Diary – Monday 30 October 1995

Mountaineers have been angered by an advert in this month’s Climber magazine for Sprayway, a mountain-clothing manufacturer. It is a two-page spread, one half of which is a large picture of Alison Hargreaves before her tragic death on K2 earlier this summer. Beside it is a blurb starting: “It is better to have lived one day as a tiger than one thousand years as a sheep.” It ends with the tribute: “A tiger in a world of sheep.” At the bottom it states that the advert has received the backing of Ms Hargreaves’s family.

Mountaineers who knew Ms Hargreaves feel it is tasteless in the extreme. “Both the principle of making money out of the dead and the idea that the rest of the mountaineering community are “sheep” are scarcely ones which appeal,” says one.

The magazine’s editor, Tom Prentice, who has himself just returned from the Himalayas, has been deflecting the complaints. “I did not actually see the advert until I read the magazine,” he says. “It’s important to bear in mind that Sprayway will have booked the ad before her death and will have had to adjust their campaign.”

Sprayway is taken aback by the reaction. “The reference to ‘sheep’,” says the managing director, John Hunt, “was meant to refer to non-climbers. The advert is a tribute to Alison, which is why the Sprayway logo is very small.”

In the Middle Common Room at Newnham College, Cambridge, an idea has been toyed with that is far more radical than the current proposals to ban Trinity’s Great Court Race after an accident this year. In a bid for political correctness, Newnham’s postgraduates voted last week to cancel Christmas.

My source explained: “Several people on the committee felt that to hold a Christmas dinner would be offensive to non-Christians. By Friday their view was the majority view.”

The weekend, including perhaps a hearty roast on Sunday, has thankfully restored sanity to the group. “They have changed their minds. Christmas is now going ahead,” sang my spy jubilantly.

To the Travellers Club (where else?) for the launch of Simon Jenkins’s tome Accountable to None, The Tory Nationalisation of Britain (Hamish Hamilton, pounds 16.99), in which he accuses the Thatcher administration of totally failing to achieve decentralisation – and in fact achieving the opposite. It was left to the Oxford psephologist David Butler to point out the work’s main irony: that one so famously conservative as Jenkins should have penned a script so critical of the Tory government. “No one could be more Establishment than Simon,” he said of the erstwhile editor of the Times. “He is Mr Quango. Precisely because of this he gained access to all those he needed.”

Actually, Mr Butler, this is not quite true. Even for men as distinguished as Jenkins, the path of research does not run entirely smooth. There was one person, Jenkins grudgingly admitted to me afterwards, who had refused to speak directly to him. “But,” he added hesitantly, “it’s perhaps not fair to criticise them.”

Pause.

“You see, she has actually helped all along in other ways.”

Longer pause.

“Well,” said Jenkins, now obviously uncomfortably, “she is the subject of the book …”

I have discovered that I have something in common with Olivia Gollancz, co-founder of the esteemed publishing company Victor Gollancz: we are two of the very few people in this country who have never seen thepantomime Cinderella. For me this signified confusion when everyone else laughed at the recollections of the Gollancz author Simon Brett,celebrating his 50th birthday and 50th publication at the Groucho Club last week. “Many years ago my first book, Baron Hard-up, had been rejected by five publishers,” he told his guests, “but Olivia Gollancz chose to accept it. What I had not realised was that she did not know who Baron Hard-up was. She later told me that she chose to accept the book purely on the grounds that she thought the title meant something rude.”

Here’s one for pedants to add to the Dictionary Disasters file. A colleague tells me that when loading the magnificent CD-rom version of the OED on to his computer, the machine, after copying over the relevant files, displayed a message saying: “This application has been succesfully (sic) installed.” Groan, groan.

At least it’s not as bad as Oxford’s Mini-Dictionary of Spelling a few years back that contained an errata slip apologising for the spelling of “litterate”.

On Friday a solitary fax arrived at the offices of Channel Five Broadcasting at the same time as they heard the astounding news that their consortium had secured the Channel Five franchise. It was from David Elstein, part of a rival consortium, New Century TV. “Congratulations,” it began, “it has been a long haul …”. Can it be any coincidence that Elstein, director of programmes at BSkyB, knows that his contract there ends in January and that Channel Five Broadcasting has not yet announced its director of programmes? Hmm. At Channel Five, they are in no doubt whatsoever.

The first European gallery to specialise in original film posters has opened in Soho. Thanks to Tony Nourmand and Bruce Marchant, you can now purchase an original advert for Charlie Chaplin’s 1914 film Laughing Gas for a mere pounds 25,000. “These posters have risen in rarity value,” explains Nourmand (his cheapest are around the pounds 1,000 mark), “because throughout this century so many have been destroyed.”

He and Marchant believe that there are still hundreds out there whose owners simply don’t realise their worth. On their collecting excursions the duo came across spectacles of poster destruction that almost reduced them to tears. “In Oregon,” says Nourmand, “Bruce stumbled upon a butcher who had once owned the local cinema. Bruce asked where the posters were and to his horror discovered that the man was wrapping up steaks in thousands of pounds worth.” The rest of you have been warned.

