Even as We Speak (50 page)

The first televising of the House of Lords, on 23 January, was, I found, a pleasant shock. It might well be that the other viewers consisted entirely of the unemployed, but I
doubt if even the most bitter among them felt that time and money were being wasted. Helping to make the broadcast a surprise were one’s expectations, which could not help but be dire.

Somehow the idea had got about that it was a lively moment in the House of Lords when Lord Hailsham bounced up and down on the Woolsack, and that in the normal course of business there was
nothing to be heard from the buttoned red leather benches – pictures of these had been seen in the colour-supplements – except the death rattle of octogenarians. Things turned out to be
not like that, either because they never had been or because they had been tarted up for the day. If the latter, it was a good argument in favour of televising Parliament.

The argument against was rehearsed at the eleventh hour by Lord Chalfont, talking to David Dimbleby on BBC 1. Lord Chalfont was against the televising of the House of Lords because he suspected
that it was just a stratagem on the part of the broadcasters so that they could force the door of the House of Commons, after which the House of Lords, having served its purpose, would be once
again plunged into obscurity. This sounded like a shrewd analysis. He was also against the televising because the peers would quickly become concerned with nothing else except fashioning an image,
since television isn’t interested in reasoned arguments, only in creating an impression. This sounded like a shrewd analysis only if you believed the premise, which I don’t: television
is just your eyes and ears on a stalk and doesn’t like unreasoned arguments any better than you do. There is even a case for saying that it likes reasoned arguments better than radio, which
won’t tolerate dead air, whereas a pause on television makes you look as if you’re thinking when you are. Television also makes you look as if you aren’t thinking when you
aren’t, and thus helps to strip rhetoric of its binding energy. It is a bad medium for demagogues and offers its maximum excitement when one talking head is talking well. This is a hard point
to prove, however: heads that talk well are in short supply.

Suddenly there they were, in abundance. The idea of starting off with Question Time was inspired, because the convention that a question must be kept short meant that a whole cast of characters
were on their feet in the first hour, all choosing their words carefully so as to pack the most provocation into the briefest time. Probably they had rehearsed in front of the bathroom mirror, but
it didn’t matter. The level of language was high: that was what mattered. Would-be camera-hogs were steered back to the straight and narrow by a mass murmur of ‘Too long’.
Properly constructed sentences were to be heard, many of them with subordinate clauses. Contributions from Conservative, Labour and Alliance peers were all at the same respectable level of diction
and articulacy, as if the English language were the common property of the British people, instead of, as in the House of Commons, something drawled by those who vote Conservative, bellowed by
those who vote Labour, and spoken in recognizably human tones only by David Owen. Indeed the growing idea that Parliament might have to be dissolved and Dr Owen elected in its place will need to be
revised, now that the House of Lords turns out to be full of people who are even better than he is at speaking as if you were listening. Some of them are a bit older than him, of course, although
none of them actually died during Question Time. Lord Shinwell was seen to be sitting very still, but next time the camera came back to him he was sitting very still in a different position.

The reaction shot immediately showed its power. When the directors and vision mixers get more practice, the reaction shot will unquestionably become a principal feature, but even during this
test run you found yourself listening harder when the face on screen was listening too. Whether Lord Hailsham was listening was hard to judge, because of his wig. All the other peers except the
bishops were in street clothes: another expectation falsified. Despite having read quite a lot of journalism on the subject, I had somehow expected to see my noble lords in full drag. Doubtless
they would have carried it off, but their looking ordinary made other conventions more immediately assimilable. The convention of calling your interlocutor ‘my noble lord’ or ‘the
noble baroness’, for example, rapidly came to sound like ordinary courtesy, and one looked forward with regret to the next time the Speaker of the House of Commons would be obliged to eject
Mr Dennis Skinner.

The Minister for the Arts, who is also the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and who when neither of those things is the Earl of Gowrie, was referred to at all times as either ‘my
noble lord’ or ‘the noble Earl’, or a combination of both. To be thus addressed is probably more comforting than otherwise, especially when your job, as far as the Upper House is
concerned, hasn’t got much else to offer except the obligation to field flak from above, below and all sides. During Question Time Lord Gowrie was asked to answer for the Government’s
economic policy, but because he was due to speak on that subject in the upcoming debate he staved off the question with a joke.

