Notebook

The magazine 'West Africa' says that Major Marien Ngouabi, President of the people's

Republic of the Congo, may have been murdered by left-wingers. This strikes me as unfair since Ngouabi's regime, to judge by appearances, was the most left-wing in the world. When I was in Brazzaville a few Years ago, the streets were brilliant with red

banners, bunting and streamers, all embossed with yellow hammers and sickles. A Poster in the Russian hotel showed the scowling face of a Congolese proletarian over the Slogan: 'You march with the People or the enraged People will march over you. The

-Ity Museum of Revolution boasted a wkainting, much resembling one of Lenin, Showing a bearded orator with a red shirt and black face addressing the crowd outside Brazzaville railway station. The pride of the exhibition was the impounded treasures of A bbe

oulou, the overthrown President, which included a brass bed, three cheap Clocks, a laquer black box and a vase. Outside in the street, the children chanted at

e.`Portugais, capitaliste! Portugals, reactionnaire! Nous allons disparaitre, eorome les poissons dans la mer.' When a Previous coup d'etat failed, the leader's Corpse was shown on Brazzaville TV with the stuffed in the mouth. Nevertheless I,,ne Peoples Republic was largely run by the thousands of French officials and businessmen Tile schoolchildren learned their revolutionary slogans from well-paid French Maoist teachers. And the Congo is now the s

eOuntry in independent Africa whose capital bears the name of the European who founded it.

Would a Conservative government under Mrs Thatcher close the Equal Opportunities Commission? This thought occurred to me after seeing _

very the Commission's half-page and

expensive advertisements in effect touting for custom. It would be pleasant to think that the four Commission members, Whose idiot faces appeared in the ad, were °bilged to find some useful job. But experience tells that a Conservative government can always outdo Labour when it comes to wasteful public expenditure. Motorways , Concorde and two-tier local government spring to mind. And the iconversion of the National Health Service In° the c present grossly expensive bureau5 was largely the work of the country's `wo leading monetarists—Sir Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell.

Puitnna 'Newsweek' I learn of a new German f on.leb's magazine Emma 'named after the enlinist heroine of Jane Austen's 1816 rhpvel,' which includes in its first issue 'a gushing piece on novelist Virginia Woolf and a story on North Vietnamese women entitled "The New Amazons".' The blonde thirty-four-year-old publisher Alice Schwarzer, author of a best-selling book The Little Difference about how men use their sexual organs to suppress women, says that Emma's profits will go towards day-care centres and karate schools. We have been warned.

I heard from Kingsley Ands who heard from an MP a good story attributed to a Scottish Nationalist, who had been asked why his party took their seats in the House of Commons. 'We are like the blind man who was picnicking at the side of a loch when a very hairy dog bit a chunk out of his leg. He immediately gave the dog a chocolate biscuit. When another picnicker praised his forgiving spirit, the injured man said: "I gave him the biscuit to find out which end of him is the mouth so I can kick him in the bollocks".'

That great prophetic book by C. J. Renier The English: Are They Human ? said the day would come when this country would be merely a tourist resort, with foreigners also serving in the hotels and restaurants because the English were too idle to work. This has happened to Simpson's Restaurant in the Strand, which used to be held up as the sole example of good English cooking. Indeed its menu still shows that Bateman cartoon of the diner at Simpson's who asked the carver whether the meat was foreign. Dining there for the last time, we were given dried-up steak and kidney pudding, smothered in gravy with a congealed skin; my broccoli was not just cold but still partially frozen; my wife's vegetables did not arrive at all.

Of course there are plenty of other places in London to go for a good dinner but Simpson's used to be something more than a restaurant. It was a national monument.

Bernard Levin is right to draw attention to the atrocities in Cambodia. But I suspect that in dwelling on these atrocities he is seeking to justify his former support of American intervention in Indochina. In fact the ruin of Cambodia began with the overthrow of the government of Prince Sihanouk, the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. I do not know if the coup d'etat was engineered by the Americans but certainly the Americans moved into Pnom Penh afterwards, where they were seen carousing genially with the Russians, who also welcomed the downfall of Sihanouk. The subsequent massive bombing of the Cambodian countryside by the US Air Force so embittered the population that the lunatics of the Khmer Rouge won control of the guerrilla forces. The blame for the present plight of Cambodia rests with Nixon and Kissinger.

One evening recently in Windhoek I was sitting at a table next to a couple of Germans, one of whom looked fleetingly familiar. After the meal I went up and spoke to him and he said that he too was a journalist and that he too thought he had met me once before. It must have been a long time ago, we agreed. Just how long ago only transpired when we discovered how we had met. I had been giving him advice on where to go for material for a piece on 'swinging London.'

It is unfair that the architect John Poulson should stay in prison while his associates, the politicians T. Dan Smith and Andrew Cunningham, are out on parole. The latter indeed was privileged to celebrate his release last year by taking tea with James Callaghan, the Prime Minister. If it had not been for the persistent efforts of Private Eye none of these would probably have gone to prison at all. It is probably due to the Eye that proceedings have been taken against Bryants, the Birmingham construction company. But as I mentioned last week, the Attorney-General in this case has announced that no proceedings will be taken against any politicians connected with Bryants. No prizes are offered for guessing to which political party these politicians belong.

Coming back to the Spectator after two months in South Africa, I notice some change in the local pubs. A real ale group have taken over the Sun, which is good news, but it means the departure of Flash, the mongrel who used to keep watch on the premises. A beast of peculiar hidden talents, he used to lead groups of other dogs on outings south of the river. The Duke of York, whose staff are Liverpool Football Club supporters, no longer sell Gauloises after their team's defeat by Saint Etienne.