DIARY MAX HASTINGS
It seems time to sound the alarm-bells about the threat of paralysis facing the whole system of government appoint- ments, thanks to Nolanisation and politi- cal correctness. Hundreds of trusteeships and posts remain vacant throughout the public sector, as ministers struggle to fill quotas for gender, colour, disablement, and to meet Nolan's qualifications for purity. At the weekend I met one of the most venerable of the good and great, who described how he was telephoned by a minister some months ago and asked to chair a new body. After some thought, he assented. A week later, he was surprised to meet a Whitehall understrapper who said, 'So pleased you've decided to apply for the chairmanship.' Apply? Sure enough, this poor man was required to complete an all-purpose New Labour application form. He was then asked to name two referees with direct experience of him as a subordinate. He shamed the department out of taking up his references with the two former prime ministers he cited, but at the age of 76 he had to submit to a formal interview. Even as a humble gallery trustee, I have been asked to com- plete a form from the Department of Cul- ture, which demands, among other things, an exposition of one's own credentials for the job. I threw this away on principle, but last week received a reminder from the Department. I considered ticking the boxes to describe myself as a one-legged Chinese lesbian, thus ensuring shortlisting for the chairmanship of the BBC. Eventu- ally I merely marked the box which said, 'I decline to answer these questions.' In the end, presumably, abstention will get me blackballed from any public body. Yet Professor Parkinson was right. Anybody prepared openly to apply for a job is by definition unfit to do it.
Front-page stories about the threat to the Prince of Wales from a maddened har- poonist in the Mediterranean recalled the Wodehouse story about Tuppy Glossop's engagement, broken because he refused to believe his fiancee's tale of being attacked by a shark while aquaplaning. I am doubtful about the success of the campaign to per- suade us that the poor old PoW is becom- ing less dotty. The load of personal para- phernalia he carries when he goes to stay in other people's houses suggests growing, rather than diminishing, eccentricity. I mean, what would one think of any other house guest who turned up clutching his own loo paper? 'And it's not as if our host expects you to make do with Bronco,' remarked a baffled witness of the princely Ion paper, towels and so on arriving at a ducal palace. A courtier contrasts the Queen's daily newspaper reading with her son's absolute refusal to look at the press: `She doesn't enjoy what she sees any more than he would, but she believes it is her duty to know what is going on among her subjects. He doesn't care about that.' I still believe the harpoonist was hired by the Highgrove spin doctor.
Ian Hislop let forth a cry of anguish in the last Private Eye about finding one of his letters recycled in Mohamed Al Fayed's Punch. Fayed had apparently retrieved it from the Eye's rubbish. Punch has also recently published a letter I wrote to Paul Foot at the Eye address, presumably acquired by the same means. We know that Sir James Goldsmith liked to scuffle about in Private Eye's dustbin on his way home from the Clermont Club in the 1970s, but nowadays electronic snooping is more fash- ionable among rich megalomaniacs. When
`Can I have a glass of water, Dad?'
Fayed declared war on the Evening Stan- dard and withdrew Harrods' advertising because he disliked our coverage of him, I was warned to have my telephones regular- ly 'swept', and not to set foot in the shop.
Opera snobs are often rude about Hol- land Park's summer season. Yet we were enchanted by Donizetti there last year, and we had another wonderful evening at La Boheme last week, of which a highlight was Antoni Garfield Henry's Rodolfo. The rain stayed away, the atmosphere was cheerful and unfussy, it was all over by 10 p.m. and we didn't have to dress up. This is opera for the public, not the corporate classes. We love it.
Tory sources' have been telling politi- cal correspondents that Mr William Hague intends to distance himself from Jeffrey Archer's candidacy for London mayor. I still do not understand why Mr Hague saw fit to take his judo lessons in Archer's pri- vate gym, nor why he has failed to invoke his party's apparently moribund Ethics Committee to halt the whole charade. The questions raised about the Anglia shares deal alone should have stopped the great fantasist dead in the water, before even starting on the rest of Archer's preposter- ous history. A few months ago, however, a Tory frontbencher explained his colleagues' view of the Archer candidacy: 'First, the blue rinses love him. Second, he can pay his own bills. Third, he might just do it.' My friend shrugged an afterthought: 'Of course, if he won, it would all end in tears in six months.' And they say journalists are cynics.
Weather forecasters put on their gloomiest tones when mentioning the chance of a shower, but those of us obsessed with our gardens have been thrilled for the past fortnight to be spared the tyranny of watering, which occupied every weekend of July. We watered so assiduously that I felt the pain of a slighted lover when two large and noble pelargoni- ums gave up the ghost anyway. I consulted the book and found that their leaf loss almost certainly means they were victims of overwatering. Then I realised that two huge urns in which we kept them had no drainage holes. I got to work with a drill and was rewarded with an escaping torrent of Zambesi proportions. Too late for the pelargoniums, alas, but thank Heaven for good old Dave Hessayon's marvellous idiot's gardening guides, which tell us the answers to questions other gardening books are too sophisticated to mention.
Previous page