Diary – Monday 23 October 1995

The Irish Prime Minister John Bruton has resolved to change his country’s national anthem, deeming the current song too militaristic for these optimistic days of the peace process. But the plan is generating an increasingly heated controversy – and some novel suggestions. Bertie Ahern, the Fianna Fail leader, has already nominated “A Nation Once Again”. Now the nephew of the man who wrote the current anthem in 1907 has launched a campaign for his own preferred replacement. I fear, however, that his suggestion is likely to raise temperatures higher still.

Brian Behan, the playwright nephew of Peadar Kearney, who wrote the lines which begin: “Soldiers are we, who fought and died for Ireland …” has written to Mr Bruton suggesting that “Danny Boy”, sung to the tune of the “Londonderry Air”, should become Ireland’s new national anthem. “It is perfect,” he says – blithely forgetting that the very name of Londonderry is regarded these days as grossly politically incorrect by all but the most hardened loyalist – “because it unites elements of both the North and South”.

He adds: “However, in return, I would stipulate that the Orangemen & Co stop singing the British national anthem.”

To date, Mr Behan’s “campaign” consists of a handful of radio broadcasts, and methinks somebody will stop him in his tracks before too long. The Ulster Unionist MP Clifford Forsythe was distinctly unamused to hear of Mr Behan’s efforts. “I like the tune of ‘Danny Boy’ very much,” he says, “like I like Mozart very much. But my national anthem is ‘God save the Queen’.”

I don’t know what Mrs Bostridge, mother of Mark and Ian, ate when she was pregnant, or if she painted their baby bedrooms bright colours to stimulate their brain cells, but at the launch last Friday of Mark’s book Vera Brittain, a Life, the spectacle of these two baby- faced young achievers set middle-aged Oxbridge academics almost retching with envy. (“How important, relatively speaking, is the Gladstone prize?” I asked an Oxbridge historian just behind me. “I don’t know,” he replied stiffly, “since I didn’t get it.”)

Last week marked a double celebration for the Bostridge brothers. While Gladstone prize-winner Mark, 34, was lauded for his efforts – eight long years of thorough research – as a co-author on the Brittain book, Ian, 30, a distinguished professional tenor, had just released a record “The Red Cockatoo and Other Songs”, which contains works by Benjamin Britten never previously recorded. In January, he is due to sing the lead in The Magic Flute at the English National Opera.

If the two wore specs and glistened with acne and greasy hair, one might feel slightly better about them. But as you can see from the photograph, this is not the case. How come their parents got such a good deal, I asked them. “I don’t know,” said Ian, while Mark jested: “I’m sure Ian’s talent has something to do with the fact that as an older brother I always took a great interest in him.”

Incidentally, at the above launch, staff at the Imperial War Museum were in a great flap about what to put on Shirley Williams’s name tag. Everyone else was easy (I, for instance, was plain Vicky Ward). But the title of Vera Brittain’s daughter, Lady Williams, created something of a division among the ranks: no one could agree whether she would prefer to be titled or not. In the end she was asked to choose from two labels. She chose the untitled version, much to the jubilation of those who had punted that way. “I knew it,” one of them confided to me, grinning, “I just knew it.”

I have decided to dub last week my “Brian Sedgemore week”, because I kept on bumping into the tall, angular Labour MP for Hackney South. This is more, apparently, than the rest of the House of Commons managed, all 650 of whom noticeably failed to turn up to the Westminster launch of his satirical handbook, The Insider’s Guide to Parliament, last Monday. “They were too frightened to be seen with me, especially the Labour lot in the run-up to the Shadow Cabinet elections,” Sedgemore told me gleefully over dinner hosted by the Folio Society at Lincoln’s Inn, “because of the book’s contents.”

Only seconds earlier Susan Reeves, Sedgemore’s assistant, had described the book to me as “perfect material for the toilet” – in view of which I feel our MPs must be a very cowardly bunch indeed.

One MP who is likely to be slightly annoyed with Sedgemore is Paddy Ashdown who, the book reveals, used to visit a dance hall in Exmouth on Saturday nights in his marine days. “He used to sneak in through the back entrance, like I also did,” recalls Sedgemore, sighing nostalgically. “But he won’t like me for revealing how politically incorrect he was in those days – he used to refer to those occasions as ‘meat markets’.”

Making Nonsense of Modern Commercial Practices: the case study of the BBC. The Beeb’s internal mail goes out of its buildings before coming back in. Er, why? Because in June the internal mail system was contracted out to the Post Office. “It would be true to say,” says a postroom employee, “that the new system is having a few problems.”

Really? “But it’s not too bad. We reckon we are a next-day service.” So technically, the service probably qualifies as first class.

All new magazines have teething problems, and I am glad to report that the worst complaint so far levelled against Prospect, the political monthly launched last month by the former Financial Times journalist David Goodhart, is that the crossword is not hard enough. “I have realised that I can do one-quarter of the clues without even going to a reference book,” explains Goodhart, “and my general knowledge is not even very good. We are going to have do something about it.”

There is one advantage to having an easy crossword: readers fall asleep over it and do not enter. Goodhart’s postbag for this month contained only four correct solutions. But then, with clues like “Historic city founded by Kubla Khan in 1256 as his summer residence (6)”, one is not really surprised …

Diary – Monday 9 October 1995

Presidents of the Oxbridge unions are not usually meek, unambitious types – consider the examples of Messrs Heseltine and Hurd and Mesdames Benazir Bhutto and Arianna Stassinopoulos-Huffington. But the current incumbent at Cambridge, one David Branch, a third-year reading Archaeology and Anthropology with “no plans” for a political career, is more audacious than all his predecessors put together. He has arranged for Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi to speak at the Union.

