DIARY
ANNE McELVOY To dank Cambridge for the K6nigswin- ter Conference, the annual health check of Anglo-German relations. The German par- ticipants are infallibly polite and attentive, but one senses that when it comes to dis- cussing the future of the continent, they consider our faculties to have been warped by mad cow disease. Each year the head- shaking gets more obvious. We Euroscep- tics will soon be regarded in polite German society as the equivalent of an eccentric great-uncle who expounds the divine right of kings. I sat next to a newspaper editor at dinner who was aghast to hear that I was implacably opposed to a single currency. Later, I heard him mutter to the man on his other side, 'And so young too', as if I had fallen prey to a terminal illness. I don't mind being surrounded by enthusiasts, but federalists have a knack of making dis- senters feel that aversion to a grand Euro- pean vision is a moral shortcoming rather than a difference of opinion. Sir Edward Heath's keynote address was sheer torture. The EU, he intoned, was 'the greatest achievement since the American Revolu- tion' and it was 'ungrateful' not to recog- nise this. The list of Eurosceptic sins enu- merated was long — very long. Britain's participation in the European elections was the lowest in Europe, he said sorrowfully. This might lead some people to conclude that the country at large has a robust lack of faith in the European parliament and associated institutions and ask themselves why. Not Ted. 'Extremely unjustifiable' was his considered judgment on our reluctance to exercise our Euro-franchise. At this point, I noticed one of our neighbours at table, who hailed from the former East Germany, wince violently. 'I haven't heard that phrase since the leadership in East Berlin used it about the 1.12 per cent of cit- izens who refused to vote in the sham elec- tions,' he whispered. 'Of course, the securi- ty organs knew exactly who they were.' You have been warned.
Some of my best friends, I hasten to add, are Europhiles. One Konigswinter stalwart is Joyce Quin, the Gateshead MP and one of the few New Labour women who always look bien dans sa peau. She was already riding high in my estimation as the only North-East MP to notice that the beach from which Nicky and Mary embarked on their canter through recent political history, at the beginning of Our Friends in the North, was southern shingle, not regionally correct sand. Caught out in this falsification of Geordie geology, the BBC confessed that the Whitley Bay scene had actually been filmed in Hastings. Joyce told me that she spends the summer recess working as a city guide, not in Gateshead, where the sights are few, but across the river in those parts of Newcastle-upon- Tyne which T. Dan Smith and Poulson did not manage to ruin. What a splendid idea it would be to make this sort of engagement obligatory for all MPs. It would give us the opportunity to find out how much they really know about their constituencies. Dennis Skinner's Bolsover by Night would obviously be a big draw: 'Look ter yer right an' you'll see a perfect, unrestored example of 17 years of Tory misrule.' More enter- taining still would be tours run by MPs whose affinity or even contact with their constituencies is modest. Peter Mandel- son's Hartlepool Highlights would — like his visits there — be conducted at a brisk pace. And Jonathan Aitken would bring a rare touch of patrician elegance to Thanet Tours. Home to the ex-cons and retired taxi-drivers of Essex, Thanet has always struck me as viewing its suave member with awe, grateful that the likes of him should stoop to represent them. As the late Dun- can Sandys used to say when accused of spending too little time in his constituency, `Damn it, I'm there to represent Streatham at Westminster, not Westminster at Streatham.'
Some reports of delinquency, however grave, cannot fail to provoke perverse feel- ings of sympathy for the malefactor. One such is the news that Keith Donoghue, a council clerk in the blameless city of Wells, has narrowly escaped the sack after a col- league found three soft-porn magazines in his drawer. In order to keep his job, he has been forced to seek counselling. I would be inclined to impose this modern equivalent of public humiliation on the woman who unearthed the magazines on the 10-denier pretext that she was 'looking for invoices'. It might have been rather silly of Mr Donoghue to keep girlie magazines at work rather than in their rightful place in the garage tool-box, but looking at pictures of unclothed women hardly renders him a threat to society. Much more damage is done by the sort of people who consider it their right to intrude on colleagues' draw- ers. I very much hope no one rifles mine. They would find three pairs of laddered tights, an old banana, a list of dirty Russian jokes and a home-made compilation tape of the worst pop songs ever recorded. A trip to the counselling service for the chronically slothful beckons.
One of my more entertaining duties as deputy editor of The Spectator is to read unsolicited manuscripts. Even those which do not make the magazine give great plea- sure here in Doughty Street. Nestling in the pile this week was a submission from Pro- fessor Gertsev at the Rybinsk State Acade- my of Aviation Technology in the Yaroslavl region of Central Russia. It is a brave attempt to explain the appeal of the Beatles using Venn diagrams and something called the Principle of Mutual Involvement. 'Let us identify zone A with rhythm-and-blues (Ray Charles, Chuck Berry and others),' Professor Gertsev begins. 'In this case, zone B can be considered as the work of the Rolling Stones. . . . ' The former Soviet Union is a prime source of our most arrest- ing offers, including a proposal for a profile article on the Georgian interior minister, Kakha Targamadze, which wins my Alexan- der Pope Damn-with-Faint-Praise award. `It has often been stated that Mr Targa- madze is arrogant, self-loving and not sovereign in the exercise of his tasks,' the encomium begins. 'But on closer inspec- tion, one finds a man who when saying "no" can always be relied upon to mean "no" even when people around him wish that he would say "yes".' The least inviting offer of the last week was, I'm afraid, a home-grown one from a British reader, whose submission letter went: 'This was originally written with the intention of get- ting published in Philosophy magazine but they saw fit to reject it. Thinking it a pity to waste it, I rewrote it for the New Humanist where they have not even acknowledged its reception. Accordingly I am passing it on to you.. .
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