I do not know what is the clinically acceptable period of convalescence from post-electoral melancholy, but I fear that in my case it will be some time. This alone excuses, I hope, a brief, and possibly final, retrospect after five days of adjusting to the inevitable, which is the acceptance of the fact that, as I see it, justice has not been done.
In these circumstances professionally one has to declare interest, though in my case it is only fair to say that I have never concealed it. I had wished for a fair deal for Michael Foot, at least from the trade we used to share and in which I operate today, and which explicitly he did not get.
The fact that one had for weeks foreseen the Labour catastrophe is of little help; Michael Foot is not blameless, and neither are we. But to see a very considerable career extinguished in ignominy says little for Labour, and less for loyalty.
I am not a member of the Labour Party, nor indeed any other. I could just possibly have been attracted by the Social Democratic Party, because I like the name and, like them, am tempted by compromise, but the Social Opportunist Party would have been more honest initials.
I am on the side of Mr Foot for the following quite irrelevant reasons: because we were both journalists, because long ago we were founding fathers of CND, remaining loyal, because throughout his doomed campaign he remained expressly faithful to his basic beliefs ╤ give or take a few anguished equivocations after Denis Healey╒s sabotage operation ╤ and because as far as I know he has never let a comrade down.
But when the debacle approached, everyone simultaneously turned on him, with subtly different emphases. Michael Foot changed overnight from being the Marxist Menace, the Dangerous Disarmer, and became, with hypocritical compassion, the pitiful Lear of Labour, the ailing dotard of democracy, to be patted sympathetically on the back and sent back to the shadows.
This is a cruel and preposterous role for a sincere and vigorous man in his prime who in his time did more for the honest political Labour image than any of his generation, and if he fell at the last fence it was not because he was weary, though he clearly was, but because he was elbowed out by his fellow-runners. Neil Kinnock can in future look Michael Foot in the face.
That cannot be said for the Contemptible Comic, an obscure vaudevillian called Kenny Everett, who achieved surprising applause for an act that included spasms of gutter wit including: ╥Let╒s bomb Russia!╙ and ╥Kick Michael Foot╒s stick away!╙ I know nothing of this alleged comedian except that I hope he is disciplined by his union and ostracised by his trade. Or possibly employed as a columnist by the Daily Mail.
Mea culpa, too. I have exceeded my brief and my rights. You may have missed, in the above, the strict and stern objectivity in which this
newspaper takes a proper pride, and which you will agree I follow scrupulously when not terminally depressed by what all around I see.
Which, if I am watching the television, is an endless succession of clips of Mrs Thatcher playing her Queen Aunty bit and administering her blessing: ╥Thank you so much... how kind... we are all right now.╙
I begin to doubt that.
Some malign power ordained that we got our new television set last week. In protest at what it was obliged to show, it went wrong. So it was not just eternal politics, but out of focus too. Often it is hard to know what to blame ╤ there are politicians, like Mr Pym and Mr Jenkins, who seem to spend their public existence just slightly out of focus, speaking earnest words of which one can detect the tune but not the meaning.
Our new TV is not very good but it has a mind of its own. It has the whim of suddenly changing channels of its own accord. Once that would have mattered; it mattered no longer. Everything was the same.
It was Mrs Thatcher being sweetly reasonable with daggered eyes ╤ ╥but, Mr Day, what you do not appreciate is╔╙ putting poor Sir Robin in a spot: should he start calling her Lady Thatcher? That is what I would have done, but I am nastier than Robin.
Or Michael Foot, reading the verities of life into words of one syllable ╤ good and excellent and worthy words, but mostly the same ones: ╥but╙ and ╥yet╙.
One jests for fear of weeping. There comes a moment when one must be serious. This could be the last General Election our generation will see. The combined battlewagon of Reagan and Thatcher could within that five-year period result in a climax neither will survive, not to speak of us. That is the stark simplicity that Michael Foot recognised and most of his colleagues shirked. I see it as the simple difference between professional politicians and racists ╤ by which I mean those in favour of preserving the endangered race we call the human one. I wish us a better half-decade than we deserve.
