VIEWPOINT

Elections I have known-2

GEORGE GALE

It is easier to recall by-elections than general elections and I suppose this is because they are more concentrated. You get to know the place, its people, the candidates, because you have nothing else to do but to look at them and listen to them. At general elections I seem to have been running around the coun- try standing still: that is, dashing from one

huge hall to another, but always ending up at a press table below banks of flowers, looking up at frequently indelicate politicians' wives' legs and listening to the same speech and the same rapturous applause. (I am not, in- cidentally, a natural voyeur: but if you have heard the same speech before, or come to that if you have the text in front of you and you know it's going to be a bore, you can easily find yourself with nothing better to do than to gaze, spellbound and with gruesome fascination, upwards through the flowers at some pair of proudly splayed legs.)

Such generic memories apart, it is curious

incidentals that lodge, almost as accidental grit, in the memory. There was an occasion at the last election when, driving across the Pennines from Yorkshire to Lancashire my car, by chance, caught up with the car carry- ing the• Prime Minister and his wife. We followed behind for some miles, and Mr Wilson, obviously extremely tired, fell asleep. This was clear, as I could see his head lolling about, responding to his car's move- ment. I thought then, and I still think, that Mr Wilson is a much more tired man than he allows to show in public. On the day I am recalling, he went on to make a major speech at a great rally in Manchester or Liverpool and displayed, assume (for had he not done so. I would have remembered), his characteristic bounce, no trace of exhaustion. Last week, on television, was the first time in my experience when he appe'ared publicly at a loss for words: it was as if, for the first time, the adrenal gland. failed 'tn -respond:to the

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The el'eetitin before I -had_ spent chiefly with Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who persisted up and down the country in discussing foreign and defence policy and especially the bomb, to the despair of his advisers. William Barkley, then the distinguished Parliament- ary reporter of the Daily Express, wished to do a piece comparing the performances of Sir Alec and Mr Wilson at, I think, the Bull Ring in Birmingham. He had done Wilson, and for a day I handed over Sir Alec, as it were, to Bill. For my part, I made arrangements at the Foreign Office to in- terview the Foreign Secretary, and did so. on a train travelling north. Sir Alec got howled down at Birmingham, and Mr R. A. Butler, as he then was, was thought by some to have been less than discreet talking to me.

The Tory party at the time had felt it had

not been getting as good a press as it should have done and had let this fact be known in Fleet Street. Anticipating improved treat- ment, they were, putting it mildly, disconcerted when the first issue of the Daily Express to appear after their Fleet Street overtures had as its main story the howling down of Sir Alec, and as one of its subsidiary stories the interview in which 'Rat,' ex- pressed the view, inter alia, that the Tories would lose the election or at least that

'things might start slipping in the last

few days'. Ted Heath was in this elec- tion conducting the daily Tory party

press conference and many months later he told me that when he read Rab's charac- teristically honest if not as characteristically oblique remarks he promptly got on to Scotland Yard to ask to speak to the detec- tive who, as Heath well knew, must have ac- companied the Foreign Secretary north and must therefore have been present at the interview. Heath wanted to know whether Rab had said what I had reported him as saying. 'That wasn't the half of it'. Heath told me was the unhelpful and unwelcome reply he got. I still think Heath's action over this was a bit dodgy.

That was the election in which Wilson scraped in. The result wasn't formally determined until the Friday and there were some peculiar rituals to be performed. The Queen's summons to Wilson took longer than anticipated, and one of Wilson's aides in Transport House kept hovering around with a morning suit for Harold to go to the Palace in. He did not wish to put it on beforehand, presumably in case something went wrong. There are other rather sordid little details which take place when an elec- tion results in a new Prime Minister. The detective assigned to the Prime Minister, for instance, drops his previous chap at the crucial moment, and walks across Smith Square to present himself to his new chap. The official government cars with uniformed chauffeuses start arriving at Transport House instead of Central Office, or the other way round as the case might be. I don't ex- actly know why, but the tasteless and almost brutal quiet efficiency of this operation always reminds me of the performances of undertakers. There must be a kind of War file in Scotland Yard and Downing Street and in the government car pool and at the Palace which details what goes on when the Queen receives the resigning Prime Minister, how the brief interregnum is managed, and what starts working when the victor formally accedes to the royal request to form a government.

But, as I've said, when remembering elec- lions it is chiefly by-elections I remember. There was a foggy Cambridgeshire by-elec- tion, with 124 villages, and Robert Davies, the Labour candidate wanting Britain unilaterally to ban the bomb. A great moralist. Mr Davies. 'I am in favour of Bri- tain renouncing the H-bomb to prevent the number of countries having their own bombs from spreading.' That is a pragmatic argu- ment,' I told him. 'Yes it is,' he agreed. 'But my own position is a moral one.' Francis Pyin. who won, and is still the member, said, on the subject of peace, 'Our policy is to avoid war'. And Mr Maurice Cowling, sup- porting Mr Pym, delivered himself of the following splendid rhetoric in some obscure village hall : 'Whether you want flogging or not, whether you want hanging or not, whether you want crime put down or to in- crease, at least in the Conservative party we don't argue in a hysterical way about these things.'

A few months earlier, and the Labour party was arguing most hysterically about the bomb and defence policy and much besides. At a by-election in Bolton the Labour party had to arrange a tight schedule so that Dick Crossman, opposed to Gaitskell's policies, should not encounter Bessie Braddock, loyal Gaitskellite. Crossman, then chairman of the party, said of the deep split. 'My object is to stop the fight before it destroys the Labour party. The sooner the fight is stopped, the better.' By mistake he twice came face to face with Bessie Braddock and twice tried to pass the time of day with her, and twice she turned her flushed face aside. Frank (now Lord) Byers was the Liberal candidate, easily the ablest man in the field; but the victory went to Alderman Edwin Taylor, whose first remarks I heard were, `Ah may know nowt about politics, but ah'm a master baker.' He was in his way the most engaging by-election candidate I have encountered, Bolton born and bred; he didn't even bother to pretend that the comments On the issues of the day that he was supposed to utter at press con- ferences had been written, or even seen, by him. A Liberal news sheet said of him, 'As he is by no means U. the Tories boost him as part of their democracy.' The alderman declared: 'Ah will own that ah didn't know what that meant, but a lot of my supporters have told me it's a new-fangled phrase to mean that ah'm common. If the Liberals want to win this election by sneering at me and then looking down their noses on the electors of Bolton East just because we don't talk posh, they will find they have made a great mistake. We can't all be intellectuals. but it takes more than brains to represent Bolton.'

We also had Hugh Gaitskell going around the clubs, sometimes highly flattered : 'You're actually interrupting the tombola so that I can speak.' And earlier that year there had been the Brighouse by-election, again with the Labour party split, and the agent and candidate ending up not speaking to each other. The Tory chap delivered a Churchillian style of oration to five men and seven women at a meeting. 'Any questions?' asked the chairman. One of the men rose and said : 'All I want to ask is why was the meeting arranged for tonight, when there's a pie and peas supper on in the village and a dance afterwards?'

At this by-election Gaitskell spoke in the Town Hall, and at the end of his speech a man got up in the balcony waving leaflets advocating a boycott on South African goods. He shouted out: 'I would like to know, why there is not going to be a boycott

put on the South African tour' (it was March 1960, and the South Africans were due in May). Gaitskell replied: Personally I detest the application of the colour bar in sport as much as I do anywhere else. I deplore it. We shall have to consider when the time comes in what way we can best make known to those who come how wefeel about this subject. I think we shall have to consider that carefully.'

We have come a long way since then, and most of it backwards.