DIARY
ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR For the first time in ages I went to lunch at The Spectator last week. It is 15
years since I used to work there and noth- ing much has changed in the meantime, apart from its editors. The old carpet in my former office, bought in the 1950s for its then editor and proprietor Ian Gilmour by his wife Caroline, looks rather more worn than it used to, thanks to many years of anxious editorial pacing. She used to want it back. I doubt if she would any more. Various old portraits have been removed and replaced by Nicholas Gar- land cartoons, which are certainly of high- er artistic quality. Otherwise, it is much the same. Certainly the wine still flows in the same generous manner as it did in the Seventies and Eighties — so much so that on this occasion it was nearly the cause of my downfall.
The lunch was put on specially for a television company making a film about Jennifer Paterson, the former Spectator cook and columnist who died recently after achieving great celebrity in the evening of her life as one of the Two Fat Ladies' in the television cookery series. After drinking rather too much, I was called from the top- floor dining-room into the tiny kitchen next door to be interviewed about her for the cameras. It was from this room that she once threw crockery into the garden and got herself sacked as a result by my succes- sor as editor, Charles Moore. But she sim- ply went on coming into the office, just as she did some years earlier after I had sacked her for some other reason. There is little you can do about someone who refus- es to accept the sack, but few people have the guts to do so.
Igot back to my home in Hammersmith by about 4.30 p.m., feeling happily nostal- gic in the peaceful knowledge that there was still a couple of hours before I had to deliver the little footnote I write four times a week for the Daily Telegraph. I would lie down on my bed, I thought, and read the newspapers until I came up with a suitable idea. But instead 1 fell into a deep sleep from which I was abruptly awo- ken at 6.45 p.m. by a telephone call from the Telegraph wondering where my copy was. I haven't known such panic in years. By 7.30 p.m., I had cobbled something together and e-mailed it off to the newspa- per, and somehow they managed to get it in. It was very decent of them not to sack me on the spot. Never again, I thought. There is no room for Spectator lunches in the modern world. You will remember that there was a lot of publicity last month for an attempt by Ron Harris, an American soft-porn entrepreneur, to get users of the Internet to make expensive bids for 'eggs from beauti- ful, healthy and intelligent women'. The women concerned were supposed to be top models. And the response was abysmal. A few days after Mr Harris launched his ini- tiative, there had been only one bid that was identified as serious. So this obviously wasn't a tremendously good idea. It seems that potential customers didn't believe in the promise that the egg donors would be 'top models', and they were right. One American newspaper described the 50-odd women who had vainly offered their eggs for auction as 'struggling actresses'.
We all have the right to a fair deal when we offer money for the privilege of begetting super-children. Unfortunately, Mr Harris seems unable to give adequate guar- antees. But there are people who can. These arc Britain's hereditary peers. Their lineage is meticulously recorded in the pages of Debreu. With them, you know exactly what you are getting. If it is blue blood you are
after, they will ensure you have it. Many of the peers with the bluest blood — it would be tasteless to name names — are painfully poor. Several depended for their livelihood on the £68 a day they got for attending the House of Lords, plus — for those who lived in the country — the £78 a night they were given for accommodation in London. After their brutal expulsion by Baroness Jay, a woman with a colder heart than Robe- spierre's, they must be seriously feeling the pinch. So somebody should set up a new website entitled 'peers.com', or possibly 'peers.sperm.com', or more patriotically peers.sperm.co.uk' to give them a living.
One of my favourite songs is an old Eddie Cantor one: 'When I'm the Presi- dent,/ When I'm the President,/ There'll be no holes in doughnuts,! When I'm the Pres- ident.' I think most people like the idea of being a dictator and issuing decrees. As a journalist, I think my first decree would be to order British newspapers to stop predict- ing the reactions to their stories. Especially with 'exclusive' stories, papers are seldom satisfied with the news they are seeking to convey: they insist on telling us how others are going to react to it. They say the story is 'likely' or even 'certain' to 'anger' or 'embarrass' someone or other, often whole groups of people. You can find examples of this daily in practically every paper, but I will give just one example from the last issue of the Sunday Telegraph. It carried on its front page a summary of an interview by Gyles Brandreth with Sir Edward Heath in which the old boy disclosed his great admi- ration for brutal tyrants such as Mao Tse- tung, Fidel Castro, and Marshal Tito. 'Sir Edward's views on world leaders will cause astonishment and anger among many of his Conservative colleagues,' it said, as if this were a fact. Obviously, the more likely reaction would be one of absolute indiffer- ence.
William Hague and Michael Portillo appeared together last week at an event at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and the Daily Telegraph published a photograph of them sitting side by side at a table. Mr Hague appeared to be talking, and Mr Por- tillo was looking at him with boundless loy- alty and devotion written all over his face. It reminded me of how Nancy Reagan used to look at President Ron when they were in public together. Her stare of unblinking adoration became universally mocked as 'The Gaze'. I very much hope for Mr. Por- tillo's sake that he doesn't feel he has to keep this up for long.
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