Notebook
Payments to members of quangoes now total more than £20m. The news will not come as a surprise to anyone who has been Watching the proliferation of these interesting bodies. Quangoes — quasiautonomous national governmental organisations — have been one of the few successful growth industries of recent years. They certainly, as we learn, provide a useful f°,rtil of indoor relief for trade union officials. The excellent Mr Harry Urwin, deputy general secretary of the Transport and General, holds nine appointments; Mr Jack Jones no fewer than thirteen. A more useful reaction than outrage is to ask how these bodies — the Machine Tools Economic °evelopment Committee, the National Advisory Committee on the Employment °f Disabled People, the Food Standards C°111mittee —came into being and what they are supposed to do. And more than that, 110‘v they are supposed to be democratically Controlled. Many of the quangoes are beYond ministerial, let alone parliamentary, Control. This could have been foreseen. The ?r°totype for the quango is the nationallsed industry board. When the Attlee government was busy with its campaign of nationalisation there was a warning that the nationalised industry boards, as planned,
would be not merely unwieldy and
ndemocratic but outside the normal polit!Cal and social framework: in a phrase
a constitutional outrage'. The words were those of Aneurin Bevan. Which Member of the present Government will say that he was wrong?
Our third Bank Holiday in ten weeks at least Produced festive weather which I cele°rated by watching two days of cricket, Toligh very different matches. On Saturu, aY Private Eye played Aldworth, the Where its Editor (our television critic) il.ves. I cannot say that I gave much attention to the play — so little that a powerful ?over drive nearly knocked me out where I lay dozing after lunch. Man of the Match as, undoubtedly Mr Jeremy Deedes of the tsuallY Express, rather overdressed in an Eton '‘amblers sweater and with a handsome ,new bat. The bat, he told me, cost him £36 last week. It has started to earn its way: he
°lade 101, not easy in village cricket. But in tile shop his eye fell on the shop-keepers
Stelek-liSt. The wholesale price of the bat Wasclearly marked as £18. Is a hundred per cent mark-up usual in the sporting goods business?
M.iddlesex v Sussex on Monday was no more si!linulating than the frolics at Aldworth. 151It it was pleasant to see the Last Amateur keeping wicket for Middlesex. Michael Sturt has been a stand-by player for Middlesex for not quite as long as I can remember. He has never had an impressive batting average but he keeps wicket well up to county standard: on Monday we saw three good catches and a stumping. Yet Mr Sturt is an active businessman, managing director of the printers Lowe & Brydone (years ago when I was a lowly employee of a publishing house I found him a most efficient and good-natured sales director). He finds the time to play whenever Middlesex need him, and at the end of the season before last he played an important part in winning the Championship. 'Amateur' has become a pejorative expression, with overtones both of incompetence and snobbery. Watching Mr Sturt you remember the Franco-Italian etymology: someone who does Something because he loves doing it. I doubt whether we shall see much of that from Argentina.
Slightly overdoing it, I have just seen three operas in four days. Die Zauberflote at Glyndebourne and Tristan at Covent Garden (reviewed by Rodney Milnes on another page) were both given in German, while The Two Foscari at the Coliseum was presented, as usual there, in English. Glyndebourne has a special tradition of original language performance, of course, and it could be argued that Schikaneder's Flute libretto is of little literary distinction. Tristan is another matter. Some time ago Sir Claus Moser, Chairman of the Royal Opera, said to me, 'You don't really want us to do everything in English, do you?' to which the answer was, 'No, just more than you do at the moment.' The libretto for Tristan is an extraordinary piece of work, as I was reminded when I listened to Monday's broadcast text in hand. How many people in the Covent Garden audience really follow Wagner's German which is, to put it mildly, complex and unidiomatic? And yet the brilliant cast for this Tristan was — remarkable thing — entirely English-speaking. Is it inconceivable that they could be persuaded to relearn the words in their own language?
There is only one sensible tip for this year's Derby: do not have a bet until the day. It is not the most distinguished of fields, but at least we shall not see a short-priced favourite letting down his supporters. Racing enthusiasts will be able to name the last three Derby winners. Can they name the last three favourites? (Answer: 1975 Green Dancer, 6-4; 1976 Wollow, Evens; 1977 Blushing Groom, 9-4.) Even if every housewife in the country backs Piggott on Inkerman we should have a favourite starting at the longest price since Ksar at 5-1 in 1973, possibly as long as Lavandin at 7-1 in 1956. One must congratulate the bookmakers on their splendid start to the Flat season. Some people have unkindly suggested that it was little short of fraudulent to keep Try My Best in the betting after his flop in the Guineas, but it could equally be argued that if ante-post backers want to throw their money away then that is their .privilege. Starting prices are another mat
ter. I trust that I am right, and that they bet 6-1 the field or longer on Wednesday. Some SP books for big races have been scandalous lately. Win or lose next week, I shall be at work with my pocket calculator after the race to see what the Ring's take-out is.
Diplomatic news: an acquaintance has been delving among the Foreign Office records for the war years. He came across a letter which will not be included in any official printed volume but which deserves to be recorded. In 1943 our Ambassador in Moscow was Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr. He wrote on 6 April to a friend in England, Lord Pembroke: My Jeer Reggie: In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven. My days are probably darker than yours, and I need, my God I do, all the light I can get. But I am a decent fellow, and I do not want to be mean and selfish about what little brightness is shed upon me from time to time. So I proposed to share with you a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt.
'We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when Spring is upon us, but few of us would care to put it on Our cards. It takes a Turk to do that.'
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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