Another voice

Jams tomorrow?

Auberon Waugh

The last time I wrote about Sir James Goldsmith at any length was on 5 June 1976, but I was inhibited on that occasion by the fact that he was plaintiff in about sixty-five libel actions. He was also seeking a High Court injunction to restrain me from making adverse comments about himself or his solicitor until the litigation was settled. So I confined myself to commenting that he had a repulsively ugly face, speculating idly about the size of his virile member and experiencing surprise that he should seek an injunction against me, who had neither met nor written about him before.

When the application came to court, Goldsmith employed the unbelievably bril'liant Lewis Hawser QC to plead his case. Hawser did not dispute my comment about his client's face and had nothing to add to my tentative speculation about his other parts, but insisted that I had indeed written about him in Private Eye on 14 May 1976. He drew my attention to a sentence in which I discussed the famous libel action Dering v. Uris (1964 208 669): 'Obviously, Dering was ill-advised to bring such a libel action, even in England whose libel laws make it a haven for every sort of crook and pervert in public life.'

Although nobody was named, Mr Hawser felt that the description of 'pervert' must, in the circumstances, be taken to apply to a well-known politician, the description of 'crook' must be taken to apply to his client. I denied this, pointing out that there was no reason to suppose that Sir James was a criminal: that even if he had been one, he would by no means have been the only one around: there were also the Kray brothers, the Richardson gang, Mr Stonehouse, the Black Panther, Mr Poulson, the Cambridge Rapist, all of whom were protected at some time by the libel laws. In the course of his brilliant crossexamination, Hawser persuaded me to admit that I might easily have been thinking of his client when I wrote the sentence, but I still maintained that I had no reason to suppose Goldsmith was a criminal and that thinking about him was not the same thing as writing about him. Anyway. Hawser lost the case, and Goldsmith did not get his injunction. However, in another hearing it was said that he had sent people to search Private Eye's dustbins, which seemed odd.

Since then, as we all know, Goldsmith has failed in his attempts to buy the Observer and Beaverbrook Newspapers; he has announced his intention of launching a weekly news magazine called Now which will sell a 'planned' 250,000 copies for 40p to 50p each; finally, last Tuesday, he made a ridiculous speech to the Institute of Direc tors setting out what he thought was wrong with the country and what should be done about it. Next day, he paid for two full pages of the Daily Mail to reprint his ridiculous speech, and was hailed by the Sun — apparently gratis — as a national saviour.

Plainly the time has come to write about him again. From previous experience, I would say that the nice thing to be said about him is that he is absurd — not in the subtle way that many, if not most people in public life are absurd to those of superior intelligence like ourselves, but possessing a rich and obvious absurdity, like Barbara Cartland or Denis Howell. That is the nice thing. The nasty thing to be said about him is not that he is dangerous or sinister or even that he is particularly crude. Some of my best friends are very crude indeed. The nasty thing to be said about him is that, even by modern standards, he seems an extraordinarily sordid person.

Let us examine his latest behaviour in the light of the analysis. If we see his newspaper ambitions in the same light as his buying paper in the national press to air his ridiculous opinions — as a form of selfadvertisement, in fact — then it all becomes lovably absurd. Even more lovably absurd, it looks as if he is going to end up with egg all over his face at Now. I cannot believe there is anything like the demand for an expensive coloured news magazine which he and his sycophants imagine. If it settles at half the `planned' circulation, after promotion costs which have been put at between £2 million and £3 million, it will be doing very well indeed. You couldn't persuade the English to take L'Express any more than you could persuade the French to eat Marmite. I have nothing against the stuff, in fact I rather like it, but I wonder whether Sir James has ever tried giving it to a Frenchman. It is like putting salt on a slug.

But we must not neglect the bleaker side of this bionic grocer. The politics of Now will presumably be the politics bf its proprietor — roughly those of a Birmingham car salesman trying to be elected as Conservative MP in a Welsh mining valley. The man whom Goldsmith has appointed as Editor is Mr Anthony Shrimsley, who describes the politics of Now thus: 'While our news coverage will be agnostic, I'm not particularly in love with the present government — that's Jimmy's position, too — and I do think we have seen too much progress towards the corporate state. We won't set up a Berlin Wall, however. There will be room for alternative views.'

So that is Jimmy's position, too — what a coincidence! Elsewhere, I have read that Shrimsley finds himself `enthused' by Jimmy's ideas. What a happy circumstance! I remember Shrimsley best as a touchingly loyal Labour man on the Mirror's political staff. Later, he became a touchingly independent political editor on the Sun. Now he is a touchingly loyal free enterprise man — and that's Jimmy's position, too! We must wait and see before deciding whether the choice of Shrimsley belongs to the sunny or dark side of Goldsmith's temperament.

So we come to Goldsmith's Message to the Nation and Programme for National Recovery, spelled out in his ridiculous speech and reprinted at great expense in the Daily Mail and Sunday Express. Here is my summary:

British industry is up the creek. We are getting poorer. Our influence in the world has declined. The state has encroached too far. The unions are too powerful. Emigration and immigration have occurred. Our freedom is threatened.

The reasons for this are constitutional, administrative and fiscal. Selection of parliamentary candidates is undemocratic, middle classes controlling the Tories, unions controlling Labour. The House of Lords is inadequate to the tasks of a Second Chamber. The House of Commons is not competent to run the state industries. Our personal taxation system discourages enterprise, industry etc.

This is the Goldsmith solution. 1. Primary elections for candidates. House of Lords to be reformed and strengthened. 1. State's power to be decentralised and reduced. 3. No more immigration. 4. United Europe. 5. We must cast away false ideology' [sic]and insist on 50 per cent maximum income tax (earned or unearned), capital transfer tax, etc, etc.

If only Goldsmith had spent less time enthusing his employees and more time listening or reading, he would know that all these proposals have been debated over the years, in the Spectator and elsewhere. The objections to them, of which he is apparently unaware, are as follows:

Short of revolution, constitutional reform can onlY come about through the House of Commons which has no desire to reform itselfor reduce its powers. New candidates professing Goldsmith's views on candidate selection before existing selection committees will nor be selected. Public opinion has no method of making them do so short of revolution, and our sort of chaps aren't revolutionists. We must therefore await either a genuine revolution or the physical collapse of government, law and order before launching our counter-revolution. Immigration has nothing to do with it — mention Of the subject reveals no more than a sordid and futile desire to win votes for non-existent parliamentarY candidates in the West Midlands. The only effective or remotely possible proposal in Goldsmith's list is (IF ending of penal taxation, but there are no votes in It. Labour don't want to end these taxes and the Conservative don't quite dare, for fear of losing electoral. favour. Like our Jimmy they are more interested in power than in money, and few are as rich as he.

Goldsmith does not address himself to the one great question of our time which is how to defeat the industrial power of the unions: should the police be given batons of 12 ins (30.5 cm s) or 18 ins (45.7 cms); should Chief Constables who surrender to mass pickets be quietly removed or publicly hanged? These are the great questions of the day, but Goldsmith is too self-absorbed even to recognise them as such. Instead he waffles on about immigration and about the 'vast classless mass of the British people who believe in conservative principles'. What piffle. Has Jams never been north of the Trent, to Liverpool or Glasgow or Manchester? No human being in England is classless, only animals. On balance I do not feel that Sir James Goldsmith is a serious rival to my cousin Bernard Dru as national leader. Now I suppose I had better post an all-night guard on my dustbins.