Political commentary

Of spies and social democrats

Ferdinand Mount

Niceness, says the Prime Minister sounding Passably like Nurse Cavell, is not enough. ,No, but it makes a change. Besides, if you insist on launching a new party at nine in the morning, you need as much good humour as You can muster. For those who like their politics redblooded, the Connaught Rooms are not the Place. Everything is pastel and spaced out. The studio audience of Social-Democratic zealots is stacked in a gallery about 'half a nine away at the back of the ballroom. When Shirley Williams says that lots of their Policies are 'not necessarily popular', you have time to think 'Isn't that the sort of thing they ought to be applauding?' before a — well, burst is too violent a word — an emission of moderate applause travels back to your ears under the lilac, Eastbourne-rococo vault. Behind the television cameras, a Social-Democratic artist with I curly auburn hair is standing at an easel Painting the historic scene in very thin oil Paint. This is no place for impasto, either. „ On the platform you have the Four. Seated at an angle to one side, you have the Dozen, the other Socdem MPs. Seated at a desk opposite is the press officer who is running the show. Everyone is tidy and wearing dark suits and sitting very still. My advice to the artist would be to aim for the general austere effect of one of those Dutch Pictures of the Elders of the Kirk of Averkoffdrop. Only the cameramen surging around the platform inject an untoward been of vulgarity, as though the kirk had been invaded by the production team of alankety Blank. At this stage, old-stagers start muttering 'Where's the passion?' and 'It's a bit early for me, old boy.' Can an occasion so affable and temperate be 'real politics'? Where are the grotesques, the bores, the monomaniacs, the drunks, the bullies who make Up the hard core of any serious political Party? Is the defection of the entire high command of the Fabian Society enough to compensate? It is all somewhat baffling. The Social Democrats don't merely not answer our questions— we are used to that—they rebuke us for asking them. Surely politicians are Supposed to start by saying, 'That's a very Interesting question'. Not here they don't. A leader? Bill Rodgers says, 'People are SO stuck on the old parties that they are asking that sort of question'. Later in the day, David Owen even suggests they Might carry on indefinitely with a collective leadership — and, I suppose, have a fourPerson (they've o r _Quaternity. Party sources got those already) ask us to be charitable and assume that Dr Owen was tired. But surely these are supposed to be the chaps who make others look tired. My own theory is that Dr Owen will be the first to crack under the strain of having to be nice.

An economic policy? Roy Jenkins says he doesn't believe in trying to reduce government borrowing during a recession. But he doesn't believe in 'rash finance' either. Pity, a Rash Finance Party might do rather well at the polls. It always has in the past.

A policy about public schools? Mr Jenkins says that David Owen and he don't believe it is practical or right to forbid private education by law. Shirley Williams does. Goody, our first split. But Mrs Williams ups and says, with the utmost sincerity and niceness, that she hopes some' less 'far-out' solution can be found. Like I what? Either you ban it or you don't ban it, one might think — but that is just the sort of outdated think-style we must rid ourselves of.

A policy about anything much (except the Common Market, the Third World and immigration)? Mr Jenkins says 'the country has been suffering too much from `manifesto-itis'. This receives the most nearly immoderate emission of applause from the distant gallery. Which is odd, because it isn't true. Manifestoes normally contain as few concrete promises as the party leaders can gdt away with. Anyway, how much does any of this really matter? The SDP's prospects do not depend on its policy which is relevant only insofar as it confirms the impression they' are respectable, sensible, patriotic and I relatively normal people. In fact, what is vital is that they should not seem obsessed with the minutiae of dogma. Their whole purpose must be to de-intensify and to , domesticate politics, to take it away from the committed and the committee. In a letter to the Guardian,Conrad Jameson, the pollster, objects to SDP wheezes like party membership by credit card and instant referenda by computer, on the grounds that they give 'passive' party members too much power and 'make party democracy meaningless'. The objection, he says, is the same as the objection to opinion polls: 'The mandate is taken in the dark of the doorway rather than in the open light of the forum.' Subtract the loaded metaphor about darkness and light, and you have the best argument for the Social Democratic Party: that people should not be forced to attend endless meetings in order to be hectored by emotionally warped bullies, and that it should be possible to have their views made., known and taken into account by less cumbersome and time-consuming means.

Here, I think, the first effects of the SDP come into view. Overnight, the Labour Party has lost a sizeable fraction of the philanthropic middle class the Guardianreading, Tawney-worshipping, South Africa-boycotting, rambling, Hampstead intelligentsia which has given us so many laughs. Small loss, tough eggs in both Labour and Conservative Parties will say. How many divisions has Anthony Sampson? Yet it is one more link gone with the liberal, non-Marxist tradition of the Labour Party.

And this launching? Risible certainly. Too many people from the ad agency wearing badges and bearing 'press packs'.

But millions of people now have to attend similar ghastly conferences and seminars wearing badges and fixed smiles and laden with folders full of 'literature'. Such things are normal.

By contrast, scarcely any ordinary person attends an occasion one tenth as bizarre as the Prime Minister's statement to a crowded Commons on Sir Roger Hollis the same afternoon. While the rest of the nation was rocking with innocent mirth, Mrs Thatcher was heard in a silence of the utmost reverence. There we all were nodding our heads: grave allegations. . . Burgess, Maclean. . access to classified information . . . Philby, Blunt . . certain leads . prima facie case . . Lord Trend . . . Chapman Pincher. . . hitherto undetected penetration by hostile intelligence agencies . . . Mr Pincher . . . Lord Trend.

Not one person rose (even if the Speaker had allowed it, which he wouldn't have done, as he closed the questioning with startling promptitude) to question the whole rigmarole. Even Michael Foot had suddenly been afflicted with a bad go of responsibility. This was unkindly said to be because his old friend Tom Driberg had been named as a spy.

That sounds implausible. After all, nobody ever dreamed that Driberg was not a spy. One of ours or one of theirs? Mr Pincher, I note, now seems to think that in his later years Driberg preferred the KGB. If true, I regard this as a plus for British intelligence, on the principle that every spy you lose is a sign of sanity gained. The best thing that happened to the US in years was the disgracing of the CIA.

The vast apparatus of the CIA and its ability to smother the brain in voluminous 'intelligence appreciations' of dubious value prevented several US Presidents from an intelligent appreciation of the true state of affairs in foreign countries like Iran and Vietnam. In Britain, the direct access to the Prime Minister still enjoyed by the head of the security services is bad for both sides. The spies are confirmed in an inflated sense of their importance. The Prime Minister is liable to be carried off into a fantasy world in which he or she stands alone between Britain and the knavish plots of hostile powers.

When Sir Anthony Blunt was unmasked, Mrs Thatcher was brisk and candid, and seemed to have grasped that there was no gain to her in muffling the ghosts of the past. This time I thought she had simply swallowed her brief and had not paused to think what on earth was the point of making a long statement which amounted to saying only: we don't think Sir Roger Hollis was a Russian spy, but, if he was, we did our best to find out.

It would have been better to downgrade the whole business by giving the facts in a short statement from Downing Street. Better still to appoint a junior Minister for Spying in the Civil Service Department and to put all spies through the normal civil service selection machine, publish an annual report from the Ministry, reducing clandestine activities to the minimum. Military intelligence should of course be the responsibility of the military and staffed by servicemen.

Alas, repeated exposure to these briefings from the head of the Secret Service carries its own terrible radiation hazards; you begin to believe that all this juvenile rubbish has some indispensable value; you start saying things like 'In an open society we must have security services and they must necessarily operate partially in secret.' The whole point of an open society is that we don't have to.