On 22 November (assuming he has finished ejecting Libya’s Palestinians) Gaddafi will debate the motion: “This house believes that the West cannot remain as guardian to world affairs.” His adversary is Sir Laurence Martin, director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Branch’s plan is “to link up Gaddafi via satellite, which will be switched off when we want to have a ‘normal’ debate among ourselves afterwards.”

Should things run smoothly it will be the first time that Gaddafi, whom our government does not deal with, has ever been granted a public platform in this country. But Gaddafi may drop out at the last moment. Sir Teddy Taylor’s office staff, who helped with the arrangement, warn: “One simply does not get a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from Gaddafi.”

Alan Howarth’s article in yesterday’s Independent, explaining his reasons for switching to Labour, rang alarm bells with the eight former members of the Young Conservatives who defected to the SDP in 1981. Some of them think he has copied their statement. “When we resigned Howarth was the director of the Tory Research Department,” says one, “and, as such, he sat in our meeting with the then party chairman, Lord Thorneycroft, when we had to explain our reasons for resignation.”

My source thinks that apart from a generally similar use of imagery (negativism versus positivism, etc) there is even one direct lift from the 1981 statement. It is the description of Labour as “a new politics of generosity, and inclusiveness, of realism that appeals to our better nature”. Obviously the party is different, but none the less I’m sure the coincidence will get psychoanalysts producing theories on the longevity of the subconscious like there’s no tomorrow.

To the Groucho Club for a double celebration lunch; on the one hand to welcome the celebrated black American writer Walter Mosley (Clinton’s favourite author) to these shores, and on the other to congratulate Angus McKinnon, the new editor of GQ, on his appointment.

McKinnon, 42, is a rather different character from his noisy, ebullient predecessor, the late Michael Vermeulen. Attired in his customary tweed jacket, he sipped only now and then from his wine glass, making quiet, intelligent conversation all the while. But there is a sense, none the less, that much of Vermeulen lives on in him – not just because he was Vermeulen’s deputy for several years, but because Vermeulen was instrumental in introducing McKinnon to his new bride – Rowan Pelling. “Since Michael brought Rowan on board GQ as his secretary he always patted himself on the back for our pairing,” McKinnon confided. But Vermeulen’s patronage turned into something of a mixed blessing for the duo. To say their relationship was subjected to intense office scrutiny would be an understatement. “When Rowan and I started going out I thought it was my duty to inform Michael,” says McKinnon. “When I’d finished, he looked at me and said ‘Angus, that is absolutely fine, but all I really want to know is how many times you’ve slept with her’.”

Last week at the National Gallery an American rendered a new, illuminating verdict on the long-standing debate over Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage. (For those who don’t know, the picture is of a man and a woman in 15th century dress, but the woman in the picture has a large bump on her middle: is it the dress or is it pregnancy?) This particular man did not know any of this. So when a gallery guide asked him what he thought the picture represented, he whipped out his book of English idioms. “Seems to me,” the American finally enunciated in loud, deep South tones: “there’s sure bin some shootin’ before the Twelfth.”

The unexpected also occurred at London’s South Bank last week when, surrounded by minders, Salman Rushdie arrived unannounced to join in readings by Umberto Eco and Mario Vargas Llosa. As ever, Rushdie stole the show. He marched in just as the compere was starting to introduce Eco and Vargas Llosa and received a huge ovation for several minutes. He responded with lots of regal waving. At the end one could not move for crowds wanting to get him to sign his books. It was, all in all, real puke-making stuff. But if Eco and Vargas Llosa – the two whom the programme had billed – were annoyed, they did not show it. Indeed Eco went so far as to make a joke on stage. He got up and read incomprehensibly fast in Italian for a good five minutes. He made sure his audience was completely baffled before snapping his book shut with relish and saying “now … een English?”

One might imagine that the British gay community would welcome the arrival here of Andrew Sullivan, editor of Washington’s political journal, the New Republic, and prominent gay thinker. His position in the right-wing establishment means that his new book, Virtually Normal, is likely substantially to widen general awareness of the difficulties faced by homosexuals. But the gay pressure groups are furious that a debate organised by the Guardian launching Sullivan’s book is to be held on Wednesday, the same night as a party to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Gay Liberation Movement. Furthermore, Outrage’s leader, Peter Tatchell, feels that the panel debating homosexuality is unrepresentative of the issues of modern homosexuality.

The Guardian replies that it cannot help the date – it is the only one Sullivan could make, and it has added on to its panel Angela Mason of the lobbying group Stonewall. Tatchell and his cronies are still peeved. Over to Suzanne Moore, who is on the panel: “It would be sensible to include someone from Outrage,” she says, “not least because if they are not represented they will create a disturbance on the night …”

Diary – Monday 2 October 1995

On Saturday night, respectable residents of Streatham, south London, heard for the first time in 20 years a din emanating from Ambleside Avenue. Alarmed, they shook their heads, locked their doors and told their teenage children to stay in: Cynthia Payne was holding her final party.

