28 OCTOBER 2000, Page 10

ANOTHER VOICE

They strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage and now are seen at literary lunches

MATTHEW PARRIS

Welcome to the Hotel California, except that it was not California but Park Lane, and the hotel was the Grosvenor House. Though mirrors weren't on ceilings nor the pink champagne on ice, we were all just prisoners there, of our own device.

Court & Social columns are not my métier, but the guest list at the Foyles 70th anniver- sary literary luncheon last Wednesday, 18 October, was so extraordinary, so gilded, so melancholy as to be a period piece in itself. A last snapshot of a departing time, you might say; except that the time had long departed. Only the people were left behind.

I am no Samuel Pepys, but public moments that seem indelible in a thousand minds fade quickly if nobody writes them down, There must have been almost a thou- sand people, of whom nearly 250 were `guests of honour'. So much honour! Hon- our's battalions extended across six top tables: a 'top' top table, and beneath it a sort of tournament of top tables.

The seating plan on which I rely charts the field of contest. On paper, the line-up emerges peppered by a hailstorm of deco- rations. Just a couple for Sir Nicholas Hen- derson, GCMG, KCVO; a modest three for General Sir Peter de la Billiere, KCB, KBE, DSO. At four, the Rt Hon. the Lord Carrington, KG, GCMG, CH, MC was numerically honours-even with Field-Mar- shal the Rt Hon. Lord Carver, GCB, CBE, DSO, KCVO; yet in this war of acronyms, both were outgunned by Marshal of the RAF Sir Michael Beetham, GCB, CBE, DFC, AFC, DL, FRAeS.

On the 'top' top table, James Callaghan's last chancellor sat almost next to Margaret Thatcher's first foreign secretary. The Rt Hon. the Lord Healey of Riddlesden, CH, MBE and Lord Carrington found them- selves to the left of the principal guest speaker, Mr Ned Sherrin, CBE. The Baroness Thatcher herself was to Mr Sher- rin's right. Lord Tebbit had been mis- chievously seated between Lady Thatcher and the German Ambassador.

Lady Thatcher has never been one for star- ing around. But had she looked along the seats to her right, her eye — lighting briefly on Lord (Kenneth) Baker and lingering per- haps a moment longer on Lord (Cecil) Parkinson — would have passed three ambassadors, the New Zealand High Com- missioner and five peers, as well as her hus- band and Penelope Keith, before reaching her host, Christopher Foyle, and his wife. Glancing now to her left, she would have noticed two more ambassadors and the Aus- tralian High Commissioner — if she were not distracted by Lord (Bill) Deedes, the Duke of Devonshire, Lord Snowdon, Lady (Barbara) Castle, Sir Hardy Amies, Sir Ludovic Kennedy, and others equally illustrious.

And that was just her side of the table. Across it, Katie Boyle, Nigel Nicolson, Dame Norma Major, Sir David Frost, the Lords Cranborne, McAlpine, Biffen, Can (Robert), Rawlinson (Peter), Mackay of Clashfern, Fellowes . . oh, where shall we linger? Not by the barons alone, but by the court jesters, troubadours and travelling players too: Harry Secombe, Alan Whicker, Robert Robinson, Thora Hird. Many of the surviving members of the Thatcher, Callaghan, Heath and even Wilson Cabi- nets were there.

Lady (Mary) Wilson herself was seated between Norris McWhirter and Lord Ryder. Richard Ryder was once Mrs Thatcher's private secretary, later John Major's chief whip, and now sat not far from Uri Geller, looking across at Chap- man Pincher. The Thatcher-impersonator, Janet Brown, and Lord Saatchi were close by.

`I've recently become a surrealist,' said Ms Zsu-Zsi Roboz, an artist beside me, and I think I knew what she meant.

Further up the table, Lady Thatcher's head of the Civil Service, Lord (Robert) Armstrong, was within her direct eyeline, though it was Sir Bernard Ingham who will have had the full force. Peering past them (and past Ann Leslie's mischievous eyes), she may have noticed two former editors of the Times. Except that she looked a little tired. She hates other people's speeches. She always has.

A certain ennui seemed to dog Denis Healey, too, though when he spoke he gal- lantly kissed her hand. By the seventh speech it was nearly four o'clock and a number of noble guests were nodding off. It didn't matter. They had nowhere to go. Lit- tle that anyone here said mattered any more. Little that anyone here thought was any longer of much account.

In private conversation Mr Sherrin seemed to get on well with Lady Thatcher, though when the jokes in his speech bor- dered on the risque, she fixed Norman Teb- bit in determined small talk. As Gyles Brandreth began a joke about marijuana, the small talk became quite intense.

But she sang along when Larry Adler played the mouth-organ. Nothing in Auberon Waugh's short speech upset her; Frederick Forsyth's thoughts seemed to please; and Christopher Foyle was heard with the respect due to our host.

I found the occasion strangely moving, strangely sad. There was almost nobody there representing the 'new' Labour dispen- sation. Apart from Lord Bragg, seated oppo- site Lord Mishcon, Tony's cronies do not do the literary lunch. This was the old guard, the ancien regime. One bomb could have taken out most of what's left of the 1970s, almost all of the 1980s and much of the 1990s, too. Whole lives must have scrolled before that eminent throng as they surveyed their fellow diners in the vast, ornate, yet indefinably tatty dining-hall. Every one had mattered once, very few did now. Thus it must be to die and find oneself in some Elysian field among all the great and the good from the era in which one had spent one's prime. These our actors were all spirits, projected out of air, out of thin air. Their revels were ended. They would soon vanish.

These people had done so much, meant so much. We owed them — I owed them — so much. On the original canvas their por- traits had radiated such potency. Now, cut out and glued flat on to the baseless card of a bookseller's fantasy seating plan, the montage was unreal. Elbowed into a new era which they had helped to create but which was not their era, they looked dis- placed, faded, insubstantial. Bric-a-brac. These were people who could now lunch until tea. They had nothing else to do. The next time many would meet again would be at each others' funerals. I was put in mind of those Russian émigrés in 1920s Paris, still toasting the Tsar.

Every age has its monarchs and their courts. Around Margaret Thatcher last Wednesday sat the courtiers, viziers, inquisitors, propagandists, scribblers, sol- diers, philosophers, jesters, hairdressers and spies who had once dominated their epoch. But the Queen is dead — long live the King! It was a very 20th-century lunch: one of the most glittering, perhaps the sad- dest, maybe the last.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.