RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 99
believe, and become a movement.
One by one the Big Names came out, almost all for the
Yes. eventually a single major figure remained conspicuously
undeclared and this was the most major of all, the colossus,
Harry Oppenheimer. If Harry endorsed Option 3, it’d be on the
map overnight.
Gael and I were invited to dinner at his home, Brenthurst,
along with three of Harry’s confidantes – Boz Bozzoli, the vicechancellor
of Wits; Jan Steyn, head of the urban foundation;
Peter Gush, chairman of anglo’s gold division. The spoilt vote
was the central topic and I advocated as I had never advocated
before. By the end, both Gush and Steyn were pushing heavily,
“You must do it, Harry, you must do it.” Bozzoli was as frosted
as Slabbert had been, taking the view that if the government
said “Yes” to anything whatever the obvious task of good men
and true was to say “No”. Harry nibbled tantalisingly, but when
he walked us to our car he said, “You do realise that I have a
long history of involvement with the Progressive Party” and we
figured that was that.
a couple of days later there were newspaper posters with
various mergings of “Harry O” and “NO”. Harry had endorsed
the Progs. Then The Star, the biggest daily and the last to
pronounce, invented the fourth Option.
Harvey Tyson, the editor, set out a front page leader with
reasoning so similar to mine that I heard the same joke fifty
times: it should have had an asterisk citing Frontline. But at
the end Harvey strikes out bold and original. What he says is:
abstain. Since you can’t vote Yes and you can’t vote No, stay
home and don’t vote.
I suppose, perhaps, maybe, in charitable moments, I can
nearly begin to understand Harvey’s problem. The spoilt vote
was a confusing thing, not least due to the sheer semantics. The
claim that you could make it meaningful was derided as “an
intellectual option”. It would have ceased to be “intellectual”
if enough clout was applied, but en route you’d need to brave
out “intellectual”.