The Light's on at Signpost (7 page)

Borgnine is excellent…I think—is he too much, with that mad glint?—Olly as good as always, Heston v. good, and the most believable Henry I’ve ever seen, Raleigh’s tyrant to the life; he manages something which I wouldn’t have thought Heston could have done, namely, make my eyes moist. Lalla Ward gives Young Bess the message, on all cylinders. George Scott looks even better the second time.

Surprisingly, the scene at the stocks between Olly and Raquel plays well, possibly helped by Korngold’s music, which Dick has used for the nonce. I rewrote the scene, on request, but the principals liked the original better. Mark’s finest hour is his “They shall have right” speech, which he does superbly, with Olly reacting perfectly—that whole sequence, beside a dreary river in half-light, is Jack Cardiff photography at its wondrous best.

Westminster Abbey has got out of control—long pauses, Mark looking serene, Raquel doing her damnedest with that bloody Great Seal—I hate the sequence, always did, gave them what they asked for against my better judgment, and it doesn’t work.

They haven’t shot the last fight, by the way, which is as well; I had doubts at the time, and we’re better without it. So Dick won his battle with the producers, the Abbey set wasn’t rebuilt, tons of cotton and beetroot found a happy home, and Eddie Fowlie and his workers were spared a maddening job.

Lovely finish to the film, with Rex speaking the end pieces and Lalla Ward sweeping off to take care of England, and looking as though she’s just the girl to do it, too.

Worst mistake—taking most of Harrison out. He could give the thing just the lift it needs. My overall judgment: it could go either way, good or bad, probably on the bad side. I’m a harsh critic, and it may be better than I think. But I doubt if we’ll have a hit. Respectable at the box office, perhaps, but no better. And yet, who knows? I had serious doubts about the M3, and how wrong I was.

Dead silence when the lights go up. Salkind murmurings, comments like “Yes…very good…Yes…” (At least no one gives the ultimate thumbs down of “Great locations”.
*
) I move behind Dick and say “Well done”, and he says thanks. He’s disappointed at their reaction, but he probably expected to be. Talk of restoring Harrison, which will mean cuts. I make the case for keeping Scott and Young Bess intact, and Dick agrees.

Some time later, in Paris, I hear that Harrison is to be restored, thank God. Ilya tells me the feeling is that Rex put bags of pathos and oomph into the thing, and that his removal would cut out all the good emotion. He then horrifies me by wanting to remove Lalla Ward’s final magnificent exit, his reasoning being who the hell knows about Queen Elizabeth I anyway, and look at the state of the pound, for Christ’s sake. They want to fake in some appalling nonsense of two hands shaking, indicating friendship and love or something equally bizarre and meaningless. I suspect Ilya of froggy prejudice against English history. I tell him he’s mad—that America at least knows about Good Queen Bess, even if the garlic-eaters don’t, and the final shot will not be lost on them. But he insists.

Fleischer says that over his dead body will they cut the Bess finale, and even Ilya agrees that it should stay for the British version. Fair enough, I don’t really mind what they show in Venezuela, although I think it’s a damned shame if it isn’t kept for the US version too.

The Bess finale was retained, and a curious medallion-like decoration
was also inserted, showing two hands shaking, which did no harm if
it did no good. The film took a critical pasting in Britain, one reviewer
apparently taking offence at the Ruffler’s attitude to religion. I’ve heard
of weird, but that’s ridiculous. However, it was better received in the
United States, where it was called
Crossed Swords,
God alone knows
why. Mark Twain’s title wasn’t deemed right for American audiences?
But the change of title didn’t keep the audiences away, and the film
achieved a rare distinction. Radio City Music Hall was to close, and
for the final week
Crossed Swords
was chosen as being a good family
film. Result: it ran for six weeks, and Radio City Music Hall stayed
open
.

The screenwriting credit on the picture was unique in my experience.
The authors of the first script, none of which was used, were credited
with “original screenplay”, and I with “final screenplay”
.

T
O CALL MEMBERS OF
P
ARLIAMENT
the dregs of society is the kind of hasty judgment one makes at every new revelation of folly or corruption at Westminster, but the sober truth is that no group except criminals and illegal immigrants ranks lower in public esteem. Journalists, lawyers, and even chat-show hosts attract less odium. The reasons are plain: parliament has become increasingly untrustworthy and incompetent, and there is a natural instinct that anyone with the brazen cheek and monumental conceit to say: “Vote for me, for I am fit to govern you, decide your destiny, set your taxes, and make your laws” is patently unfit for election, and in an ideal world would be pelted in the street. People know this, and hold MPs in contempt, but thanks to the inevitable evil of the party system have no option but to vote for them or effectively disenfranchise themselves by abstention.

