Spectator's Notebook.

We join in the general congratulations offered to Princess Anne and Lieutenant Mark Phillips on their engagement. It is very satisfactory that no pressures have been put upon the Princess to choose a husband from the remnants of European royalty or even from the British upper classes of nobility and landed gentry.Princess Anne's choice has fallen upon a young man of the upper middle class whose chief distinction is his horsemanship. Obviously it is their love of horses that has brought the couple together, and his ability in the saddle will certainly have commended the young dragoon to the Queen.

In retrospect it is unfortunate that the Princess and the Lieutenant were so vigorous in their denials of a romance as recently as March, particularly since we are led to understand that the engagement itself was entered into at Easter. The Princess said in March "There is no romance ... and no grounds for rumours of a romance" and Lieutenant Phillips, asked if an engagement was likely, said "It is absolute nonsense. There is no truth in it whatsoever." The explanation of these statements given by a Buckingham Palace spokesman this week, that "at that time they had not thought of getting married" is also deficient in candour, unless indeed the romance itself blossomed suddenly during last month and this.

The engagement is certainly a lucky windfall for the Prime Minister and the troubled Tories. It is difficult to think of any other conceivable story which would have so happily driven the Lambton affair off the headlines, and so easily and sweetly have removed sourness from the public mood. By the time national rejoicing reaches its due peak with a spectacular Westminster Abbey wedding in November, the present difficulties the Government is having will have become vague and distant memories.

Dangerous innocence

No one, whether pejoratively or approvingly, would ever describe the Prime Minister as a man of the world. It has been quite obvious that the Lambton-Jellicoe affair has caused him profound distaste. The haste with which he accepted the police assurances that there Was no evidence against the 'third' ministerand the protestation of innocence, passed on to him via the Home Secretary, by the minister concerned, may prove to have been incautious. But it is surely proof of the great repugnance he has for the more squalid manifestations of unsublimated passion. He also seems to have been genuinely surprised that some of his colleagues should lead sexually irregular lives.

There can be a danger in such innocence. To attempt to select a Cabinet, let alone an entire Administration, composed of men and women whose sexual behaviour is above reproach, would be an act of stupendous folly. To ask colleagues, "Have you anything to hide?" is to invite dishonest answers, and ridicule besides. For ministers to believe that extra-marital chastity was the condition of . their remaining in office could lead to appalling tensions. One effect of the Prime Minister's angry sense of outrage may be to increase the risk of blackmail. It now seems that if a minister's sexual indiscretion, impropriety or deviation could be proved, then

any minister confronted by the proof will be expected to resign forthwith.

In the present circumstances it will be not in the least surprising should ministers choose to lie. If a man is to be certainly dismissed and disgraced for admitting to the truth, will it not make better sense to him to deny the truth and hope that thereby dismissal and disgrace will be avoided? And may it not even be his proper course so to do, thus avoiding not only obloquy and disaster himself but also shielding the Government and the Party from further public odium? Any minister, however high or low, who is pretty confident that there is no evidence against him and that it is simply a question of the word of a whore against his word, may well calculate that his private and the public interests alike require a forthright denial. In thirty years' time the diaries of the recent weeks will make interesting reading. Until then, it's best if the scandal is left to rumour and the limelight be directed at where the real corruption lies, which is where the money is.

Nation's gaiety

But before leaving the subject of the affair, there is one point I'd like to make, albeit rather quietly. It has been great fun. It has provided ready and responsive conversation, everywhere. It has contributed greatly to the gaiety of the nation. Whatever attitudes may publicly have been taken, privately everybody (or almost everybody:, it must have been terrible to be one of the three or fourministers regularly named, in ' informed ' circles, as the

• ' third 'minister) has been having a good laugh at it all.

Happy families

There have been one or two minor consequences. "The wives and children had a rotten weekend of it" said one young Tory MP. He explained that everyone in his posi tion had been busy during the Whit weekend taking wives and kids around their constituencies. "Happy families everywhere " he said.

John Rowan Wilson

John Rowan Wilson, who has been our medical correspondent since early 1966, was on holiday in Cyprus when he suffered a heart attack and died. He was buried on that most beautiful island last weekend. He had already sent us his last article, which we print this week.

He was a most civilised man. He was a doctor who at one time had a smart London practice; but he came into some money and seized the chance to stop practising. He had always enjoyed writing and was a most accomplished novelist. Auberon Waugh praised Barrington, his most recent novel (published by Collins in March, 1971), very warmly indeed in these pages.

John Rowan Wilson will be remembered by his many admirers as the most stylish, witty and urbane of expert writers on medical matters; and by members of the staff here — and also on World Medicine, of which he was a co-founder and consultant editor — as a most delightful colleague. He was a rather restless man: he had, indeed, once been a ship's doctor, and although he has died far too early — he was only 53 — Cyprus is the kind of place he might have chosen to die. He leaves a wife and a dog.

Kenneth Allsop

Kenneth Allsop, another of last week's premature casualties, was also no stranger to these pages. He had a celebrated exchange with Quintin Hogg back in 1968 on the religious question. Allsop wrote of the paradox, as he saw it, encapsulated in "the choir of King's College, Cambridge, singing Messjah—those words applying so profoundly to the most secular of us, ' He was a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief '—while right next door those molecular scientists, Watson and Crick, were cracking open the very pip of life. The only half-acknowledged change—and an apocalyptical one it is—is that the mystery has been stripped from existence, and in the process the last veil from God, exposing Him as nothing. What this entails is swallowing hard and looking with a cosmogonist's eye into the bottomless black well of space, with the recognition that life is probably only a 'temporary accident' and that millennia hence .earth will be a burnt-out cinder as barren as in the beginning." This, Quintin Hogg characterised as "a too complacent and, at the end, ridiculously sentimental atheism." I think Hogg was unjust. What could be more sentimental than Christianity?

Kenneth Hurren reminded me of another passage he thought he recalled Alison having written sometime or other, he thought in The Spectator. Sure enough, we tracked it down. In an article called "Brave New Underworld" about the booming strip clubs, he wrote way back in the distant days of August 1960, of Paul Raymond's Revuebar in Brewer Street "which Mr Leslie Perrin, Mr Brewer's press agent, describes as ' the Atheneum of the strip clubs.' Indeed," Allsop went on, " it seems possible that you might find yourself among the same company in either place. The names of Revuebar members are confidential, but I can tell you that among the 70,000 are ten MPs, eight millionaires, more than sixty knights, thirty-five peers and enough businessmen and captains of industry to drain dry the Stock Exchange and the Savoy Grill when a new whipping act is being staged."

Kenneth Alison will probably be remembered as one of the first major television journalists; but it is likely that he would far prefer to have been remembered for his writing. He has left behind him many written words, and the memory of his intelligence, his care and, above all, his courage.