HERE AND THERE
59
an inch. Before the election, after the long hot summer which swung
the polls nearly 20 percent in the Tory direction, it was easy to re–
member that in British political life the vice of the Left
is
more often an
aspect of their ingenuousness, of vanity or frankness concerning power,
than that of the Right, which is a kind of meanness. During the cam–
paign there was a genuine fear on the Left that the last days would pro–
duce some trick, some Zinoviev letter. George Brown remembered the
1950 Labour administration, when there was a majority of six, and the
Opposition suspended the normal courtesy of pairing in order to wear
out the ministers, even when the occasion of the request was a necessary
ministerial trip abroad. Harold Wilson's single slip in the campaign–
a rash suggestion that a potentially disastrous strike was Tory-inspired–
sprang from the same memories. In the end it was not a violent or angry
campaign; but I am always impressed and alarmed in the moments when
the British public is politically conscious, at the dangerous combination
on the Right of upper-class arrogance and middle-class hatred for the
worker; the first is a strange feudal survival, with a strong paternalist
element, but the second is a fierce neo-Calvinism. Although it was the
heckling of Home and Hogg that made the headlines, all the really
vicious talk one heard in pubs seemed to come from people who might,
by accent and manners, be thought to be of the working class, but who
were anxious to prove their election. Across one poster, asking support
for Leslie Lever, somebody scrawled the word "Christ-killer."
So that in the early days of the campaign one felt always like using
the abbreviation "Con" and doing so with a French accent. The minis–
ters were saying the economy was never better, and the Tory papers kept
the news of the adverse trade gap low on page 6; meanwhile the Labour
campaign was dull and hope lessening. At this point I had
to
go to
Denmark, where a British Week had been organized, an agreeable device
for selling things. Copenhagen, as everybody knows, is a handsome city,
more like Paris than any other, perhaps, and full of good food,
good
furniture, and good ideas, like the long pedestrians-only shopping
street across the center. The Tiv:oli was shut. Outside it was a facsimile
British pub, and at no time of the day did I contrive to reach the counter.
Denmark is unbelievably anglophile, which makes for a pleasant visit; the
Danes are anachronistic in other agreeable ways, too, their manners
gentle, subdued, Edwardian. One's host at dinner quietly and repeatedly
drinks one's health; professors of English at the universities are always
looking for lectors with British-English accents. There were plenty of
these around; we represented our culture not only by the pub, London
policemen in full fig, double-decker buses, marching pipers, and itinerant
