DIARY
DAVID ENGLISH Ihad a bellyful at Blackpool last week. The entertaining of ministers by the press has now reached such orgiastic proportions that I cannot understand why neither Blackpool nor Brighton has not seen fit to construct a municipal vomitorium. When I first started covering party conferences some decades ago as the working acolyte of the late, great Derek Marks, we reported debates and interviewed delegates and mm- iSters at press conferences or as they hur- tled along the streets to their hotels. If we Were lucky, they would arrange to meet us in bars where they would provide us with small gin and tonics. Political editors (edi- tors themselves rarely appeared) were occasionally invited to a minister's suite and given a lobby interview together with a glass of scotch. Only rarely was food involved and then invariably at the politi- cian's invitation. 'I shall not be directing coverage in the conference for the early "moon,' Marks once announced grandly. I have been invited to take luncheon with the leader.' Somewhere in the late Sixties, this changed and the politicians began accepting massive hospitality from journal- ists- Knowing the more liquid this was, the greater the likelihood of loosened tongues, the latter went for the top of the wine list without hesitation. It wasn't long before this became ritualised and the costs bub- bled out of control. Politicians of both par- ties complain about the two agendas — the real one and the media one. But they have °nlY themselves to blame. They're the ones that feed the media agenda after the third bottle of Latour is uncorked. Last week, as I sat facing a succession of Cabinet minis- ters and their loved ones watching them forking into duck a l'orange, 'red meat' grouse, grilled turbot and baked sea bass washed down with more than a little Mon- trachet, my major thoughts were on the grim diet I would have to impose on myself the minute I returned to London. If this government is stupid enough to put VAT newspapers and magazines, I will have no alternative to ordering a company ban on entertainment of all politicians. The resulting savings should go a long way towards diminishing the immense loss of profits which VAT must cause our industry.
th ord Archer wants to be chairman of eTorY party, and his speech to the con- ience on crime and punishment was one of the best job applications I have ever heard. One elderly connoisseur of dema- goguery rated it better than Huey Long but 11?t as good as Mussolini at his best. As with so many Archer enterprises, it almost strayed into farce. He planned to ask the audience 'Hands up all of you who have been burgled in the last few years', antici- pating a forest of outraged Tory forearms. He then intended to spend several seconds attempting to count them before giving up and glaring significantly at the Home Sec- retary. Fortunately, he could not resist out- lining this idea to the platform officials, who nearly died on the spot. Only after sev- eral minutes of unjoined-up shouting I'm told did Archer finally grasp the fact that the resulting television footage showing hundreds of Tories as victims of crime 14 years after their party came to power would almost certainly form the gleeful basis of the next party political broadcast — to be screened by Labour. My favourite Archer story of the conference is one where after a lengthy lunch in his suite he gets a phone call and says to his guests, who include the two senior spin doctors, Sir Gordon Reece and Sir Tim Bell, 'I am sorry. The Prime Minister is on the line wishing to discuss tactics with me. It's confidential. I shall have to ask you to wait outside.' Respect- fully, they shuffle out to the corridor where they wait and wait. At this point, the bulky figure of the Hon. Nicholas Soames, the `Minister for Food', lumbers into sight. He inquires what they are doing. The gurus explain. To which Soames replies,'Well, if the PM is talking to Jeffrey, he's doing it by extra-sensory perception. Turn on your television and you'll see him on the plat- form and he's been there for the last half hour.' A large proportion of the Tory elite 'Apparently you can die in it!' — about 99 per cent I'd say — are deter- mined that Jeffrey will never become the chairman. Strangely, they believe he would be disastrous. I cannot see why. He would keep press, party and nation endlessly entertained with his japes and wheezes and so make life much more exciting for us all, • In the end, it was Major's conference but the Mirror's week. For the first three days, it dominated Blackpool. Meanwhile, in the City, its shares were snapped up and it broke free of its Maxwellian past. Thus the Thatcher scoop was symbolic of the new Mirror, and the Pembroke Hotel, the media base camp, resounded with bellows of hurt rage from Fleet Street editors screaming down the phones to their London subordi- nates who had failed to 'find' an advance copy of the memoirs. For make no mistake, everyone had been seeking to do just that, at whatever cost, for the last few weeks. Only the Daily Mirror succeeded, thus demonstrating that it is back in business as a serious competitive newspaper after many years in the comic wilderness. In my view, this is a very good thing.
Diary writing is a new journalistic excursion for me. I have never worked on a newspaper diary nor kept a personal one. Indeed, I feel we should always be wary of obsessive diary writers, as the following conversation, which occurred at a recent party, illustrates. Andrew Knight, chairman of News International, greets Paul Johnson, who needs no introduction. Knight: 'Hallo, Paul. How nice to see you.' Johnson: 'Well, it's not so nice to see you.' Knight (taken aback): 'What do you mean?' Johnson: `You told me that you were going to fire X' (he names a News International editor). Knight: 'I did not.' Johnson: 'You did and you have failed to do so. That is shameful. X is a vulgarian, a guttersnipe and a dis- grace to the profession.' Knight (nervous- ly): 'I assure you I never said I was going to fire anyone.' Johnson (triumphantly): 'Yes, you did and I can prove it. It is in my diary. I write down everything, every night. And that promise to fire X is written down on the day that you said it.' Knight (desperate- ly): 'I am sure I said no such thing. I can't believe that I said anything of the sort.' Johnson: 'You said it! It is written down! I will show you the entry if you like. Not that it's important. What is important is that you haven't done it. You haven't sacked X and you should have done so.' Who is X? Nothing will induce me to say. We shall have to wait for the publication of the Paul Johnson Diaries, or, life being what it is, the serialised version which will undoubtedly appear first in the Sunday Times.
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