Notebook
The editor of the Daily Telegraph, the great Mr William Deedes, has a cold. ,,"s is about all I have been able to discover an exhaustive investigation into the Industrial troubles on his newspaper which, nT we are told, could result tragically in its die sure. r „ ew people seem to understand the tell.ealls of the dispute which has prevented rlse of us living in London from seeing the Wednesday for the past week. The Times on euriesday published a 'background' arti- "Ie intended to explain what the dispute was all about. But one was left little the wiser. T-he Tetegraph losing money at a rate of £3 a year, wanted to close down one 'tinting machine with a loss of 20 jobs. The printers therefore stopped production of the paper in ''ogatLondon. Their union (called 82, like one of the Airport films) °Aruered them back to work. They refused. Asa a consequence (unless the dispute has peen resolved by the time you read this), the paper could close. There are suggestions that the whole thing is a great deal more n°111Plicated than that. But the truth is that ':,,crtically everybody, including employees b we threatened newspaper itself, are so politics and perplexed by Fleet Street union o that they cannot be bothered to find small more. They know simply that a print 8r°1113 of overpaid, bloody-minded the workers are once again threatening n survival of a national newspaper. They Nv.ee,,ciAcrushing. That is all there is to it. No eoln'er Mr Deedes is as interested in his ' a sPu es he is in the complexities of the discI have a cold as well, and it is very sa. hgreeable. While I have been taking
and Mr Deedes has been chewing garlic •
the urgig all his fellow old-sufferers on staff to to do the same. Ic might follow his ehxrar4Ple if I did not know that garlic on the is eath smells disagreeable. But maybe there th,„inore to Mr Deedes's remedy than meets ca` eYe. Garlic also has magic properties. It h.rt Fure leaf -curl in peaches; it can keep the stilent;„, white fly away from plants; it odes destroy ne. t Wr04 the magnetic power of the Perhaps i can also destroy Sogat any rate, it is worth a try. 1/14 the current issue of Penthouse, split in grarsa,if ie bY a fat section of coloured porno- ourPhotographs, is an interview with Qre engreatest living novelist, Graham iwo He is quite acerbic about one or geridOr his fellow writers (on Malcolm Mug- far", ge: `I wouldn't trust Malcolm very euron an interview conducted by Anthony Which u h , ‘..e put words into my mouth but I had to look up in the dictionary'), the uesPite his much-publicised battle with trn underworld of Nice, he seems ad- derahlY serene in his old age. The bouts of
Pression which used to attack him do not,
he says, 'come seriously now. I'm on a kind of plateau.' And what a nice man he is! Take his reason for giving up smoking dur- ing the War: 'There was rationing. I had a girlfriend who smoked and I thought that if one was going to queue up for a couple of cigarettes she might as well have them both.' He also has excellent taste in his reading material. Apart from Private Eye, only one magazine is regularly sent over from England to his home in Antibes 'The Spectator, which really is incredibly
good.'
Mr Greene also made one brief little comment on the Falklands War — 'I blame the Foreign Office first and foremost for allowing the Falklands situation to develop.' This innocuous opinion, which is shared by practically everybody, including Mrs Thatcher, for some reason provoked William Hickey of the Daily Express into a mini-paroxysm. He accused Mr Greene of 'sounding off' about the Falklands issue, 'choosing as his forum the soft-porn magazine Penthouse', when it is quite clear from the introduction that he agreed to be interviewed only under great pressure and probably had no idea in what magazine the interview would appear. But what Hickey minded most was the fact that a man 'who has chosen to live elsewhere since 1969', 'a spooky expatriate chewing lotus leaves on the Cote d'Azur', should dare to venture any opinion on a British national question. Everything about this little smear is absurd and unfair. First, Mr Greene is something of a patriot — 'I don't dislike anything about England'; secondly, he went to live abroad because of his health and stayed there because conditions for writing were better; thirdly, he doesn't chew lotus leaves but works very hard; and finally, as a former Foreign Office employee, as a regular reader of the Times and the Spec- tator, and as someone who knows Argen- tina well, he seems better equipped than most to form an opinion on the Falklands. One possible explanation for this curious lapse by the Express (a great newspaper, incidentally, for it publishes rubbish by me every Tuesday) is that it feels particularly possessive about the Falklands. It supported the war throughout; its own Max Hastings was the star reporter from the front; and last week it sponsored an enormous party — a 'Falklands Task Force Reunion Ball' — aboard the aircraft carrier Hermes. The party, as it happens, was Max's idea. After liberating Port Stanley, he cabled Lord Matthews from the Upland Goose Hotel: 'Please send £20,000• for celebration party.' Lord Matthews agreed, and the ball, when it finally took place in Portsmouth harbour, cost him not £20,000 but £25,000. The 850 guests dined believe it or not — on whelks (though 'Lord Whelks' as Private Eye calls him, could not be present), drank 1,000 bottles of cham- pagne, and, when they were not listening to martial music, danced to the strains of three bands and a discotheque. It sounds as if it must have been rather fun. My account of it comes from John Shirley of the Sunday Times, one of the very few Falklands reporters present — the rest having blotted their copy-books by engaging after the war in a distasteful smear campaign, clearly motivated by jealousy, against the Express's hero, Max. Poor Max, according to Shirley, was keeping as discreet a presence as possible. 'If you want to stay on speakers, John, you'd better forget my part in all this,' he said. But how can he expect us to overlook this, the last, of his many Falklands triumphs?
In last week's Notebook I said I would be going to Italy to find out who had been burgling my family's house in Tuscany. So- meone had come with a van and removed all the most valuable furniture. According to the local Marshal of the Carabinieri, the tyre marks indicated that the van was a Ford Transit. He said on the telephone before I left London that he had 'suspi- cions' he could only impart in person. So I went to see him. After a long conversation he eventually revealed that the chief suspect was our oldest and closest friend in the area. I protested against this improbable hypothesis, particularly as there was no evidence against the suspect except that he was the owner of a Ford Transit van. But the good officer assured me that friendship has never been an impediment to crime of this sort. It is all very difficult. If he actual- ly manages to pin the blame on our friend (and I very much doubt if he will succeed), then there will be no chance of getting the
stuff back. I will have to pretend that the burglary never took place, that I simply in- vented the whole story. Meanwhile, the hills are being stripped of oak trees to make way for a gigantic pipeline, bringing gas all the way from Algeria to the north of Italy. Why do people talk so much about the pipeline from Siberia?
Alexander Chancellor
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