trio. There is only one alternative as I see it, e .the NUJ's crossing the barricades. Weneff not a big enough union to picket the 03,,,.7 stations, but last week I happened to volt ai Cheshire home in Devon. It was an enviab Yd cosy place, the patients in their beds. ail wheelchairs struck me as among the nIce,.is people it would be possible to meet ilea111 all of them, I should guess, Daily TelegraP e readers. But just as whenever I visit th splendours of New York I am haunted'? Y,‘ the idea that it was specially built for t.u: hydrogen bomb, just as beautiful virgilid seem designed to be violated, so it seenitehe to me the Cheshire home implores e tribute of a picket. Why should NUPE hay all the best times?
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