I t is odd that so many people in Who Who
list their recreations. These tend either to be bland like lonely hearts ads — 'reading', 'travel', 'theatre' — or self-congratulatory — `the company of my family', 'the disabled'. Even worse are the facetious. The late Sir Nicholas Fairbairn MP used to change his every year. In 1990, he offered 'growling, prowling, scowling and owling'. In 1991, he entered 'loving beauty and beautifying love'. Wishing to avoid a Sir Nicholas-type fate, I have therefore never included my recreations. This year, however, I think it is time to Stand Up And Be Counted. For the coming edition of Who Who, I have written 'hunting'.
The latest suggestion that hunting will be banned this year confronts me with a dilemma. Last week, jumping off the train in Sussex, I forgot a hold-all I was carrying. In it were my beloved hunting boots, much scratched by brambles but still with about five years' wear in them. I zoomed on by car to Hastings, where the train ended, in the hope of catching up with them, but no one had handed anything in and neither I nor the guard could find anything in the carriage (very few lost objects survive a visit to Hastings, I was told). If I never see the dear boots again, should I buy some more? The answer is obvious. I must do so, both as an expression of hope and also because one of the obnoxious aspects of the proposed ban is that it has for seven years reduced the custom of good tradesmen because people 'make do' with what they have got until they know what the future will bring. My lost boots were beautifully made by a master of the craft who has now retired. Suggestions for the best bootmaker in England (or Wales) who costs less than Lobb gratefully received.
An excellent piece by Kevin Myers in the Sunday Telegraph reminded readers of how disgusting a man was Che Guevara, now the subject of a new laudatory film, It put me in mind of a story that Kingsley Amis liked to tell about an interior decorator he knew who found himself working in the house of a left-wing millionairess in Hampstead. Dominating the grand staircase was a huge portrait of Lenin. Kingsley's friend affected forgetfulness, 'Who's that bloke?' he asked the grande dame who was paying him. 'No hang on, don't tell me. I know — Hitler!'
Qne must never forget that a great many aesthetically inclined people
positively like murderers if they kill enough people and if their motives appear to be political, religious or cultural, rather than merely personal. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who joined the Communist party when everyone else was leaving it because of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, loved Stalin and Hitler equally for this reason, His fellow poet Alan Bold told me once that MacDiarmid would say, 'Hitler did great. But just one thing — why only six million?' At present, I am rereading Alan Clark's diaries in the course of my Thatcher studies. The first volume to be published is quite brilliant, not so much as political history but as observation of the human condition. Yet Clark combines this with a semi-concealed admiration for Hitler. While trade minister, he finds an excuse to visit the Wolf's Lair in Poland on the 44th anniversary of the Stauffenberg plot against Hitler (`No one will know what is going through my mind'). Has anyone noticed the significance of the entry for 20 April 1990? He begins, 'A date which usually marks a period of good fortune.' It is Hitler's birthday.
The death of Mel Lasky last week reminded me what a wonderful publication Encounter was. It was stupid of him to have taken money from the CIA for the magazine, because this compromised it even though it never damaged the content at all. Encounter was the first 'grown-up' (as opposed to 'adult') magazine that I ever read, and it filled me with curiosity about writers like Bukovsky, Solzhenitsyn and Havel. It
fought the Cold War on the highest intellectual plane, so high, in fact, that it was very seldom guilty of boringly plugging a political line. Its emphasis was as much literary as political, publishing numerous poems and stories. Picking up a single issue at random, I find work by Mary McCarthy, Isaiah Berlin, Frank Kermode, Stephen Spender, D.J. Enright, Arthur Schlesinger, Arnold Wesker and John le Carre. It exemplified mental freedom rather than propagandising for it. And it did what it could to lift post-war Britain from its natural torpor about the outside world, How much we need something like Encounter today to engage with the ideas about resurgent Islam and the 'clash of civilisations'.
Iturned on the Today programme on Tuesday. In the space of 20 minutes, we had: why George Bush is wrong by Ming Campbell (no one spoke in favour of the President); why additives to food should be banned (no one saying they shouldn't be); the wickedness of killing some sea beast; the wrongness of having league tables in primary schools; the iniquity of private contractors in wars (all of these unanswered by an opposing view); and — beyond parody — an unchallenged attack on the British for invading Tibet 100 years ago by, among others, the Chinese.
One clash-of-civilisations question is whether Islam can develop a doctrine of religious freedom. In his excellent Tyburn Lecture last week, the Pope's biographer, George Weigel, touched on this, pointing out that the Catholic Church did not have its own doctrine of religious freedom until the promulgation of Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, Mr Weigel states optimistically that Muslim thinkers wrestling with the question today may be like those Catholic writers who tried to deal with the collapse of the old political order in the 19th century. The more gloomy possibility, however, is that Islam, which 'started' later, has roughly another 700 years to go before reaching its own 1965.
Males from the Church of England. One I bishop, known for the ambiguity of his sexuality, went to his doctor to complain of piles. 'It hurts near the entrance,' he told the medic. 'That's a curious way to put it,' said the doctor. 'Most people would call it the exit.' This story, by the way, is told by the bishop himself.
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