It was, according to Payne party veterans, a most nostalgic affair. There were men dressed as vicars, retired prostitutes dressed in rubber, wielding whips, and plenty of bedroom activity – all in the incongruous surroundings of Payne’s typically neat suburban decor – flowery wallpaper and patterned carpets. “Just like the old days,” guests kept muttering, while la grande dame was misty-eyed with emotion. She held the party as a final tribute to days gone by, since, in the style of the Princess of Wales, she is retiring “from public life”.

Even local cabbies who collected guests in the small hours shed a tear or two. “Before you get in, we better tell you we don’t accept luncheon vouchers,” they told passengers jokingly, sighing afterwards: “we haven’t had to say that for 20 years.”

Delegates attending the conference of the International Telecommunications Union, opened by Nelson Mandela in Geneva yesterday, perked up when they learnt that security required them each to have a conference code-name. “Mine is Sibelius,” a BBC executive announced excitedly, “and I know that someone else’s is Presley. The million-dollar question is, what is John Birt’s?” The Beeb men plan, I believe, to walk up to Birt throughout the convention calling him every composer’s name from Bach to Strauss until he acknowledges one. Ah well. I guess it beats talking about the telecommunications industry.

In the good old days MPs existed to help and represent their constituents. Alas, it seems that nowadays Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Tory MP for Cirencester and Tewkesbury thinks he is far too busy for such humdrum concerns. He recently received a letter from 18-year-old Amy Street, an A-level student at a Cotswold comprehensive, asking for literature on Tory Part coursework project comparing current divisions in the party over Europe with those provoked by the Corn Laws in 1846.

It seems, however, that Mr Clifton-Brown’s sensibilities were offended by her approach. Instead of responding to Ms Street, he wrote to her headmaster, saying: “It is really not the function of a Member of Parliament to assist students with their courses … this request is going well beyond the parameters of an MP … I would be most grateful if you would pass on this information to all your staff to preclude other students writing with similar requests.”

Ms Street, an intelligent lady, on course for Oxford, is understandably miffed. “All I wanted was a leaflet. I hardly think he would have got a deluge of pestering letters,” she says. “He also had the cheek to send me a letter on my 18th birthday – because, no doubt, he wants my vote at the general election.” Something tells me he’s blown that one.

Speaking of Tory splits on Europe, this week sees the launch of Andrew Roberts’s debut thriller, The Aachen Memorandum, a work of unadulterated propaganda for the Eurosceptic cause (Roberts is the historian who joined John Redwood’s bandwagon in the summer). His book is set in the United States of Europe in 2045 where evil and corruption abound in government (of course) and the good guys are the insurrectionist movement of Nats (nationalists).

The most mystifying thing about this book is the identity of the man upon whom Roberts has based his fat, balding, but none the less very brilliant asthmatic journalist hero, Horatio Lestoq.

Vestigially, he is undoubtedly Matthew d’Ancona, a fellow of All Souls and assistant editor of the Times who published the controversial Irish Framework document earlier this year. Roberts labels Lestoq the “demon document detective” – a reference to d’Ancona’s forthcoming publication alleging that certain fragments found at Oxford are eye-witness accounts of Christ. “There are also,” Roberts concedes, “parts of Dean Godson – a Sunday Telegraph leader writer – in him.” But Lestoq has one character trait that d’Ancona assures me he does not recognise. The man is a regular Lothario. And when he isn’t actually in bed with a pouting mega-babe, he has sex on the brain. “When he gets to the bedroom, all resemblance to me ends,” says d’Ancona firmly. “That’s the part of him that was unmistakably Andrew Roberts [recently married] in his bachelor days. ”

To the launch of Prospect, Britain’s new pluralistic political monthly magazine, which, it must be said, bears a closer resemblance to an inflight magazine, on the outside at least, than to any august political journal. Still, the party at Senate House, in Bloomsbury, London, was, to everybody’s enormous surprise, packed. Many, including John Brown, owner of Viz magazine, had not got a clue why they had been asked. “I don’t understand it,” Brown told friends. “David Goodhart [Prospect’s editor] asked me to contribute to the magazine’s funding. I refused – not very politely – yet he still asked me.”

But all became clear when Goodhart got up to speak. He thanked all those who had contributed and all those who hadn’t – for the latter he said had stiffened his resolve to publish. “That’s why I decided to invite them tonight … they know who they are,” he declared. At which point several in the room, Brown included, stared fixedly into their drinks.

Those of you who can recall from Four Weddings and a Funeral, Duckface’s floral bridal arrangement – surely one of the factors that caused Grant’s character to jilt her at the altar – may be interested to know that its manufacturer has written a book called Wedding Flowers, published this month. In the manner of Hugh Grant, the florist Simon Lycett, 28, has acquired fame on the back of FWAF. Not only has Ebury press asked him to write the book on wedding arrangements, but he has also just finished doing the flowers for the forthcoming film Restoration, starring Meg Ryan and Robert Dowey jnr. “My next project is Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night,” he tells me happily. At last! A suitable period for that revolting flowery headpiece.

