US Edition Patriot
FOR General Sir Walter Walker, who has died at 88, I had a warmer regard than for almost any British general of the last century. In appearance and manner he was everything a British general should be. A superb commander, he was distinguished for brilliant campaigns that put paid to communist insurgents in Malaya and Borneo.
He was also distinguished for having the right opinions and never hesitated to express them. He deplored the shameful surrender of Rhodesia to communist savagery. He favoured strong measures against the IRA. He thought Enoch Powell would make a good prime minister. He warned us tirelessly against communist enemies both at home and abroad. With all this, he made plenty of enemies himself.
In the Seventies, he set up an organisation called "Civil Association", a force of volunteers which would be ready to take over essential services if, as then seemed possible, public order should break down. It soon had 100,000 supporters. Such an organisation, patriotic and conservative in the true sense, was bound to attract the sneering ridicule of every Hampstead thinker and smug Left-liberal verbaliser in the country, and this it did in full measure.
When it petered out, one more chance of rousing the country from its habitual torpor was lost. Gen Walker had spoken in a newspaper interview of the Army having to take over the government. But he was far too much of a gentleman, I think, and far too nice a man to make a military dictator.
Thirty years later, a nation no longer threatened with foreign conquest or internal revolution, but sunk in witless hedonism and commercial barbarism, seems helpless before the creeping advance of a different kind of dictatorship - the dictatorship of the Blairite one-party state. Instead of patriotism and care for its own people, it favours multi-racialism at home and "progressive" war abroad on behalf of a bogus and sinister "international community".
Who will stand against it? Walter Walker was a fine example of a certain type of Englishman. Is that type altogether extinct?
Safety first
Sir Aylwin Goth-Jones, the genial, popular chief constable of Stretchford, is a keen speed camera fan. He has ordered a thousand new ones to be installed all over the conurbation. They will be painted in purple, scarlet, emerald green and his own favourite, "butcher blue". Amanda Goth-Jones, his niece, artist-in-residence at Nerdley central police station, has produced some arresting designs based on paintings by Picasso, Dali, Tracey Emin, Bouguereau and other great masters.
At a hastily summoned press conference, Sir Aylwin answered critics who thought that the new cameras, far from preventing accidents, would fascinate drivers to the point of losing control. The point of the new cameras, he said, was to build bridges between motorists, the police, artists and the public. The arts had long been deprived of their proper role in dealing with problems of road safety. Here was a chance to fill a gap in the cultural life of the nation, which, if unfilled, might make a philistine Britain the laughing stock of the civilised world.
Asked if it was true that police officers monitoring the cameras were betting on the registration numbers of speeding motorists, sometimes for large sums, Sir Aylwin said that officers engaged in this somewhat monotonous work needed to enliven it with a "bit of fun".
"I sometimes drop in myself to take a hand. The other day I made a real killing with a 50-1 bet on an 'H and double three' combination. I had to stand brandy and cigars from the canteen all round."
Nature diary by 'Redshank'
August lays its heavy hand on hill and dale. Trees grow sombre. Wood pigeons repeatedly deliver their dogmatic statements: "I told you so. If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times." Bluebells and cow parsley bloom in pointless competition.
It is the season of wasps. Old Seth Gummer, our village wasp-keeper, master of an age-old but dying craft, comes into his own. Yesterday, I found him engrossed in "telling the wasps" - a custom so old that it makes the better known custom of "telling the bees" seem, as the country folk put it, "like the latest TV presenter".
Unlike bees, which have a kindly view of human nature, wasps favour the dark side. So instead of news about betrothals, weddings, WI cake making and May queens, Old Seth was telling his buzzing charges about recent acts of village vandalism, dope-peddling, mugging, rape, breaking and entering, ABH, GBH and all the rest of the sad tale of fallen humanity.
The wasps were buzzing their enthusiastic approval like a hundred mouth organs augmented by a thousand comb-and-tissue performers. Who knows but that such age-old customs, rooted in dark, immemorial country lore and probably of pagan origin, may not put shallow urban meliorists out of countenance?