A Spectator's Notebook

Li A Minister for London. This is not a new suggestion but it remains a good one and has lately been gaining ground. Nor is that surprising, as London becomes ever more congested, chaotic and expensive. Metropoli tan administration is at best muddled, at worst Paralysing, divided as it is between the Greater London Council, thirty-two boroughs, and, of course, central Government.

There are no sound reasons for retaining the GLC at all. Every one of its functions could be distributed between the boroughs and the

Government. On grounds of economy as well as cohesion the GLC should be abolished, its army

Of officials dispersed. So far from absorbing the City Corporation, on which some zealots have lung cast envious eyes, the GLC could profit

ably by cut to extinction — not all at once, not overnight, but systematically as both Government and boroughs assumed its powers and responsibilities.

There is nothing eccentric or far-fetched in thinking this. Many good witnesses with an

impeccable (and successful) record of public service in London are of the same mind, among them Alderman Hugh Cubitt of Westminster

City Council and Mr John Guest, formerly Lord Mayor of Westminster (and before that Mayor of Marylebone). But abolition of the GLC does argue the appointment of a minister to co-ordinate and control both policy and practice. This would

seem an entirely sensible, not to say overdue, arrangement for a great capital city. The Minister's department need not be large; indeed it ought to be small, but high-grade, with an iMPortance in inverse ration to size.

El Reactionary chic. A restaurant in Covent Garden, L'Opera, is now heavily sandbagged

against possible terrorist attention. Likewise .Madame Prunier's establishment in St James's. In the result, their facades have taken on a new distinction.

1:-.] Here is a splendid piece of enterprise. Mr Anthony Hopkinson, brother of the writer

Marika Hanbury Tenison, is making paper by

hand from waste. He has just written to us on a speet of agreeable oatmeal-coloured paper i,ecYcled", as they say, from the Financial Times — and much more attractive than Mr Alan Hare's (or Lord Cowdray's) original pink. iVir Hopkinson has this to say about his own Process, which is really — or could become — a cottage industry:

'The process of paper making by hand is as old as Christianity but in this case there are one

or two modern touches. For instance, I found the first stage of pulping the waste paper by hand very slow so I have introduced a kitchen v 'Icluidiser which turns it in a few seconds into a Pti,i1D looking rather like porridge. Into this pulp I dip a wooden frame covered With mesh. When I withdraw the frame the

Mesh is covered with a film of pulp which is then transferred to a sheet of cloth. After Pressing and drying, this film of pulp is peeled

the cloth and is ready for writing or graving on.

"Hand-made paper has a special feel about it, a kind of quality the machine-made stuff cannot match. Colouring can be added to the pulp to vary the grey which otherwise results from old newspapers and the paper can be sized to make writing paper on which ink doesn't spread. It can be an attractive material for artists in pencil, pen or watercolour and for making up into scrap books and photograph albums. "Although I get great satisfaction from making paper and enjoy passing on the secret of the method. I must emphasise that I have a serious purpose in introducing my craft to other people. To get the paper we need in this country each year takes a forest the size of Wales. Most of our paper and paper-pulp comes from abroad and this year will cost us about 61,000 million to import. "Much of this paper, once printed, will be read in a few minutes and then thrown into the dustbin, after which the local authority will have the considerable headache of disposing of it. We only recycle about 40 per cent of the economically recoverable waste paper and that's less than they achieve in many other western countries."

Li A friend who has been working in the reading room of the British Museum reports that there is a remarkable rash of graffiti in the men's lavatory there. Most of them appear to have some political content, usually of a Trotskyist nature: 'Fight for workers' control of culture' on one wall faces an impassioned attack in French on, 'Laquais, Ieche-bottes et crypto-fascistes.' However, the Right — new or old — is answering

back. After the slogan 'Vietnam has won', someone has written gloomily, 'Wait for the executions': and another wit — remembering former habitues of the library — has scrawled a note of assignation between Karl and Friedrich (Marx and Engels).

EJ Dame Agatha Christie was a lady with a considerable line in whimsical wit, perhaps most evident in her remark to the effect that one of the greatest advantages of having an archeologist as husband was that he became more interested in one as one grew older. She was much loved by all who knew her. Her huge success never went to her head and, unlike many successful authors, she never sought to impose her own wishes and temperament on her hard-working publishers. None of this amiability, however, prevented her from enjoying a tremendous and often sharp rivalry with the other great Dame of British crime fiction, Ngaio Marsh: both ladies were published in the justly famous Collins Crime Club series.

Some, however, are less than totally convinced that the Christie achievement was one to be ranked with that of Doyle or Chesterto/1 As our own crime critic, Patrick Cosgrave, put it: "I never found that her characters were alive. Poirot I thought an extremely tedious bore, and his Watson, Captain Hastings, was unbelievably stupid. Then, though she was highly expert at ringing the changes on the established conventions of the detective story she had, really, only one trick. She invariably — and this was particularly evident in the last Poirot book, Curtain — simply developed a consistent line of behaviour for a character, but one which admitted two explanations. Once you noticed the character whose every action was explained by reference to a philanthropic impulse you had the villain. I do not think she is to be compared to Marsh, or even Allingham or Sayers. However, she undoubtedly had a greater pulling power than any of them, and some of her best tricks were enduring contributions to the detective story form."

111 Michael Parrott writes from Paris: When Valery Giscard d'Estaing was French finance minister, he earned the reputation of avoiding spectacular policy decisions in favour of a more subtle tuning of the economy. To judge from his sixth cabinet reshuffle announced this week, he is adopting much the same sort of tactics in the political field as head of state.

If anybody was expecting a major shake-up of his government after eighteen months in power, they were disappointed. Giscard replaced only three of his sixteen ministers and sacked four secretaries of state in what he claimed to be a technical rather than political redistribution of portfolios. The creation of five new secretary of state posts allowed him to bring in some more non-parliamentary supporters, but the basic political balance between Guallists, Independent Republicans and Centrists was maintained.

While the Gaullist Jacques Chirac remains prime minister, Giscard has strengthened the Centrist wing of the government by appointing the Centrist Minister of Justice, Jean Lecanuet, a minister of state, thus putting him on the same level as the Independent Republican Michel Poniatowski, Minister of the Interior. With parliamentary elections due in 1977 or 1978, the President is pushing ahead with his plans of winning a parliamentary majority on a Centrist rather than a Gaullist ticket.