RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

98 | denis beckett
to stake it, but nobody was claiming the same patch for any
other cause, so the flag we erected was uncontested.
I thought we’d done our duty, dropped a little pebble into
the pot and that was it. It wasn’t. The little pebble rippled, and
for a month I was a politician, pounding the keyboard with
polemics on the “Third Option” and exercising my jaw behind
microphones. for a while it seemed the issue was going to fly.
everywhere I went, from ambassadorial dinners to the barber to
the bottle store, people were saying, “Yeah, right on.” What we
lacked, though, was decent authority. The Nats were plugging
Yes, the Progs were plugging No. Pieter Who, Hazel Who and
Denis Who were plugging some complicated thing.
Van Zyl Slabbert, Leader of the Opposition, was unimpressed
to freezing point. He sent me a furious letter suggesting we get
off his pitch in a hurry. Other Progs told us fulsomely, off the
record, that they wished they’d gone our way to start with.
Now, smelling their flop coming up, they went ape when niggly
nobodies stood up in their meetings and asked why they didn’t
go for the spoilt vote. They shot it down with vehemence. One
Sunday night the temporary unofficial “Spoilt Vote Party”
met a top Prog who wept in frustration that he was tied to the
No. On Tuesday morning we read him in the Rand Daily Mail
denouncing us as irresponsible, ignorant and imbecilic, with
dark hints about ulterior motives.
a few days later we had the great, if backhand, privilege of
watching the Prime Minister savaging the “very silly people”
who wanted to “make the South african voter look as if he does
not know how to cast a vote”.
Ja, well. a Yes would give us black rejection and embattled
Indian and coloured elections; a No a rampant right, with
the blinkered liberals having helped them in. It was heads the
country loses and tails it also loses. PW Botha didn’t need us to
make the Sa voter look stupid.
But we needed someone to give clout, someone patently
non-stupid, someone to say “it makes sense to vote informal”
loud enough for people to believe that other people would