SKINFLINT'S CITY DIARY
Fleabitten
The Guardian's 150th anniversary dinner at the Dorchester was generous, though a little slavish, with a prudent mixture of old and present Guardian staff (with some notable exceptions like Philip Hope-Wallace), newspaper wholesalers and distributors, ad, vertising agents and their present and poten- tial customers, business leaders, politicians including the Prime Minister and the Ger- man Chancellor as well as representatives from the weeklies. It was a generous gesture which I hope they will find self-financing in increased sales and may well be copied by the Sunday Times in 1974 and in a humble way by the SPECTATOR in 1978.
The -.Guardian's Miscellany reported `Willy Brandt drifted from the Guardian an- niversary dinner to watch us and himself on 24' Hours on the Dorchester's colour television The preceding item was an in- terview with Peter Jay about the dollar crisis. What courses, the Times economic editor was asked, were open to the West Germans? Jay listed four learned possibilities. Brandt listened intently, shaking his head to each in turn. Then he smiled and said: "He is very clever, but he has forgotten the fifth possibility .. ." ' 1 hope Miscellany (is it the ubiquitous snoopy Eric Silver again?) will not think me ungrateful if I say 'wrong again'. I was as quick as anyone else to sidle up to the great man—almost shoulder to shoulder in a man- ner of speaking—in the Crystal Room of the Dorchester Hotel to hear the replay of his speech on the 24 Hours programme. Ludovic Kennedy was asking Peter Jay (with tangerine tie and groovy Cote d'Azur suit) about the dollar-Deutsche 'Mark crisis. He answered, with his Terry-Thomas smile, in what seemed to me a lucid way, mentioning the alternatives which probably included two-tiering interest, floating the Deutsche Mark and so on. Jay went on to illustrate his argument that the dollar was like a dog with the fleas of other currencies around it. Willy Brandt did not seem to catch it all (he was after all only waiting to hear his own speech) but with good-natured irony• turned to the rest of us and said: 'Oh he's clever!' Sunday's news that the Deutsche Mark is to • be floated seems to show that the mysterious 'he has forgotten the fifth possibility' was nonsense though forgivable journalistic licence this time, from our kind hosts.
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