That is not to say that there are not worthy men and women in the Commons, but it would be rash to think they are a majority. The remainder you would, at best, hesitate to rely on for their ability, courage, and probity, and, at worst, be unwilling to trust with doing more than sweep your steps or, in an emergency, remove your refuse.

Conspicuous among the honourable exceptions, imbued by the old ideals of service to country and constituents, and (don’t laugh, there are such folk) putting party second and self a distant third,
are those admirable Left-wingers with an independent streak born sometimes of wealth, but also of their personal reputation which puts them beyond deselection. Some may be more noteworthy for their integrity than for their intellect—indeed, some may be described as eccentric to say the least. You know who they are; be thankful for them, and for those others who know that to be a good MP it is first necessary to be a lady or a gentleman.
*

But they are well outnumbered by the lobby fodder of all parties whose first loyalty is to themselves, their positions, and their purses, which means in effect loyalty to the party until the time seems right to defect or stab the leader in the back. There is little to choose between the sides, but one remembers with particular distaste the rat-like behaviour of Conservative members when Mrs Thatcher was brought down. For those who still retain any illusions about Parliament as a whole, study of the diaries of the late Alan Clark will prove instructive and disgusting.

But it is not to be wondered at, when one considers the muddy path that aspiring politicians must follow to reach Westminster. To win selection as candidates they must be able convincingly to dissemble, to toady, to cozen, and, when necessary, to lie outright; given these essential defects of character, and a sufficient supply of platitudinous wind to deceive the voters, all they need is luck and grovelling loyalty to the leader, obedience to the Whips, and an ability to suppress conscience, common sense, and decency as the need arises.

It was not always so. As recently as fifty years ago, Members of Parliament at least presented a more dignified and worthy appearance. They were, to a fair extent, respected and not entirely distrusted; they were thought of as sound, largely decent, dependable people, a cut above the ordinary. Tories might be a bit pompous, Labour passionate, and Liberals rather quaint, but no one doubted, really, that they were men (and very occasionally women) of bottom and common sense. They were the subject of jokes, lampoons, and caricatures, and their worthlessness was taken for granted by comedians, but it was a fairly kindly humour; if Parliament was regarded with cynicism, it was of a tolerant kind. It might be derided, but not despised, and it was expected, by and large, to do right.

How far this tolerant-cynical view was justified it is hard to say. MPs were not under the intense spotlight they endure today; their faults were not seen in close-up, and they had the sense to limit their public utterances to political meetings, and not run off at the mouth as politicians nowadays seem to feel obliged to do, God knows why. Possibly we were less critical of them than we should have been; there were rogues among them, but not that many so far as the public could see, and their conduct was generally thought to be above the national average. They were certainly not at the bottom of the league table of the despised.

All that has changed. It is no longer taken for granted that a politician will bear a level dish. There used to be occasional scandals; now one follows hard on another, with shady deals and loans and honours for the boys and brown envelopes and cash for questions and favours in return for party contributions and blatant buying of influence and feverish attempts to hide personal interests.

It is a sorry tale, made worse by the contempt which the Commons plainly feel for the electorate, as we see when a married MP, detected in infidelity, protests indignantly that it is none of his constituents’ business what he does in his private life—and in this arrogance he does not lack support among his parliamentary colleagues. What turns the stomach is not the adultery, which is usually good for a laugh, but the lofty assumption that the voters
have no right to know that he is not a man to be trusted; he has broken the most solemn promise a man ever makes, but when it is asked “If his wife couldn’t trust him, who can?” there comes the inevitable whine about privacy, and the childish attempt at justification: “Everybody does it,” which is a lie. Everybody doesn’t. Without being unduly sanctimonious, one may remark that time was when unsavoury personal character, like poor performance, was a matter for resignation, but no longer. We have government from the gutter, and neither the detected transgressor nor the incompetent minister feels it incumbent on himself to do the honourable thing. They seldom jump; they have to be shoved. No wonder Parliament has fallen into disrepute.

The tragedy is that not Parliament alone, but the very matter of government, has been besmirched. God knows democracy, that much-trumpeted and venerated myth, has faults enough; the notion of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, was silly enough when Lincoln said it, but later generations of politicians have turned it into an obscene farce. It is worth defining democracy, not in its literal
*
sense or in the swollen meaningless terms beloved of demagogues, but as it exists in fact: the opportunity, every four or five years, to choose among a few party hacks of doubtful character and ability in whose selection the voter has had no say. That is democracy, Western style.

None of Lincoln’s conditions for government exists in fact. There is government of the people only in the sense that they are governed, but not in the sense that government comes of the people, and only a crook or a madman would say we have government
by
the people, when the truth is that it is in the hands of a dishonest, self-serving clique under unbreakable party control. As for government
for
the people, don’t make me laugh: the people’s will is flouted at every turn, on Europe, capital punishment, and the promotion of sexual perversion by government, to take only three issues. The politicians’ attitude is, bluntly, that the public are sheep who don’t know what’s good for them, and need to be led by a pack of second-rate lawyers, trade union activists, career opportunists, student agitators, and crazed feminists. That is democracy, British style.