Diary – Monday 25 September 1995

I have news that should prove useful to dithering potential voters in the new Kingston and Surbiton constituency. Having failed ignominiously to be selected as the Tory candidate for the new safe Tory seat of Vale of York, as well as several others, Norman Lamont, the erstwhile chancellor and MP for Kingston-upon-Thames (to be amalgamated into Kingston and Surbiton at the General Election), is returning to fight for his former home ground. He has thrown down the gauntlet to challenge his neighbour, Dick Tracey, Tory MP for Surbiton. It is a desperate move. The past year has seen Lamont touring all over the country to avoid precisely such a power struggle. Now he is busily getting involved in constituency affairs to do a bit of last-minute canvassing. Alas, I fear he is too late. Last week he strolled into the Kingston Town Hall and headed for what he thought was the Conservative group room. “I’m sorry, Mr Lamont, you won’t find what you’re looking for in there,” he was told. “Why not?” asked Lamont. “The Liberal Democrats took over this council a year ago.”

One expects Britain’s late-night newsreaders to indulge their palates at lunchtime. After all, they can’t be out gourmandising with the rest of us at dinner time, since they are busily preparing their scripts. Alas, however, this thought had apparently bypassed one man who took ITN’s Trevor McDonald to lunch last week. Having collected him at ITN’s headquarters, the pair wandered down nearby John Street and McDonald’s companion paused beside a sign. There was a small pause, broken by McDonald. “You know,” he told the man, nudging him gently onwards: “I am not really a pub person.”

To take Mick Jagger boldly by the hand, lead him to the dance floor and slow-dance with him, when one has never met him, takes either great courage or colossal inebriation. My friend and colleague Esther Oxford, 26, swears it was the former. “I wanted to see what he felt like,” she told me rather breathlessly on Thursday morning, having gyrated against the rock star for 30 wondrous seconds at the Grosvenor House the night before. “He was just standing there, chatting, when I pulled him to his feet. He was so shocked he followed.” Unfortunately, at six foot, Ms Oxford is not the ideal physiological specimen to check out Jagger’s body contours. As a result of her experience, all she discovered was that “he felt rather short”.

The sight of Judge Stephen Tumim, HM’s wonderfully good-humoured Chief Inspector of Prisons, on the judging panel at last week’s Jerwood painting prize, reminded an old crony of a time when Tumim’s artistic streak (he is a former chairman of the friends of the Tate) was considered something of a joke – at least among the police force.

When first appointed to his current post in 1987, Tumim was required to have two Special Branch security men guarding him at all times. Being something of a philanthropist, he took it upon himself to educate them. “Look at the fine brush strokes of X,” he would say, having dragged them into an art gallery on a Sunday, “or the effects of the thick brush by Y”. Word of this soon got back to Special Branch, which decided enough was enough. It changed one of the security guards. Tumim immediately took him off to the Tate. “Don’t you admire X?” he began, only to receive a lecture on X’s work from the guard, “How can this be?” queried Tumim. “Sir,” replied his new guard “Special Branch chose me for this job precisely because I had an art history degree.”

Fear not all ye rock fans tearing your hair out for Iron Maiden, whose dreams of being the first Western rock band to make it into Beirut have been shattered. (The Lebanese government has refused them visas, with only two weeks to go before the show and 1,000 tickets sold, and Lebanese police have withdrawn their records from the shops. The excuse is that the group is a “bad influence”.)

But now a white knight is riding into the fray, promising to sort everything out. Wielding his influential club everywhere, but most especially in the Foreign Office, is the Tory MP for Harlow, Jerry Hayes. “Steve Harris, Iron Maiden founder member, is a constituent,” explains Hayes. “He has turned to me for help. And I am doing my best. I have advised the Foreign Office that they must do something. The matter is now in their hands and we are hopeful.

“Also,” adds Hayes, 42, who lists “practising the violin with my daughter” as one of his hobbies in Dod’s Parliamentary Companion, “the group is not a bad influence. In fact they are very good. I have all their albums.”

Further to my note last week about the Downing Street dinner for Lady Thatcher’s birthday being the wrong way round – dinner first, drinks later – I was reliably informed, by the grown-up children of one MP who is due to attend that function, that when at Downing Street, pater much prefers the unconventional arrangements to normal patterns of sociability. That was a paraphrase. His actual words to his children were: “Oh God. Imagine having to sit through a long dinner with that lot. Too awful!”

There seems to be a hitch with the latest fad at the Daily Telegraph: namely, writing pieces about Establishment figures who cannot reveal their true identities. Yesterday it printed a successful piece about the right- wing polemicist and prison doctor who calls himself Theodore Dalrymple – I for one intend to inspect the bald patch of every man I meet until I find the one that matches the accompanying photograph – and another, disastrous, piece about a hugely rich international art collector who did not want to publish his name for security reasons. It would seem, however, that the man reckoned without the Telegraph’s sub-editors.

The piece starts in the thriller vein of The Usual Suspects. We are given clues that indicate a villain-type character from a James Bond film. We learn he lives in rich, rich Switzerland. His name for the purposes of this piece is the harsh, mysterious “Werner M”. Next comes a Gothic description of his house – “a darkish hall corridor,” “flaming” (but of course) with pictures by Vlaminck, Braque, Leger …

As a piece of mystery writing it’s all going swimmingly until in the sixth paragraph, the tension is inadvertently dissipated. Somebody somehow forgot all instructions and slipped the collector’s real name in. I shan’t be unkind and reveal it. Let it suffice to say it isn’t Goldfinger.

