he root problem endangering the Atlantic Alliance today,” Peregrine Worsthorne wrote in The Sunday
Telegraph, “is that too many people in Western Europe are coming to regard it more as a brake slowing down the prospect of constructive diplomatic advance than as an accelerator speeding it up.” He highlighted concerns that Britain’s close ties with the US were proving to be a significant barrier to further co-operation between Britain and the Soviet Union, “binding us to a cold war past rather than pulling us forward into a future of East-West détente.”
Worsthorne felt that the post-cold war era would call for a demonstration of political rather than military prowess from Nato member countries. He looked to France’s General de Gaulle as an example: while “his contributions to defence-thinking are almost comically irrelevant”, he none the less held out “a glittering diplomatic hope” for a Europe free from “the cold war political deadlock” and able to take advantage of the fact that “the scope for East-West economic cooperation has never been so bright”.
Meanwhile, the paper reported that the British minister for health was about to receive a “shock report on the gravity of drug addiction in Britain”. This would mark the first time that addiction to hard drugs would be named as a major problem in the country. The increase in addiction to morphine, heroin and other drugs was being blamed “squarely on the medical profession”, with the report – written by a committee of eminent doctors – naming over-prescription as “the only source of supply”. The Home Office, which at the time recorded “a total of 635 known addicts”, was said to be “complacent” about the issue.
Peter Gladstone Smith reported that a “nationwide organisation of river fish poachers using poison is supplying hotels and restaurants, black market fishmongers and ocean-going vessels with cut-price salmon and trout”. Racketeers were poisoning fish in rivers in England and Wales and selling them on all over the country. Gladstone Smith added: “People in some of London’s West End restaurants have eaten fish that died from cyanide in the gills.” The flesh of the fish was reported to be “perfectly edible”, but the practice risked spoiling breeding in affected rivers for years to come.
An unusual news-in-brief item revealed that a “theological dispute” over whether or not dogs have souls had broken out in Chobham, Surrey, after the owner of a Great Dane had placed a cross over the dog’s grave. The cross was broken and removed by objectors, but in a poll locals voted 24-15 that dogs do have a soul. Reverend OR Acworth, Vicar of Chobham, had ruled that “a dog cannot be a Christian unless it has been baptised”. He declared himself against crosses on dogs’ graves, as he “cannot imagine any vicar baptising a dog”.
According to Nigel Dennis, a successful thriller must have at its centre a character who “can survive bullets, bombs, radiobeams, stilettos, buzz-saws and many other things that would cut you and me to the quick, but he would go down like a duck if he were pierced by a genuine feeling or seized in a back-alley by a profound thought”. One author who obligingly followed these rules was Ian Fleming, whose latest Bond book,
The Man With the Golden Gun, saw his hero brainwashed by Colonel Boris of the Soviet secret police and intercepted by MI6 after attempting to assassinate his own boss, M.
Dennis is, however, careful not to give the whole plot away, writing: “It is a strict rule in the reviewing of books that the greater the flood of the nonsense, the greater the care that must be taken not to spill it. Enough to add that the action station is Jamaica and that the villain has three nipples where the rest of us have only two.”