Yours ever, Vaizey
Sir: Peregrine Worsthorne prudently left for Australia just before he discussed my children in the Spectator (Notebook, 13 January). My wife has therefore been unable to hit him with a rolling pin. As a friend of his, may I say, I would never discuss his children in the public press, though I did refer in a scholarly work to his stepfather, once Governor of the Bank of England, as deranged. Perry and his relations have changed their names so often that I did not know of his relationship. In any case, his stepfather, as well as being dead at the time, had been a most powerful public figure. My children are alive and are not public figures.
My simple point is that Montagu Norman's problems may, by some genetic quirk, have descended to Perry. (Perhaps Perry should be an honorary 'Hon'.) Norman, you will recall, thought that the cable announcing to him that Britain was leaving the gold standard in 1931 meant that his mother was leaving for her annual holiday, a somewhat splendid muddle. Perry, with a similar lack of grasp of reality, refers to my being 'huffy' with my children's head teachers.
In any circumstances that I can think of, a parent who was 'huffy' with a head teacher before his child had left the school for ever would be as prudent as a missionary getting huffy with a cannibal and a cooking pot. John Vaizey 24 Heathfield Terrace, London W4
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