Diary – Monday 18 September 1995

John Major is in grave danger of committing the most serious social faux pas of his premiership. The etiquette of the dinner he is throwing for Baroness Thatcher at 10 Downing Street on 26 September, ostensibly for her 70th birthday but in reality to gloss over his differences with the Tory right wing, is all wrong. He plans to have a sit-down dinner first and a drinks reception afterwards. (He has pragmatic reasons. He thinks in this way to appease the second-eleven customers who don’t make the shortlist for the dinner, without causing them the embarrassment of shooing them out the door at the sound of the dinner gong) But imagine! No lingering over the port, no loving puff of a cigar, no time in which to digest the cheese, no chance to get really blotto … disaster. One who has been invited tells me it has really dampened his excitement. I suspect others of influence and importance feel the same.

This striking picture (right) of a nubile young woman could be a good advert for, say, toothpaste, or gold jewellery, or hair dye. But it takes on a whole new significance when I tell you that it is the frontispiece in this week’s edition of Country Life.

The magazine is historically the property of smart young gals in pearls, usually just engaged. But the editor, Clive Aslet, has decided that it is time to get radical, starting with Mary-Claire Lewthwaite, 22, non- engaged and from Cumbria.

He has had enough of the well-bred betrothed, in part because modern society’s conventions do not fit in terribly well with the magazine’s aesthetic values. “Women get engaged so much older now,” he tells me – meaning, I suppose, that at 28 there is a danger of wrinkles. Ouch!

Still, one ought to commend him for innovation. “I can safely say this is the first woman who has ever laid down for Country Life,” he says proudly.

Yesterday at breakfast time, London’s genteel literati were busy dropping their toast and marmalade in shock. They had received through the post an idea that is as outrageous as a topless model gracing Country Life. After 154 years of happy, undisturbed browsing, the demands of a handful are threatening to destroy the peace of the London Library. The committee is holding a referendum over whether to have a coffee room on the St James’s Square premises.

All those against – and I suspect there are very many, since I hear it was “only a few” who made the tawdry suggestion – should take comfort. It is quite clear from the language on the ballot paper that the library’s chairman, Nicholas Barker, is on your side. In his letter to members, asking for their vote, he throws the issue open and then concludes: “There are difficulties about the provision of such a room, and we will have to see whether these can be overcome. We would welcome members’ guidance.” Quite, Mr Barker, having given it yourself.

News of a further kerfuffle from Rodney Walker, the outgoing chairman of the NHS Trust Federation. Last week, you may recall, he made much noise about the dwindling capacity of the NHS – soon, he said, it would be able to cater only for emergencies and the elderly. At a dinner on Wednesday, he also managed to provide the first blot on what has generally been considered a spotless honeymoon landscape for the new Health Secretary, Stephen Dorrell. Getting to his feet in Nottingham in front of 600 people, Walker turned to his trusted friend – the pair go back a long way, since Walker is also chairman of the Sports Council, which came under Dorrell’s jurisdiction at Heritage – and uttered: “There can be no greater gob in government than the Secretary of State for Health.” For a brief moment there was intense public scrutiny of the Dorrell jaw. Which was not, incidentally, quivering with laughter.

The Americans are the only sane people I can find who agree with me that last week’s performance by the actress Tilda Swinton in the Serpentine Gallery was a national embarrassment. My colleagues seem to have lost all rational faculties over it/her/the pillow. In the New York Times, however, the caption accompanying a picture of the sleeping Ms Swinton said everything that was needed on the subject.

First it said in big print: “Quite Useless.” Then, in smaller print: “At the Serpentine Gallery in London, performance art is provided by the actress Tilda Swinton. She sleeps eight hours a day in an exhibition called `The Maybe’. The woman at right is a visitor to the gallery.”

He may, as the critics have noticed, be starting to touch on the theme of mortality in his books but, at 74, the author Dick Francis still has plenty of punch. At the launch of his latest blockbuster, Come to Grief, a woman cooed: “Ooh, how do you churn out a book so often? [Once a year.] Are you very disciplined? Do you get up very early?”

Francis looked at her beady-eyed. “Actually,” he replied, “I get up early when I’m not writing. I was up, for instance, very early this morning.”

“Ooh,” cooed the lady again. “And doo tell, what did you do when you got up this morning?”

Francis looked a bit taken aback, and then focused on her a little sternly: “Madam, I went to the bathroom.”

Those who sat next to Bob Geldof at the glitzy first night of Jonathan Miller’s Carmen at the Coliseum last Wednesday felt just a teeny bit uncomfortable when it got to Act IV and the opera’s wild gypsy heroine, Carmen, chucked in her lover Don Jose for the younger, hunkier bullfighter Escamillo. The story is obviously not too far removed from Geldof’s own: his wife, Paula Yates, has run off with the lead singer of INXS, Michael Hutchence. “He just sat there grim-faced and still. It was terrible to watch,” says one who was in a seat nearby. Fortunately, there is not much physical resemblance between Hutchence and Robert Hayward, the singer playing Escamillo, to ram the point home. Still, one can’t help wondering what Geldof made of Miller’s characterisation of Carmen as little more than a slut.

