THE POWER OF A WORD
Walter Wolfgang is 82 years old and has been shuffling around Labour Conferences for as long as I can remember. I first met him in 1975 and he looked like a veteran then. He is intelligent, articulate and knows a thing or two about war and peace. He is a member of CND with sincerely held views on nuclear weapons, Iraq and so much more. Walter is also Jewish and left Germany to escape Nazi persecution. Although intellectually robust and formidable, he is in no great shape physically and both his body and his suit appear to have been partially nuked at some time in History. Well, this fragile senior citizen was listening, yes actually listening to one of the greatest orators of our times, the redoubtable Jack Straw who provides all year relief to insomniacs throughout Britain as they rush to the unconscious state to avoid the pain of his mutterings. But Walter did not sleep. He uttered a word, not a long word but not an abusive monosyllable either and not even a particularly challenging or acicular word, just a harmless: ‘NONSENSE’. This almost anodyne utterance released a hurricane on hapless Walter who found himself surrounded by Labour’s muscle- bound stewards intent on ejecting him from the hall with disproportionate force. A young man, Steve Forrest, sitting near Walter, saw all this and with parabolic speed decided to play the Good Samaritan by telling the courageous heavies to: ‘Leave that old man alone’. The great socialist stewards of New Labour then surrounded the samaritan, pulled him from the hall and pushed him into a corner, threatened him and only police intervention save him from who knows what. Meantime Walter tried to bumble his way back into the hall only to be detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The rest is history: Walter and Steve became instant celebrities, Labour lost control of the Conference with this spectacular own-goal and important debates were subordinated to the most abject concatenation of risible apologies ever to have been articulated in our movement. An enquiry was announced but it has not yet reported This was a seminal moment for me and many others: we have some very nasty people in our ranks and they must be exposed and relieved of their duties. Who authorised such thuggery in our name and shamed our Party so comprehensively? And if the TV cameras had not captured all this, would the apologies have flowed so fully? And if all this had resulted in Walter’s death from shock and strain? What then? One word too many, Walter…!