Racist rant
From Mr Alastair Forbes Sir: I must admit to having feared the worst on reading the new young editor's recent, rather premature, praise of The Spectator's demi-mondainites. The worst was not long in coming. Apart from a just tribute to the courage of Sally Aspinall, Talci's piece last week was a racist rant. He would not have far to walk from his sump- tuous Cadogan Square pied-a-terre to find plenty of Christian churches whose black congregations on a Sunday are the best- dressed adults and children in the capital.
Taki's praise for my love and under- standing of children was some years ago printed in your columns. Though he knew how I doted on my half-Finnish, quarter- Danish granddaughter, one of the whitest of the descendants of the ancestor of all of us who first left Africa two million years ago, he was ignorant of her rather numer- ous black cousins.
Taki doesn't go often to London and, when there, he does not travel by London transport, which was breaking down until it was rescued by the arrival of the honest and honourable West Indians who have kept it going ever since. Nothing 'short-sighted' about that, pace the two white West End gamblers.
If I implore The Spectator not to allow its pages to be defiled again by such racist, quite possibly actionable, stuff, it is because, my liberal convictions aside, I fear for the safety of the half-dozen black Lon- doners who are among my wider family. Alastair Forbes 50530 Sartilly, France
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