‘Nothing Ever Happens Here’

Diary – Monday 11 September 1995

Forget the statistics, forget the fact that the Bar Council is to consider banning barristers from taking on friends or relatives as “private pupils”. According to Cherie Blair, QC, wife of the Labour leader, Tony Blair, nepotism is no longer a significant problem at the bar. At last week’s launch of Robert Harris’s thriller Enigma, Mrs Blair waxed lyrically about her chambers – in which she is third woman to take silk.

“In our chambers we only take on people with first-class degrees,” she told me, “or occasionally people with 2:1s but they have to offer something else as well. The days of pulling strings are gone.” I did not quite have the courage to mention the name of Buster Cox, son of the former LWT chief, Barry, a great friend of the Blairs. (Last year, Mrs Blair was heavily criticised for awarding Cox jnr an unpaid six-month stint as a private pupil in her chambers. She responded that the arrangement with Cox was separate from the chambers pupil scheme and that Mr Cox was unpaid). But, of her own volition, Mrs Blair quashed the rumour that the Blairs and the Coxes had holidayed together in the Dordogne this summer. “Yes, I heard we were supposed to be in the Dordogne – but we weren’t even in France.”

My note last week about James Walsh, the young man at Tory Central Office who was appointed Gillian Shephard’s special adviser only to be thwarted by No 10 – a memo blocked all Central Office employees moving elsewhere in government before the general election – caught the attention of the playwright Brian Behan who has come across Walsh before. Earlier this year Walsh suggested that “meaningful action” be taken to block Arts Council funding of a play of Behan’s, when he discovered that its plot centred on a Tory prime minister having a homosexual affair with a minister. Walsh got nowhere, but Behan remains somewhat soured by the episode. Indeed, he has written to tell me that he is featuring Walsh in his new one-man show, The Begrudgers, due to run at Brighton’s Nightingale Theatre in November. “I have inserted Walsh into the plot,” he says. “He plays a censor protecting the Establishment.” Needless to say Behan is delighted at Walsh’s career upset. “He has suffered the curse of Behanism,” he says gleefully. “His agony will continue.”

Imagine, if you can, the working day of Julian Satterthwaite, 24. Mr Satterthwaite is the sole press officer for the Lib Dem MEPs – all two of them (Graham Watson and Robin Teverson). “I spend my time issuing press releases, writing articles, setting up meetings, that kind of thing,” explains Mr Satterthwaite in unenergetic tones.

Last Tuesday, however, he was provided with an exciting diversion – “the most unusual event in my career to date”. He was sent a letter bomb. “I went down to collect the second post and saw this suspicious package with psychotic handwriting on the envelope,” explains Satterthwaite. “So I opened it gingerly.”

Brave or stupid? “Well, it was exciting.” Fortunately for the would-be- martyr, the bomb, accompanied with a note stating, “Destroy the European Union by any means necessary”, was a fake. But now he and his bosses are wondering who could be picking on them in such mean style. Watson chuckles: “Finding a bomb in the mail was certainly not the first thing our London press officer expected. He tells me he’s quite happy with constructive criticism but that explosive threats are not really his cup of tea.”

Two weeks ago I told how the Oban Gathering, Scotland’s smartest reeling party, was oversubscribed this year, seriously wounding the pride of 50 hostesses. Spare bedrooms aired, new dresses purchased, they never expected to suffer the social ignominy of being refused tickets.

Now, though, they are feeling rather better. The ball, held last week, was not its usual success. Of the 400 who attended the pounds 100-a-head gathering, a number of unfortunates were struck down with chronic food poisoning. Some fear the prawn sandwiches were to blame. “I don’t know how it happened,” says one eloquent hostess, “but they rendered people so ill that for 24 hours bathrooms from Glasgow to Fort William echoed with the sounds of comestible regurgitation.”

Though he is intent on broadening the artistic awareness of his constituents, I am relieved to hear that the Lib Dem MP for Caithness & Sutherland, Robert Maclennan, knows where to stop. This weekend sees the fourth annual opening of his brainchild, the Northlands Festival, a celebration of the arts common to both Scotland and the Nordic countries. He was worried, however, by an earlier insertion into the programme of a work by the fashionable American playwright David Mamet. The fourth, much-repeated line of the intended play – Sexual Perversity in Chicago – is “Are you ****ing kidding me?” Remember: conservatism in Wick makes the residents of Tunbridge Wells seem positively modern.

“Once we saw the script,” explains the festival organiser, Alan Perrin, “we realised that it was not exactly suitable for a school hall in Thurso on a Sunday evening. The entry has now been withdrawn.”

Breaking out of the traditional fashion PR mould of short skirts, pearl earrings and silk scarves is Julietta Longcroft, 26, who, alone on that circuit, boasts a Cambridge degree. Ms Longcroft has just set up her own PR company, the Communications Store. It is the first PR/marketing company of its ilk to venture into cyberspace.

There is no fluff, no fuss and, best of all, no stream of gaudy, drivelling press releases emanating from her Savile Row offices. “I offer clients Internet facilities,” she says. “It’s cheap and it gives you a far bigger audience. Unlike most PRs, my aim is to be invisible. I can reach people all over the world without actually having to disturb them with a phone call.” No offence to the rest of you, but, as one who gets interrupted 10 times a day, what bliss!