His jokes were no better than anybody else’s. The House of Lords, like the House of Commons, seems to learn its humour in the Oxford and Cambridge Union debating chambers, where the
audience will laugh at anything. An audience which will laugh at anything can teach you nothing about humour, which requires self-criticism. But when the peers stuck to questions and answers on
serious points they were impressive, especially the women. Baroness Young almost got you convinced that the BBC’s Overseas Broadcasting services, far from declining under this government, had
actually flourished. In the reaction shots, however, the sadly shaking heads of her questioners showed you that something was up. Lord Whitelaw allowed the baroness to be questioned repeatedly,
indeed repetitively, on the subject, so he was certainly not protecting her.

Lord Beswick opened the debate for Labour. He was no television star, but that was what made him a television star, and will eventually make them all television stars. He showed no sign of
juicing his speech up for the camera or even the microphone. On the other hand, he showed every sign of speaking reasonably. His attack on government policy made sardonic use of the British Telecom
flotation. Well-composed and ably enough delivered, his argument was hard to answer, as Lord Gowrie proved. My noble lord the noble Earl did his best to evoke a booming economy, but was hampered by
lack of factual material. Baroness Seear, leader of the Liberal peers, made telling points which Lord Gowrie, seen in the reaction shots, either acknowledged for their skill or else simply agreed
with. (Mrs Thatcher has probably already convened Lord Gowrie, the three other Cabinet nobles and every other Tory peer in order to tell them that it is no longer enough to be careful what they
say. They must be careful what they think, and Lord Thorneycroft must not smile so much.) Making Baroness Seear’s forensic sallies doubly impressive was the fact that they were spoken
extempore. Again this was no television star, but most of television’s female pitch-persons were going to sound pretty club-tongued by comparison. Imagine Esther Rantzen speaking for twenty
minutes without notes.

The Bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore, fruitily delivered a maiden speech which took me back to Great St Mary’s in Cambridge, where I listened to him earlier in his career. Familiarity
bred indifference, but Lord Cledwyn, next up for Labour, offered what sounded like sincere compliments. Then Lord Stockton, after a commotion in the Strangers’ Gallery which we were not
allowed to watch, rose to offer insincere compliments. He too, he began, had ‘recently passed through the ordeal of a maiden speech’. Everybody knew that his maiden speech had been a
triumph. The sly old walrus was poor-mouthing himself again. But not as much, it turned out, as he was going to bad-mouth the government.

Lord Stockton’s use of language verged on the exquisite (‘this motion, drawn up in very wide, almost Pecksniffian terms’), but he was out for blood. Lord Gowrie was
complimented on ‘the very best defence of government I’ve ever heard made’. But this was a buildup for the let-down. Quickly it became clear that there could be no real defence of
this government. In Stockton sixty-three years ago unemployment had been 29 per cent. What was unemployment in Stockon today? 28 per cent. ‘A very sad end to one’s life.’

He took no credit for the years in which he, in his earlier incarnation as Harold Macmillan, had told the people that they had never had it so good. The economy had been collapsing steadily
since the First World War, and the Second World War had only appeared to shore it up. When the crash became obvious to all, the Labour Government had not known what to do. (As in a well-scripted
movie, there was a reaction shot of Lord Wilson not reacting: giving points for liveliness, in fact, to Lord Shinwell. Whoever was on the buttons had a flying finger. When television is as
well-directed as this, you’re not only there, you’re looking in the right place.)

‘What is really happening,’ Lord Stockton said, as if the whole crafty edifice of his oration were being made up on the spot, ‘is that the third industrial revolution is on its
way . . . and we’re somehow out of it.’ It was permissible to reflect that it isn’t on its way, it’s here, and we’re not only out of it, we have little chance of
getting back into it. But you had to allow him his measure of optimism, especially if it doubled the effect of his condemnation. And what he was condemning was Mrs Thatcher’s government.

