DIARY
Modern life holds few greater plea- sures than flying first class at somebody else's expense. Personally, if I had to pay for the privilege myself, I wouldn't enjoy it. I'd spend the entire flight thinking how much more wisely I could be spending the money. But if somebody else is paying — in my case, the occasional foreign publisher — flying abruptly ceases to be a chore and becomes a luxury. My heart was therefore touched last week when I heard the story of Albert Goldman, the American biographer of Elvis Presley and John Lennon notorious for dwelling on the more sordid aspects of his subjects' lives. It seems that at the end of last month Mr Goldman agreed to fly from Miami to London to give an interview to the BBC arts programme The Late Show, but only on condition his seat was first class. Imagine his distress on arriving at the check-in desk and discovering his reserva- tion was only for club class. Mr Goldman Promptly threw a tantrum of epic propor- tions — so epic the BBC had to be tele- phoned in London and his seat upgraded. Alas, the author's victory was short-lived. Possibly as a result of his exertions at the ticket desk, Mr Goldman suffered a heart- attack and died mid-flight.
This cautionary tale was fresh in my mind last Thursday night when I emerged from BBC Television Centre having just appeared on Mr Goldman's least favourite programme — The Late Show. It was half- past midnight. A car had been promised to take me home to the country. But instead of the usual Ford Sierra, there waiting was a black London cab, its driver under orders to take me 'as directed' and charge the fare to the BBC's account. 'Where to?' asked the cabbie. 'You're not going to believe this,' I said. 'Hungerford.' Seldom in my life have I seen such an expression of awe and gratitude on a human face. It turned out to be a surprisingly comfortable ride up the M4, most of which I passed in a kind of trance, my eyes riveted on the meter. At 1.30 a.m. we stopped to refuel just off Junc- tion 13. By that stage there was £104 on the clock and the driver was in a state of ecsta- sy. 'This is the best job I've had in nine years of cabbing,' he murmured. 'This is like winning the pools. I'll always watch the BBC from now on.' When we arrived home — at a cost of £123 — he insisted on open- ing the door and escorting me into the house. 'Mr Robert Harris,' he said, looking lovingly at the docket, 'I shall never, never forget your name.'
One of the issues we had to discuss on Thursday night was whether or not 'video nasties' should be banned, so before going ROBERT HARRIS into the studio we were shown the last 20 minutes of Child's Play 3, a film which is supposed to have figured in two recent murders. I must confess I was shocked shocked by how tame it was compared to the blood-soaked Hammer horror pictures I watched on television as a child. What is wrong with the youth of today? The villain- ous puppet `Chucky' strikes me as not near- ly as dangerous and scary as David Alton, the MP who wants him banned. Of course, like all right-thinking people, I am instinc- tively in favour of any course of action which would annoy Michael Winner. But when one steps back for a moment and considers the implications of what is being proposed — that, for example, no British adult would be able to hire a video of Stan- ley Kubrick's The Shining — I have to say I agree with Mr Winner. We are all being treated like delinquent children. It comes as no surprise to learn that Britain already has the most repressive censorship laws in the western world. As a character in Joe Orton's Loot observes, ours is a country which would 'give power of arrest to the traffic lights if three women magistrates and a Liberal MP would only suggest it'.
Iam writing a novel — or trying to write a novel — set in Britain and Germany dur- ing the second world war. Occasionally I feel rather guilty about this: shouldn't I be tackling something of more contemporary relevance? But then I look at the newspa- pers and it seems to me that the war is not diminishing in importance but growing. Whoever would have guessed that nearly 50 years after his death England wouldn't dare play football against Germany on Adolf Hitler's birthday? The tenacity of the man's grip on our imaginations is astonish- ing. The same is true of Winston Churchill, judging by the reaction to Andrew Roberts's Spectator article about his alleged racism. At first I was tempted to agree with Lord Deedes, who wrote a reply in Satur- day's Daily Telegraph arguing that Churchill's views had to be set in the con- text of his time. But Lord Deedes's asser- tion that some of Churchill's 'more outspo- ken sayings' (which, incidentally, he didn't quote) were mere jests, uttered 'with a twinkle in the eye', made me think again. I defy anyone, in any age, to joke about blacks dying in their thousands of measles, or being scalped in South Africa, and do it `with a twinkle'. I can't think of any of Churchill's major contemporaries who would have been capable of such callous remarks. Halifax? Chamberlain? Baldwin? I doubt it. Equally bizarre is Lord Deedes's argument that Churchill couldn't have been a racist because he admired the Jews. One could more easily argue that Churchill's particular veneration of Jewish people (the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world') was simply another facet of his racism. Still, the fact that this debate is taking place at all is a tribute to Churchill's enduring capacity to fascinate. I can't imagine there'll be much interest in the views of any of our current rulers half a century hence — a comforting thought to those of us writing novels set in 1943.
On Saturday I received an unexpected letter from a Church of England priest with whom I was at Cambridge nearly 20 years ago: 'I note from last week's Spectator that, like most of my agnostic contemporaries, you live in an old parsonage. I just want you to know that when Britain becomes "Great" again, the plot to serve a writ of praemunire against Dr Carey is successful, and Neil Hamilton MP is Prime Minister, we will claim all our rightful property back. Dominus Tecum.' It's true that I'm an agnostic. But this splendid clergyman not so much High Church as stratospheric — is one of the few who might yet persuade me to see the error of my ways. A few years ago, at the wedding of a mutual friend, I watched him tiptoe up behind a young Tory parliamentary candidate who was droning on about something, and slowly tip a glass of beer over his head. 'Why did you do that?' spluttered the sodden guest. `Because,' replied his newly ordained assailant, 'you're so fucking boring.'
Previous page
