Diary
When anything dramatic happens to the Russian leadership, there enters my mind a deplorable episode of many years ago, which has probably influenced our relations with the Soviet Union to this day. Marshal Bulganin and Khruschev paid a state visit to London. A meeting at the Home Office, then in the old building facing the Cenotaph, was arranged for them. For reasons which escape me, the Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd George, and his minions, Lord Mancroft and my- self, were either not properly advised of this appointment or forgot it altogether. The Home Office of those days was not at all the jolly welcome, on the map place it is today. So when B & K arrived at the entrance, they were shunted by the door- keepers into a small, unattractive chamber on the immediate left of the entrance, reserved for unwelcome visitors, aliens and so forth, and told to cool their heels. This was unfortunate, but only the start of much greater misfortunes. Lord Mancroft was the first of us to reach the beleaguered Russian leaders. In course of this opera- tion, someone in the crowd outside the Home Office shouted: 'Boo.' A policeman on duty in the Home Office muttered: Hear! Hear! But I mustn't say so.' Lord Mancroft thought this droll, and passed it on attributably to a representative of the press. Adding injury to insult, it appeared in print. The Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was enraged. Lord Mancroft was summoned to Number Ten for a wigging. He now tells me, though I had forgotten this detail, that he came to me for tea and sympathy before going to the Prime Minis- ter. I appear to have advised him that the Prime Minister was very apt to get excited over such trifling matters, and that on no account should Mancroft offer his resigna- tion. Eden was. Mancroft didn't.
To my way of thinking the international publishing sensation of 1985 so far is not Rupert Murdoch's plans for a 24-hour newspaper in London to be called the Post, but the sale of the New Yorker to the Newhouse publishing empire for $142 mil- lion. A lot of history, character, legend, romance and good writing is changing hands. No wonder the staff are shirty. This is like selling a monastery to Hilton Hotels. Like many others, I first became ac- quainted with the writing of Dorothy Par- ker, Robert Sherwood, Scott Fitzgerald, Perelman, Lillian Ross and E. B. White through the New Yorker. The trouble with E. B. White is that his work this side of the Atlantic is too hard to lay hands on. Astonishingly, in its 60 years of life the New Yorker has only had two editors. The first was Harold Ross, who started the weekly early in 1925. Ross was a legend, a restless, eccentric genius, who somehow persuaded the best of America's writers and artists to work for him. They founded the Algonquin tradition. When Ross died in 1951, the chair went by his wish to William Shawn, now 77, still there and now part of the Newhouse property. I have just refreshed my memory from James Thur- ber's memorable recollections of Ross, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1959:
The night, in 1948, when I had sat around with Ross and Mencken and Nathan, the editor kept talking so much about Shawn that Nathan said, 'Who is Shawn? Who is Shawn?' I explained that Shawn was a quiet, retiring, tremendously efficient and hard- working man, who had begun as a Talk [of the Town] reporter and risen to the position of fact editor. His great desire is to be anonymous, a word he frequently uses, a word no one ever applied to Harold Ross.
Not a bad thing to be, a fact editor.
Asj every woman should aspire to do, can J. Kirkpatrick, who has been in London this week, manages to keep an air of faint mystery about her. Notwithstand- ing her ambiguous performances over our Falklands war, I am an admirer mainly for her mastery of the English language, which has made her an impressive exponent of American foreign policy. It is not a depart- ment in which Washington is over- endowed with talent. Her speech to the Republicans in Dallas last August, which I heard, was a resounding bid for higher office; though she talked afterwards about desiring only to get back to teaching, writing, her husband, children, dogs, cook- ing and friends. When Reagan resumed office, she did not get preferment — 'a dangerous woman', I can hear them saying in the White House — and was certainly disappointed. Yet she is now said to have finally made up her mind to leave the Democrats and join the Republicans. A pity in a way. As long as she hovered between these two suitors, she had political allure as well as intellectual clout.
My friend Edward Grayson QC, learned in the law and knowledg- able on sport, thinks he has a solution to football hooligans. Equate sporting vio- lence with motoring offences, he writes. Disqualify soccer hooligans from further involvement just as drunken drivers are disqualified. How? Legislate for the courts to impose mandatory detention or attend- ance orders every evening and every weekend for a specified period. But with respect to learned counsel, I think he is running into a wider difficulty which the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, now on the trail, may discover for them- selves. It is difficult to devise a statute which prescribes a special punishment for a narrow category of offenders. Is Mr Grayson's mandatory sentence to apply only to football thugs? Does the hooligan who beats up a railway guard, having failed to get into the match, qualify? Does the drunk at a cricket match? I shall be told that such difficulties were overcome in the Public Order Act of the 1930s which was aimed specifically at Mosley's Blackshirts. But it was not easy. Some of the early drafts of the Bill had the effect of making the Salvation Army unlawful. I look for- ward to seeing the parliamentary drafts- man's clause defining a 'football hooligan'.
Last week in the Guild Church of St Mary Woolnoth, which stands on the corner of Lombard Street, the Association of Men of Kent and Kentish Men, which keeps the spirit of the county alight, held what was called a Service of Rekindling of the Kent Corner. A good thought, for many who now work and live in London are perforce exiles from the Garden of England. The Duke of Kent, Patron of the Association, was to have come. At the last moment he had to represent the Queen in Barbados for the funeral of Mr Adams. The organisers were kind enough to invite Robin Leigh Pemberton, Governor of the Bank of England and Lord Lieutenant of Kent, and myself to read the Lessons. They sent us texts — from the New English Bible. My secretary thoughtfully laid alongside my text the words from the Authorised Version, reminding me that there is an option. I felt that in courtesy I should ring up the Bank of England and ascertain the Governor's wishes. An un- hesitating reply came from his office. They felt sure the Governor would prefer the King James Bible. (How nice to have a staff so close to your wishes.) So it was arranged. The Priest-in-charge,, the Revd Hereward Cooke, made it easy for us. The Authorised Version was on the lectern, marked at the right places. There were no complaints — as far as I know.
Isee that Lord Derby, President of the 1.Professional Golfers' Society, is to spon- sor a 36-hole tournament to mark the 500th anniversary of the creation of his earldom. My favourite golf story is about an Earl of Derby, when he was guest of Queen Victoria at Windsor for Ascot. The royal party (it is said) had assembled in the hall to drive to the course. Lord Derby was late. He apologised to the Queen with the words: 'We had a very slow four-ball in front of us at Sunningdale, ma'am.' To which the Queen replied severely: 'I should have thought, Lord Derby, that a man in your position would have a golf course of his own.' That remark is said to be the origin of Swinley Forest, close to Sunningdale, which wealthy men estab- lished as a private club early in this century.
William Deedes
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