A striking illustration of this was given by one MP, a former minister, speaking on television, when he made clear his contempt for “grass roots opinion”, dismissing it as an unsound basis for decisionmaking; it was, he declared, a negation of political leadership.

The arrogance of this, coming from a failed politician whose judgment one would not have trusted to buy a jar of marmalade, was almost stupefying. He actually saw himself as a leader, fit to take decisions, in defiance of the public will if necessary. I had the same kind of pompous claptrap trotted out to me on a radio chat-show by another MP when I taxed him with refusing to meet the public wish on capital punishment; it was for him and his fellows, he assured me earnestly, to supply a lead, not to follow popular opinion.

Now, this kind of haughty pretension may have been well enough in the days of Burke and the Pitts, when there was genuine force to the argument that the country was best governed by an educated elite, trained and fit to lead and make the many-headed’s decisions for them. Many MPs then looked on public service as something to which they were devoted by tradition; they could also, with some justice, consider themselves the intellectual as well as the social superiors of their constituents and the unenfranchised masses. Those days are long dead. No one in his right mind would suggest that today’s MPs are superior in intellect, morality, education, or judgment, to the people they represent; many of them are plainly inferior on all four counts. Some cannot even talk grammatically, and by their speech shall ye know them—assuming you can interpret the half-educated proletarian noises they make.

I have mentioned Burke, and those who defend the practice of MPs following their own judgment against the voters’ wishes can quote, if they are familiar with his works or have even heard of him, his warning to the people of Bristol that their MP owed them his judgment, “and betrays…you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Fair enough for the eighteenth century, no doubt, but it was also this same Burke who said: “In all forms of government the people is the true legislator”, and, most tellingly: “I am not one of those who think that the people are never wrong…but I do say that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is…in favour of the people.”

It appears that the great Parliamentarian was no more consistent than any other politician, but he would repay study by those who, in their complacent self-admiration, have so little regard for the wishes of those whose judgment they were only too delighted to accept when it sent them to Westminster.

An excellent way of demonstrating the unfitness of MPs is to compare them to ourselves. I think I know my capacity and limitations, and I doubt if I have ever been competent to run a department of state, but I led an infantry section in war when I was nineteen, commanded a platoon when I was twenty-one, and in middle age edited a great daily newspaper. Now all these jobs required some degree of what is called leadership—a gift which people like Blair seem to think is automatically conferred by election. I hold no very high opinion of myself as a leader, but can it be contended that the sorry collection of placemen and party hacks and p.c. women and semi-literate nonentities who have crawled and toadied and lied their way to Westminster are fit to lead me and millions like me—educated professionals and workers and artisans and craftsmen who have made their way in the world by real skill and perseverance, not by blathering and caballing?

If I weren’t so outraged at the idea, I’d be helpless with laughter. Blair, a junior barrister who has never done a real job in the real
world, to lead me? I wouldn’t follow him round the corner. Or any of his Cabinet of freaks and oddballs. Or the sorry parcel of yuppies and businessmen opposite.

It may be asked, what’s the alternative, and the answer is that there isn’t one. The British political system has been defended as the least bad polity yet invented, and there is something in it—
but
only so long as the people who operate it play the game
. I don’t apologise for using an old, perhaps outworn, expression; what I am saying is that our “democracy” is acceptable only if our elected rulers are honest, tell the truth, behave with decency, and strive to remember that they are there to serve the people as the people wish to be served.

That is not what we have, or have had for thirty years, or look like having for a long time to come. Politics has become the preserve of the second-rate, a career primarily seen as a means of advancing personal ambition and lining the pocket; service is the last thing an aspiring parliamentarian has in mind. I must say again that I speak of the majority, not of the handful who have not forgotten what honour means.

Occasionally, and more often since we became involved in the European folly, it is suggested that we need a constitution. This is puerile. There is not, and never has been, a written constitution worth powder to blow it to hell, including the collection of platitudes and wishful thinking by which Americans set such misguided store. Why it should be supposed that a document drawn up by a group of eighteenth-century English squires and merchants for a largely agricultural country should be thought suitable for the governance of a modern, highly industrialised, multi-national state, has never been clear to me, but then I have always been mistrustful of vague, high-sounding, and sometimes downright daffy pontifications, and uncomfortably aware that a constitution means what you want it to mean. We have seen the US Constitution twisted and distorted and turned inside out by slick lawyers to a degree
which Jefferson and Co. wouldn’t believe; to take one small example, they wouldn’t have equated pornography with freedom of speech.