Pretentious, Moi?

Diary – Monday 4 September 1995

There is turmoil verging on revolt in the normally peaceful bastion that was Tory Central Office. The thirtysomethings traditionally prepared to work for menial salaries in return for the first step towards a political career are livid. John Major has issued a confidential memo to all members of his new cabinet instructing them not to hire anyone from Central Office as their special advisers. For one man, James Walsh, 26, it is a particular blow. A month ago, Gillian Shephard rewarded him for four years of hard grind with a post as her man at Education and Employment. Three weeks ago, he held a party to celebrate. But No 10 refused to approve his promotion. He would have to stay put. Mr Major’s reasoning is that he does not want to lose any more of his young bureaucrats from their current areas of expertise in the run-up to the general election. But he has succeeded only in alienating the Central Office youngsters upon whom he professes to rely. “The whole point of working in Central Office is to gain promotion to a special advisership,” said one who works there. “To make an example out of James like this is completely terrible. People already feel badly treated because the pay is so low. Now he wants to take away the chance of promotion. It’s a complete farce.”

Still, the Major memo does not quite explain last week’s seemingly baffling appointment of the staunch right-winger and Portillo apparatchik John Bercow, 32, as special adviser to the staunchly wet Heritage Secretary, Virginia Bottomley. I, however, can.

It seems Mrs Bottomley’s shortlist of 10 contained too many well-heeled middle-class blue-stocking gals for her liking. “Peter,” she reportedly said to her plummy-toned PPS, Peter Ainsworth, MP for Surrey East, after the fifth pearl necklace, Laura Ashley dress and velvet hairband had made its appearance in the interview room, “they are all far too like you and me. I think we need a contrast.” Hence the appointment of Bercow, as happy in a shell suit – he is a qualified tennis coach – as he is in a black tie.

He escaped the curse of the Major memo because he was previously Jonathan Aitken’s special adviser, and before that worked in PR. “Ah, well,” sighed one who was disappointed not to get the job, “if anyone is going to stop her giving money to men prancing round in tights, it’s John.”

In a magazine interview last weekend the former “wild child” Amanda de Cadenet, estranged wife of the Duran Duran guitarist John Taylor, talked seriously about her plans for a career as an actress. “Being a mother on its own was just not fulfilling enough for me,” she sighed.

But I have proof that the 23-year-old has indeed long harboured keen thespian ambitions: she is pictured above, aged 12, in her first ever walk-on part as a conquistador in Benenden school’s 1984 fourth-form play, Inca. Though she did not have a leading role, Benenden seniors remember that Ms de Cadenet brought a star-like quality to the performance. “She ensured she got herself noticed,” says one, “by continually winking at the audience.”

The news that Piers Morgan, the fresh-faced youth who edits Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, is leaving to take charge of the Daily Mirror came as no surprise to senior executives who attended Murdoch’s recent News Corporation conference on Australia’s Hayman Island. Morgan, they say, distinguished himself by the dexterity with which he kept himself out of the conference chamber and inside the bar – all week long. His obvious disinclination to suck up to the media tycoon – an unusual characteristic within the Wapping stable these days – was, says my source, “plain for all to see”.

One can perhaps understand Morgan’s feelings, though. The corporate video of the Hayman trip is an illuminating five-minute film. Set to the song “I Still Call Australia Home”, the camera settles on Murdoch, pans to Tony Blair, resettles on Murdoch, pans to his son Lachlan, resettles on Murdoch, pans to a sumptuous banquet with a vast melting ice sculpture, resettles on Murdoch, etc, etc, etc. If one weren’t conducting the same love affair as the cameraman, one can see that it might all be a bit much.

In the wake of Ray Illingworth’s ignominious dumping of the English cricket chaplain, Andrew Wingfield Digby, it is a brave clergyman who now thrusts his dog collar into the batting limelight. But marching forth to Pakistan this autumn as the manager of the England A (reserve) cricket team tour is the Rev Michael Vockins, vicar of three parishes in Herefordshire and secretary of Worcestershire Cricket Club.

Vockins, 51, is a tough cookie: more Indiana Jones than Derek Nimmo. In 1986, he led a lost touring team through the African bush in the dead of night, unarmed. “When our host found us, he was horrified to see that we didn’t have pistols,” he chuckles. “As for suffering the same fate as Wingers Diggers, well, I don’t play the same role. I don’t tend to give my men spiritual guidance and they don’t tend to ask for it. They can’t quite forget that whatever else I may be, I am also their boss.”

He may be the author of two highly acclaimed books at the tender age of 25, but none the less there was a momentary choke over the Alpen the other morning when the Swiss writer Alain de Botton found himself referred to in a lonely hearts advertisement. It said: “Three colours red. Alain de Botton, Debussy, Satie. Bookish male, 32, seeks female into the same. Ldn”

“I found it very, very frightening and just a teeny bit flattering,” says de Botton, whose third book, Kiss & Tell, is published by Macmillan this week. “I hope he finds himself a soul mate, although I must say I thought the collection a bit weird.”

De Botton’s own love life – increasingly a phenomenon of national interest after his first two tomes on the subject, Essays in Love and The Romantic Movement – is alive and well. “It was a friend, not me, who discovered the ad whilst trawling through the columns. He then sent it to me,” he assures me.