W hen I employed him at the Daily Telegraph , I found
John Kampfner, now the editor of the New Statesman, a pleasant and able man. But his recent conduct towards one of his writers deserves a passage in the annals of editorial eccentricity. Nick Cohen, who is a leftwing columnist in the New Statesman, has written a brilliant book called What’s Left (4th Estate). Its essential argument is that large parts of the Left are so disoriented by the death of traditional socialism and so crazed with hatred of Bush and Blair that they ignore the fascism of the Islamists and the sufferings of their comrades on the Left — feminists, gay rights activists, trade unionists, secularists — at their hands. Kampfner accepted an invitation from Radio 4’s Start the Week to appear on the pretext of something else and pan his columnist’s book. Not content with this, he then reviewed it himself in his own publication in whatever are the opposite of glowing terms (glowering terms?). I suspect Cohen will take the hint and depart, a loss to a once-great paper.
Last month, I received an honorary degree. As is obvious from the press pictures of the best-known recipients — Bob Geldof, Bob Dylan — this is a rite of passage to middle age. The degree was from the University of Buckingham, unique in this country for existing without any help from the state. As a result of its independence, Buckingham is poor, but honest. It has no ancient, well-endowed buildings, nor any enormous, modern, subsidised campus. Instead, it is dotted about the charming county town. The degree ceremony was held in Gilbert Scott’s handsome parish church. The atmosphere was very jolly, entirely lacking the resentment which so often permeates academic life. How I long for the day when all universities are like this, and no central power can tell them what to study and whom to admit. The students getting real degrees that day were from every nation under heaven, mainly oriental, or former USSR, or African. The Africans (of both sexes) wore shoes so pointed you could not believe any toes could fit in them, and their mothers darkened the sky with their colossal head-dresses. I was kitted out in one of those soft, flat hats that make everyone look like Henry VIII, and stood on a dais while my praise was recited (a sadly rare experience in the life of a journalist). Then I tried to tell the students that the best thing about university was that you don’t have to think much about your future while you are at it. As we processed out, I found myself next to an earlier honorand, the heroic defector from the KGB Oleg Gordievsky. Like many people from the communist world, he cannot be doing with the compromises with totalitarianism which we in the West quite easily make. He had recently had friends to dinner, he said, and they had started to praise Fidel Castro. He made them leave.
By chance, a few days later, I was watching Billy Wilder’s lovely film The Apartment, made in 1960. There is a scene in a bar just before Christmas, in which bad, married Marjie puts ‘Oh come, all ye faithful’ on the jukebox and then starts chatting up the hero, C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon). Her line is ‘You like Castro?’ Lemmon: ‘What is Castro?’ Marjie: ‘You know, that bigshot down in Cuba with the crazy beard.’ Lemmon: ‘What about him?’ Marjie: ‘Cos as far as I am concerned he’s a no-good fink. Two weeks ago, I wrote him a letter; he never even answered me.’ She was asking Castro to let her husband Mickey out of prison in Havana. Lemmon: ‘Mixed up in that revolution?’ Marjie: ‘Mickey wouldn’t do nothing like that. He’s a jockey. They caught him dopin’ a horse.’ Terrible to think that the no-good fink is still there 47 years later, and that when he finally dies he will be feted on the BBC. I don’t suppose he has ever let poor Mickey out.
On the subject of long-reigning dictators, am I just wishfully thinking, or is there now a real movement to get rid of Robert Mugabe? Some normally slavish supporters have been heard expressing public doubts, and there are rumours of a coup soon. If he and Castro were both to go within 12 months of Saddam Hussein’s execution, it would be quite an annus mirabilis.
After visiting Buckingham, we poked round Oxford. The most striking recent change is that the university is closed. Once upon a time, anyone could wander freely about the quads. Then, as tourists became too numerous, the colleges closed to visitors for large chunks of the day, but you could usually get in all the same by speaking nicely to the porter. Now, though, most of the colleges are locked at all points. One undergraduate told me she was not allowed into another college even though she is a resident member of the university and had a pass to prove it. I think this latest tightening results from the threats of animal rights terrorists. Strange how the 21st century has imposed the return of mediaeval seclusion.
Letters from Oxford (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), Hugh Trevor-Roper’s recently published correspondence with Bernard Berenson, conveys the special tone of the place 50 years ago. Although the letters are witty and clever and full of interest, they are not very likeable. They have that scepticism, known as Gibbonian, which involves thinking oneself superior to the folly or stupidity of other human beings. Writing from the Scottish Borders, Trevor-Roper says, ‘... of course the conversation of Cheviot farmers is always, when intelligible, rather thin’. The ‘of course’ is a peculiarly snobbish touch. I do hope there are some extant letters from Cheviot farmers about what uphill work it was talking to Hugh Trevor-Roper.
If you drive from Oxford to London on the M40, you always see red kites. The birds were reintroduced, I think, by the late J. Paul Getty. When I first saw them years ago, I was thrilled, but as they become more common, my interest gradually wanes and I start worrying that they may be preying too much on other wildlife. One’s idea of beauty is bound up with rarity. Dreary old hedgesparrows have become more interesting as their numbers have declined, whereas birds like magpies (which I actively dislike) and pheasants (which I find comical) would surely seem exotically beautiful if one hardly ever saw them. It is almost as if quality is not just different from quantity, but its opposite.
On the radio, I heard an organiser of a sport talent competition explaining his plans, ‘Oh no, it won’t be like reality TV. Hopefully, it will be much more realistic.’
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