DIARY
Mr John Biffen might have said some- thing of the sort, albeit in a tone more ironic than Gladstonian. It is sad that Mrs Thatcher has sacked him. His replies to questions in the House, including her questions when she was away, were de- lightful. But like all who do not always speak with utter seriousness, Mr Biffen was sometimes misunderstood. In a new book (Kinnock, Unwin Hyman, £11.95), he is quoted as saying, on being asked by a Liberal MP whether he had no shame, 'If I had any shame I would not be following this profession.' The author of the book, Mr Michael Leapman, declares: `I do not think he was joking.' I do not think Mr Leapman is joking. He has made a fool of himself, though not so great a fool as I made of myself when I met Mr and Mrs Biffen in Bournemouth, at the Spectator's party during the last Tory conference. The idea floated into my head that Mr Biffen is the Member for Bridgwater, in Somerset, and I yielded to the temptation to show how knowledgable I am by discussing the by-election held at Bridgwater in the late Thirties. Mr Biffen received my remarks encouragingly. He too can talk about Bridgwater: as Who's Who confirms, he went to school there. When the moment came for us to part, his wife said: `I do hope you have enjoyed meeting the Mem- ber for North Shropshire.'
Last Saturday I was buying vegetables in Tachbrook Street, Pimlico, when I accidentally jumped a queue. A lady ordered me back, and when I had apolo- gised for committing one of the gravest offences known to the British, another lady said that queues reminded her of the war, when food was short and it was particularly vexing to see someone jump in ahead and get something you had hoped to get yourself. Nowadays, if people go short in Britain it is for want of money, not goods to buy. Shortages of goods, which also ANDREW GIMSON existed in the many schools and homes run deliberately on Spartan lines, doubtless caused great suffering. But the most horri- ble subjects may also be funny. My favourite story about a shortage was told to me by my father, who went to a party just after the war at which he was offered `water — hot or cold'. The guests were later shown some slides of a concentration camp, by a soldier who had helped to liberate it. `And those are the stretchers,' he said to his appalled audience, indicating some stretchers which had been used to carry bodies. `Oh!' said an old lady. `Did they stretch them too?'
Much of life is so predictable that it is, perhaps, surprising that one should so often be surprised. But I am amazed at how many of my friends are getting mar- ried, including, of course, a high propor- tion of the most nubile girls. I met the fiance of one of these recently. When he had left, our hostess said: `God what a drip!' Everyone else disputed this verdict and insisted that he was a splendid fellow. I wondered what she would have said if I had been the fiance? The two best insults which have been thrown at me so far are `You're only acceptable as a comic figure' and `You're as much use as an amputated leg.'
There was, I am glad to say, no hint of `bourgeois triumphalism' about the Specta- tor tennis team's conduct on Monday, after we had trounced the Sunday Telegraph at the Vanderbilt Club. `It matters not who won or lost' — that is the spirit in which we play. Considering that our captain, C. Moore, was unable to turn out because of illness, nobody was more surprised than we were that we took seven of the nine three-set matches. At the convivial drink which victors and vanquished together enjoyed afterwards, it was in a spirit of disinterested intellectual curiosity that our acting captain, F. Mount, asked the oppos- ing captain, P. Worsthorne, how many games he and his partner, playing at third pair, had actually won. I ought, however, to take this chance to refute the suggestion made, I am confident, in the heat of the moment, that our four best players had prepared for the match with excessive keenness: T. Theodoracopulos by being selected, before we picked him, for, the Greek national team; G. Auty by knocking up with some Germans in Kingston-upon- Thames, M. Amory by knocking up with the gardener in his ancestral indoor court in Devonshire, and F. Mount by spending several years creating a Wimbledon-level grass court in Wales. My thanks go to S. Letwin, who substituted for our captain at very short notice but was let down by her partner, myself. My own preparations, on the public courts in Regents Park, proved inadequate for a match of this class.
At school I avoided having anything to do with computers, afraid I would be unable to master them. In the offices of the Independent, where I have already done some work and start full-time in July, it is impossible to avoid computers: there are very few typewriters and a great many computer keyboards. This has advantages, but never fear, I shall not tell you what they are as I have found it is a 'Great Bores of Today' subject. But there is also an unexpected disadvantage. The lack of typewriters means that confidential items are much more likely to be put into the system, before being printed out, or sent to other terminals. Even documents which are later to be typed by a secretary may first be drafted on a screen. These are then at the mercy of 'hackers'. Imagine my surprise when, though I am no hacker, there flashed before my eyes:
Percy Bysshe Found absolute bliss Below the belly Of Mary Shelley.
A fashion for sending poetry around the building seems to have been started by Mr Andrew Brown, who composed a clerihew about Andrea Dworkin which cannot be printed. Brown, as I still think of him, had a distinguished career as the Spectator's Scandinavian correspondent, and then as our chief reporter, before accepting a salaried post on the Independent as reli- gious affairs correspondent. I shall enjoy being in a position to follow his poetic development more closely, but am very sorry to leave the Spectator, where I should thank everyone for their kindness, wit, wisdom etc, most particularly the editor.
Previous page
