Free Going Up by Frederic Raphael Page B

Mountbatten had been responsible for sending a large contingent of ill-supported, under-trained Canadian commandos to their doom in the 1942 raid on Dieppe. To compound the scandal, he had, as the last Viceroy, given away India. Even the Beaver did not go so far below the belt as to publish what was loudly whispered in grand circles: that Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina, had a more than diplomatic affair with Pandit Nehru, and that her husband was more than somewhat complaisant.
    The proprietor’s anathema extended to anyone who advocated joining the prototype of the European Union. Britain’s affiliation with the benighted continent would clash with the policy of Imperial Preference, the Beaver’s economic panacea. His opposition to the incipient Franco-German entente was embodied in the Crusader couchant , with lance and shield, in a niche at the top right-hand corner of our front page. To defer to the Beaver’s prejudices came as easily as the imitation of Ciceronian irony or Ovid’s metrical cynicism. Any party line, I realised, was liable to be as infectious as the common cold. Anyone could become an apparatchik, if duly salaried. There was secret comedy in honouring any creed that offered status and conferred privileges.
    My St John’s College contemporary the historian John Erickson was the first to remark how, during Stalin’s Terror, those rounded up and accused of capital crimes appeared before ‘grinning judges’. Both the victims and those who condemned them to a slow or a quick death knew the whole thing to be an inescapable and bloody farce. To play the ambitious clerk required neither sincerity nor belief. Like Castiglione’s courtier, a journalistcan remain free within his servility by knowing – but never, ever saying – how absurd it is, and how furtively delicious, to conform to the wishes of a tyrant who has favours to offer.
    Brocky was gallant enough to act quite as if he needed a green bagcarrier. He often took me to the pubs where trades union leaders sighed with mild and bitter regret at Clem Attlee’s lack of socialist steam. Like ITMA ’s Colonel Chinstrap, when offered another tongue-loosening glass, they never minded if they did. Brocky maintained that the key moment in British post-war history came when the National Union of Mineworkers refused the offer of a seat, or seats, on the newly nationalised Coal Board. By declining directorial responsibility, the NUM left the power where, in truth, they preferred it to be: in the hands of the middle-class managers whom they chose to denounce rather than to supplant.
    As the days went by, I was entrusted with less minor errands and inquiries. It was surprising to discover how easily people were flattered when approached by a cozening apprentice and how willing, often eager, to disclose petty secrets. My initiation into the means by which our foreign news coverage seemed to be ubiquitous came when one of the subs approached me, one Saturday morning, with a flimsy print-out, on pink paper, from the Agence France-Presse . ‘Doing anything, Fred?’
    ‘No. Rather not.’
    ‘Write this up for me then, old son, would you, as if you were in Peking?’
    As soon as I sat down at a vacant Royal Sovereign, I was looking out over the Forbidden City. In almost no time my Chinese meal was ready to go to the subs’ table. The capacity for fluent imposture supplied one of the reasons for the central role of the Classics in English establishment life. Like satire and snobbery, parody and docility are never incompatible: the satirist is often a toady with two sets of teeth: one snarls at the privileged, the other smiles when offered preferment. Sir David Frost and Sir Jonathan Miller came to prove the point.
    Outstanding in the Beaver’s spectrum of hates was the annual British Industries Fair. This apparently benign and patriotic enterprise incurred his displeasure because exhibiting industrialists were encouraged, by the Labour government, to make deals