4 SEPTEMBER 1976, Page 6

Another voice

Sad state of the Right

Auberon Waugh

Still chuckling over the July trade figures, I was brought up short last week by a leader in the Daily Telegraph. It is easy, when one is happy, to forget how much misery there is in the world, and this was an unwelcome reminder of all the panic, resentment, hysteria and sheer wilful stupidity which has come to characterise the British Right, at a time when every historical and economic portent is inexorably in its favour.

The leader concerned-1 cannot believe it was the work of my old friend Bill Deedes, whom I have never, in sixteen years' acquaintance, once seen remotely the worse for drink—rpurported to discuss some television programmes of mine, some of which had been reviewed quite politely by the Telegraph's various television critics. Not content with finding them ina'dequate, and the work of a 'ninny', the anonymous leader-writer went on to suggest that they were part of a gigantic conspiracy between television moguls (Lord Grade? Lord Windlesham?) and the IBA to keep intelligent. hard-hitting right-wing commentators (like. we must suppose, the leaderwriter himself) off the air.

The tone echoed almost exactly an even more intemperate article which had appeared the day before in the Evening Standard, signed by Max Hastings. But Hastings. at least, had the grace to end his piece with an embarrassingly direct and almost tearful plea to the BBC to renew his contract with them. Where the Telegraph leader-writer was concerned, his anonymity meant that the little cry of pain he gave had exactly the effect of the pieces of soiled lavatory paper which used to be sent anonymously through the post to such as Mr Malcolm Muggeridge 'after he had dared criticise the Queen on television.

Many years ago I remember dining with Sir Arnold Lunn. a most genial host but already. I should guess, well into his eighties at the time of the dinner party. He told me that he had challenged David Frost to put him on his programme. He would refute the little whippersnapper point by point, he said. He had all his answers ready. But of course the young pipsqueak was too scared. He didn maw to A now the right answers.

Sir Arnold, as I say. was far too genial a man to adopt the petulant, aggressive, underdog whine which has become such a painful characteristic of serious right-wing commentators nowadays. They will not adjust themselves to the Simple proposition that nobody wants to listen to them, or, as Sir Arnold put it, nobody wants to know. It is bad enough to be bored by left-wing zealots day in and day out on television without being bored by their right-wing equivalents, too. Ideally, of course, we would prefer to be bored by neither, but it is a sad fact that the left is more coherent and more powerful in the media. But anybody who doubts that a run of serious, right-wing programmes would do the right-wing cause anything but harm is living in a world of his own.

Unless I am very wrong, the mood of the country at the present time is an extraordinarily lighthearted one. Everyone accepts that we are heading for economic ruin, and nearly everybody has a pretty shrewd idea of the reason for it: reckless overspending by local and national government, a tax system and a system of industrial relations which combines with a rate of inflation to make Britain a country where it is quite literally insane to save or to invest.

But we also know that there is nothing to be done about it. The unions can and will obstruct any course of action designed to halt the gadarene procession, no matter which party is nominally in power. Any cuts in public expenditure (except, of course, in defence) will be opposed, and victoriously opposed, by the unions, as will any attempt to reform the tax system out of its present punitive and confiscatory postures, while any further attempt to reform the system of industrial relations after Robert Carr's pathetically inadequate measure will bring the country to a dramatic full stop.

So all the finest rhetoric and most persuasive right-wing argument is a waste of time. We must wait for events to take their course. The present system simply does not have the seeds of its own rejuvenation and deliverance within it—least of all in the person of Mrs Thatcher, who has already announced her intention of proceeding in a spirit of cooperation with the unions, or, in other words, of obedience to their orders.

Mrs Thatcher and the whole Conservative Party can only be described as yet another disastrous area of the British scene. Instead of meeting Mr Callaghan's extraordinarily unprincipled Scottish initiative with the obvious unprincipled response— that if he proceeds with it, the Tories will pledge complete independence for Scotland, and send all thirty-nine Scottish Labour MPs off with the Scot Nats into a Gaelic wilderness of their own, she dithers about like a Daily Telegraph leader-writer suffering from the worst extremes of persecution mania.

If I am right, and the best course of action for a sane man at the present time is to stock up his cellar and chuckle quietly over a glass of port, then the best 1 can do in justification of this posture is to adumbrate a likely sequence of events. Presumably, Mr Healey's latest gigantic loan is the last we shall receive. Even if 4 further loan be negotiated the conditions attaching to it would be too severe for our present political and industrial relations system to contain.

At any rate, most foreign holders of sterling believe it to be our last loan. When they finally suspect that Britain has not nut her house in order, and has no intention of doing so, they will descend on that loan in a concerted rush which will leave the pound at parity with the dollar, with no reserves in the Bank of England and no immediate prospect of investment from any source.

That is the moment when the country must choose between a Leninist programme of reconstruction and a Salazarist one. 1 do not personally believe that more than three months' trade figures on the July model are required to bring it about, possibly one or two will do the trick. At the present titreI have no doubt in my own mind that the country will choose Salazar rather than Lenin. This may be despite the constant stream of left-wing propaganda on television, or.it May be in part because of it, but most of all it will be because all the more agreeable left-wing solutions will be seen to have failed.

All that is required in the meantime is that the absurd Mrs Thatcher should be kept out of office, and the odious Max Hastings with his boring and irrelevant right-wing opinions should be kept off television. Even if it makes Telegraph leader' writers more miserable and more paranoid than ever, it is a price we must be prepared to pay. Incidentally, it is instructive to compare the grinding humourlessness and persecution mania of the Telegraph leader' writer with an amusing article by Keith Waterhouse which appeared in the DadY Mirror next day.

'When 1 came back from holiday a row weeks ago I was told that there had been 3 right-wing backlash in my absence. 1 felt for a moment like one of those African leaders who is overthrown by the arMY while visiting his cousin Ngumba country. Investigation showed that the backlash in question consisted almost entirely of Mr Auberon Waugh, a professional buffoon, standing on a soap box behind the wall 0f his estate at Combe Looney in the back' woods of Somerset and making hideou5 faces at the passing townies...'

Oh yes, I think the spirit of the times is preponderantly a light-hearted one. I onlY hope Keith can keep smiling through the times ahead, as I undoubtedly shall.