POLITICAL COMMENTARY
Back in the old routine or, Opposition Follies
PETER PATERSON
In spite of Harold Wilson's safely distant predictions about a woman becoming Prime Minister one of these days, there remains a stubborn streak of misogyny in the Labour party, never more marked than when Mrs Barbara Castle, who at one time might have nurtured such an ambition, steps forward to play her part. On Monday, trade union flag day at the Labour party con- ference, she had to sit for an hour and a half while a lot of trade union leaders and one or two politicians got even with their mothers by attacking her in a style they would not use against each other—witness the easy ride given to the party's biggest ministerial failure, Mr (now of course, such is the weird scale of punishment and reward in politics, Lord) Greenwood earlier the same clay—or even against their opponents. Mrs Castle brings out the beast lurking within such normally kindly men as Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers' Union, Hugh Scanlon of the engineers, boilermaker Danny McGarvey and nice Stan Orme, who has the softest heart (not head) of anyone on the left of the Parliamentary party.
There is, of course, a kind of exasperated affection for Mrs Castle among her political colleagues as well as her enemies, an ad- miration for her qualities of courage and perseverance, an appalled respect for her recklessness and her will 'to dominate. But on Monday in Blackpool no one spoke up for her as she sat on the platform enduring with an uneasy, forced smile a concerted attack on her record as Secretary for Employment and Productivity unequalled certainly since Hugh Gaitskell drew the firepower of the left on his own brave, but less lonely figure. Like a bunch of Red Guards hanging Anthony Grey's cat, Barbara's critics were out to humiliate her as well as to extract an apology and retraction for In Place of Strife, together with a promise that she would go into action unreservedly against the not dissimilar pro- posals now being put forward by the Conservative government.
'One doesn't know what Barbara will say in reply to this debate,' said Mr Orme, turning his back momentarily on the sea of faces in front of the rostrum to fix Mrs Castle with an angry eye and a pointing finger. 'She will have to reject her past policies. If she is going to be credible in the House of Commons it will have to be farewell to her past policies ...'
All the while, Mr Ian Mikardo, acting as chairman in the absence, through illness, of Mr Arthur Skeffington, sat impassively, inter- vening not to deplore unfraternal personal attacks on his colleague, nor even to rebuke Mr Scanlon for discussing another resolution altogether to the one being debated, but merely to make occasional announcements about other items of conference business as irrelevant as Mr Scanlon's breach of con- ference etiquette.
Mr Mikardo, who had started as a promis- ingly careful, courteous and patient chair- man should have taken to heart a notice on the wall of Yates's Wine Lodge, a hostelry much frequented by delegates seeking a change from the gaudy splendour of the Empress Ballroom, informing the clientele, 'Our staff have instructions not to tolerate intemperance in any form'. Mr Mikardo tolerated rather too much intemperance from Mrs Castle's persecutors.
Not that these speeches were entirely unrelieved by humour and eccentricity. Mr Lawrence Daly, the miners' union leader, became so lyrical about his underpaid mem- bers that he seemed at any moment about to tell us that there was blood on the coal in our cellar, and an old age pensioner almost leapt to the rostrum as soon as he had finished his speech to declare, near to tears, that she was ashamed of the comfort in which she was living. And Mr McGarvey, continuing the semantic tradition established by his predecessor, the late Ted Hill—who once told a startled audience he was address- ing on the subject of the nuclear club, 'we don't want to go down into that bear garden among all those gorillas'—informed us that the British government is facing the problem of 'a hot potato across the Irish Sea'. This phrase had me worrying for a while as I tried to work out which tenor used to sing that one, but Mr McGarvey had a further verbal treat for us, using a delightful euphemism to accuse the Prime Minister of making 'blatant promises'.
Mr Jack Jones, also, seemed ready to join the National Union of Phrase Makers and Cliché Polishers with his warmly applauded assault on 'pampered academics, journalists who dishonour their profession with snide sneers and downright lies' and, slightly lamely, 'some politicians'. Mr Tom Jackson of the Post Office Workers, once described
in this column as lovable, also got into the act with his description of Mr Heath as a 'prim, proper, prejudiced politician, the invisible man of Downing Street'. Alto- ' gether, the union men were having a great deal of fun, but it was Mrs Castle's blood they were after, not Mr Heath's, nor, curiously, Mr Wilson's—for it was, after all, he who put Mrs Castle up .to. her Union. bashing last year and who then added to his party's troubles by being careless enough to lose the general election.
Mrs Castle, however, had to carry the can. and bravely she did it, stalling off her pur- suers time and again with her rousing, if not altogether convincing, attacks on her suc- cessor, Mr Robert Carr—whom she seemed at one interesting moment to be accusing of allowing full rein to laissez-fart' (on check. ing this point I found that a trick of the acoustics had delivered the word `fight' in this garbled way to my part of the hall). Her resolution began to fail her as she ran out of ammunition to fire at the Tories and had to reply, however briefly, to the debate. Gradually she forced out the words the unions were waiting for, almost through clenched teeth. Yes, she would oppose Mr Carr's Industrial Relations Bill, yes, there had been political revulsion against Labour's prices and incomes policy, certainly we had all made mistakes in the past ...
Mrs Castle's hour of humiliation smoothed the way for Mr Wilson's tricky task the next morning in facing his sceptical and disap- pointed party. Someone else had eaten crow in his stead, the Brutus figures who would undoubtedly like to get rid of him if only they could accept any likely successor, have had a practice run, but Harold will survive for the time being. He betrayed his appre- hension at living in such a dangerous world as he gabbled the first few sentences of his speech (thank you, Harold, for that massive speech,' said chairman Mikardo afterwards with a certain lack of grace) but he soon settled into his stride.
For the first half the delegates were treated to a return performance by a popular old performer. All the old jokes were there, and were duly rewarded with applause, but some of the old zip and sting had gone— the Archie Rice syndrome, perhaps. And there were a few new, tentative, as yet unpolished quips to be tried out in this increasingly friendly atmosphere. The Government, after their first week, had pulled the blankets over their heads and hoped the problems would go away. (Ap- plause.) `The only recorded case in zoology of hibernation in the summer.' (Loud and prolonged applause.) But some of the stitches were showing: you cannot lambast a new government for doing nothing in its first three months in office and still cling to the excuse that success eluded your own government because 'in 1964 we came to office in the middle of urgent and immediate problems which never gave us the time and the opportunity to work out the necessary approach'. After the jokes and the alibis, the usual evasions over Europe, the anger over arms for South Africa and appeasement in Rhodesia, the new thinking. Good serious stuff, statesmanlike even, and literate. The problem of the environment, to take one example from this part of the speech, was psychological as well as physical. `You can pollute a man's soul, a child's dreams, just as you can poison the water and the air around him . . .' Harold, the most resilient man in politics, is back, at least for a while, and the nightmare of 18 June is fading
at least for a while,
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