Mrs Thatcher will probably not be much concerned by the question of which it was that dealt her such a blow, an image of a shuffling old man or a real shuffling old man. She is doubtless
sufficiently preoccupied by the likelihood that her back-benchers, should they be offered the same chance of television stardom, will show similar signs of independence. If her quondam image-expert
Mr Cecil Parkinson has been consulted he will have had further implications to point out, among them being the possibility that unless the cameras are put into the House of Commons, or else removed
from the House of Lords, then the Upper House will render the Lower House incredible. Augustus, reserving power for himself, lived modestly while allowing the senators all the glory. It
didn’t matter what they said because nobody could listen. But a national debating chamber to which the people can listen, and not only listen to but look at, becomes a power in itself.

After Lord Stockton sat down, Lord Taylor stood up to an emptying house, which was rather tough on the SDP. This, we were told, was how the benches normally looked. But the damage had been done,
if damage it was. Back being interviewed on television that same night, Lord Chalfont explained how the cameras had made the whole thing histrionic. But he wore a Garrick Club tie to say so, and if
television can’t abide reasoned arguments, why was he arguing? Denis Healey, a realist, called Lord Stockton’s speech ‘a lulu’, in the tones of one already planning a few
lulus of his own.

London Review of Books
, 7 February, 1985

Beachcomber: The Works of J. B. Morton
edited by Richard Ingrams, Muller

To introduce and edit this hilarious selection from Beachcomber’s outpourings has so obviously been a labour of love that it would be churlish to blame Richard Ingrams for
the glaring fault of subtitling the book ‘The Works of J. B. Morton’. In fact the volume is the merest chrestomathy, like Michael Frayn’s pioneering effort ten years ago, although
rather bigger and suitably adorned with some of the original illustrations by Nicolas Bentley. To capture the living heritage of Beachcomber’s
Daily Express
column in a single book
is an achievement not given to man, since an extraordinary proportion of the reams he wrote is still funny. There is no substitute for owning the original collections.
By the Way
, for
example, contains the bulk of the column for the year 1930. There are more than 380 pages of text, with a laugh on almost every page. And
By the Way
is only one of many such compilations.
Ingrams’s book has a much larger format than those early – and much handier – volumes, but it doesn’t begin to get it all together. Nevertheless it easily qualifies for the
coveted spot alongside Frayn’s
The Best of Beachcomber
, abiding the day when the maestro’s own anthologies are reprinted as minor classics.

It is gratifying to see that the notoriously slapdash editor of
Private Eye
can concentrate when the occasion demands. His historical introduction – lavishly quoting Morton
himself – is a searching effort, full of revealing things. Important to know, for instance, that Morton’s conversion to Catholicism in 1922 took place in the aftermath of a war during
which he saw far more than his share of the trenches and from which he was sent home shell-shocked. (He subsequently served in an Intelligence department called M.I.7b, which, as Frayn has noted,
sounds exactly as if Beachcomber invented it.) Morton’s aggressive, wine-worshipping religiosity – an obsession he shared with D. B. Wyndham Lewis, his close associate and similarly a
disciple of Belloc – gains in interest when seen against a picture of European disintegration. It is a truism, but still true, that humour arises from pain.

The glories of the text defeat the designer’s windy lay-out. Here are Mr Thake’s Letters and the devastating poetic tribute to A. A. Milne, ‘When We Were Very Silly’;
‘Cads and Swine’ and the adventures of Dr Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht; ‘Big White Carstairs and the M’Babwa of M’Gonkawiwi’ (but not the greatest
of Carstairs’s exploits, ‘Trousers Over Africa’ – which however you can get in Frayn’s book); Thunderbolt Footle (the doomed pugilist managed by Scrubby Botulos) and
half a dozen cases tried before Mr Justice Cocklecarrot, including the Case of the 12 Red-Bearded Dwarfs and several legal brushes with the Filthistan Trio; two stiff doses of Captain Foulenough
and a long sample of ‘Life at Boulton Wynfevers’; and, the pearl of the collection, the whole of ‘Tibetan Moonflower’, starring that Turandot-like oriental temptress,
Dingi-Poos.