DIARY
CRAIG BROWN
Vote Tory, Tory, Tory - For election glory We don't want U-turns So we'll vote for Maggie T.
Vote Tory, Tory, Tory The only party for me Say No to Labour And No to the SDP
John Major's appearance at Dame Joan Sutherland's farewell performance at Co- vent Garden suggested that he might take the Cabinet upmarket in its autograph- hunting. If this was his intention, he was badly let down last weekend by two of his most trusted colleagues. Both John Gum- mer and Norman Lamont were part of the bizarre assembly of guests at the party for Andrew Lloyd Webber's third marriage. Others included Esther Rantzen, Mark Phillips, Michael Caine, Baz Bamigboye, David Emanuel and David Frost. They all tucked into black and gold caviar and listened to Michael Ball sing a rendition of 'Climb Every Mountain', which Lloyd Webber for some reason thought 'appropriate . . . considering events in the Gulf. As the royal family has been so severely censured for failing to act gloomy during a time of war, it seems only fair to ask whether this was the best place for two senior ministers to be spending their Satur- day night. Not since Tom Driberg confes- sed to Lord Boothby his love for the crooner Johnny Ray (It is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me') has the dignity of British politics suffered such a setback.
0 ver the past year or two, there has been a remarkable growth in the number of long articles in serious newspapers about murders and murderers. Thirty years ago, such articles were admitted for publication only if the murderer was a toff, a doctor or a senior clergyman, and it went without saying that he had to be British. But in today's Sunday papers demand for murder is now far exceeding supply, so that jour- nalists are having to rootle around in all manner of professions, and have even started entertaining foreign suppliers. It is now commonplace to spend one's weekend sifting through 5,000-word articles, com- plete with grainy before-and-after photo- graphs, profiling mass-murdering dentists from Los Angeles or matricidal truck- drivers from the Perigord. Of course, the more offbeat the nation, the more prolific the murderer must be to merit a profile. Thus a Londoner could gain his 5,000 words on the strength of murdering his wife, while a Frenchman would have to murder his wife and her lover, and a Greek would have to murder his wife, her lover, plus a couple of innocent bystanders. I have never seen a profile of a Finnish murderer, but I imagine that he would have to do away with a handful of local bigwigs and at least three visiting Britons. These days, anyone on Death Row who has yet to be allotted a biographer is entitled to feel pretty cheesed off. With the advent of Janet Malcolm's new book, The Journalist and the Murderer, even the biographers of Death Row have their biographers. In the reviews of Miss Mal- colm's book, we have been able to read writers writing about a writer writing about a writer writing about a murderer. With such a log-jam, the publishing industry must be sorely worried. I suspect that it won't be long before a go-ahead publisher rationalises his schedules by commission- ing the perfect murderer. If there is still an adulterous aristocratic doctor living in Kenya who entertains a grudge against an ex-friend of the Duke of Windsor, he stands to make, as it were, a killing.
Ihave a friend who goes to a pottery in a nearby village. Among his fellow potters is a psychiatrist from a local American air- base. In a notably cranky bunch — another potter drinks his own urine and is fluent in Esperanto — the American psychiatrist stands out as quite the loopiest. His potting speciality, which he repeats time and time again, is to sculpt oyster shells full of teeth. On the bottom of these shells he inscribes the legend, 'Help Me'. If only Saddam Hussein could somehow be tipped the wink that American airmen rush to such oddballs when they feel a turn coming on, he might well decide to raise the white flag forthwith. The other week in this pottery, the American psychiatrist was claiming inside knowledge that call-up papers had already been printed for distribution to adult males in this country under the age of 34. I am 34 in May, so I felt a tiny bit nervous. However unlikely the psycholog- ist's information, it did help me clarify my own thoughts on the war. To the question, 'Would you lay down your life for this cause?' I'm afraid I would have to answer a most definite `No'. Perhaps Peregrine Worsthorne and Paul Johnson and all the other cheerleaders might ask themselves the same question. If their answer is equivocal, I suggest that they could at least make a nod in the right direction by laying down their pens.
As I began with a bad verse, perhaps I should end with a good one, the only bright patch in Simon Raven's grisly new memoirs. It is a parody by Maurice Bowra of Thomas Hardy's verses on the sudden death of his first wife, and it goes:
Oh how you went so fast Without any palaver: I found when I spent at last It was all over your cadaver
Oddly enough, the Home Secretary left this excellent rhyme out of his amazingly lazy compilation, Unauthorised Versions: Poems and their Parodies, published last year. After sitting quite happily through Lynsey de Paul, surely even he cannot argue that this omission was on grounds of taste.
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