DIARY
Quite often 'news' is what one has experienced oneself only a few days ear- her. Last Sunday, for example, the papers carried 'news' stories about a House of Commons committee report criticising the general practitioners' deputising service. This rang a bell, since my wife had very recently been suffering from its shortcom- ings. Having had acute headaches and a tormenting rash on her face for a week, she called our local GP one Friday afternoon and left a message on the answering service asking for a Saturday emergency visit. Nothing had happened by Saturday lun- chtime — by which time I had had to leave for the office — and she called again and this call eventually did have results in the shape of an extremely dirty and offensive foreign doctor who only spoke a kind of Pidgin English. He was from the deputising Pool. Without examining my wife, he took one look at her and said: 'You suffering from herpes, very contagious, nobody must touch you, how did nice lady like you Contract this disgusting disease, nothing I can do for you.' At this point my wife Interrupted him. 'Oh, yes, there is,' she shouted, 'you can get out of my house.' In fact my wife had the horribly painful shingles which our proper doctor di- agnosed on MOnday. He also explained that our awful experience of the deputising service is not at all exceptional. Lots of his other patients have had experiences as bad or worse. My wife is now on the mend, after a fortnight in the Lister Hospital. But Judging by the House of Commons report, the ills of the deputising service will take much longer to remedy.
There is a small part of Mark Boxer's career to which none of the memorialists has yet referred, because Sir Edward and Lady Hulton, Bertram Hesmondhalgh — a distinguished former Foreign Office offi- cial — and possibly his first wife — Lady Arabella — are the only other people apart from myself who know it existed. For a few months in the 1970s he was a kind of co-editor of a very short-lived quarterly Journal of which I was editor, called International Review, and although he did not do a great deal, what he did do was done with enormous thoroughness and professionalism. The journal was a brain- child of Edward Hulton — who financed it of course — and was intended to promote the cause of European unity. Why on earth, you may ask, did Mark Boxer accept to be involved in a journal so manifestly not his cup of tea? The answer, I think, is revealing about the man. A side of him always did want to be involved in what is called serious journalism. Nor was he nearly as unsuited to this kind of journal- ism as his friends might have supposed or PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE he liked to pretend. I remember a lunch we both had with Raymond Aron at which Mark gave his views about General de Gaulle with great eloquence and even erudition. Mark and I used to lunch irregularly at L'Etoile during this period and it has to be admitted that eventually more time was spent discussing 'affairs' of the kind which get mentioned in Taller than of the kind which were meant to be our bread and butter, and it was because his conscience — always impressively ten- der — began to prick about this that he withdrew from his co-editorship after only a few months, not being willing to take Sir Edward's money under false pretences. Years later he came to my Sunday Tele- graph office to do one of his caricatui es and after darting glances at me for wh seemed like an age, said: 'You know, Perry, I miss International Review a lot'. Nobody else did. But Mark was quite unlike anybody else in this regard, as in many others.
0 n the few occasions that I have listened to debates in the House of Com- mons in this temporarily recessed session I have been saddened by the decline in the standard of oratory, which is now much higher in the House of Lords. Would it be worth thinking about introducing joint sessions of the two Houses for certain types of debate which do not end in a vote foreign affairs debates, for example? The introduction of television cameras is obviously going to bring about radical changes in parliamentary procedures and I should have thought that occasional joint sessions, where all the combined oratorical talents were on display together, might improve the ratings. Debates in the Lords lack drama and those in the Commons, all too often, depth. Clearly, joint sessions _ would have to be very rare. But a few such occasions every year, with the stars of old showing their successors how to do it, might well be very popular. The Holly- wood Oscar ceremonies get the blend marvellously right and Westminster could do worse than learn a thing or two from them. Years ago I remember reading some- where how fortunate it was that human beings did not make as much noise when love-making as do cats, since if they did domestic peace at night would be shattered beyond repair. Staying in hotels recently I have had plenty of cause to think again about this statement which is now sadly out of date. Time and again I have been woken up, or prevented from going to sleep, by caterwauling sounds not at all unlike those that cats make. Without wishing to be a spoilsport, and bearing in mind the thin- ness of modern hotel walls, might one ask whether this new human habit of emitting very loud moans and groans, as if in mortal agony, is really absolutely indispensable to the task in hand? Incidentally, at Wimble- don this year there were far fewer service grunts than had been the fashion in the last two or three years, without this in any way affecting the quality of the play.
Some journalists feel dissatisfied with being mere voyeurs on the sidelines of history and yearn to be part of the action. Others, like myself, want nothing better than to stay put in Grub Street all their lives. David Watt, who died in a tragic accident last year, and a collection of whose excellent articles (The Inquiring Eye) has just appeared, came in the former category. So when offered the job of running the Royal Institute of Internation- al Affairs, i.e. Chatham House, he leapt at the opportunity and spent several years of his all too short life presiding over, and attending, endless international seminars of the good and the great all over the world. Why a writer should prefer this kind of activity to journalism beats me, and after a few years at Chatham House David came to the same conclusion. The whole ethos of Chatham House cramped his spirit, as did the intellectual constraints imposed by the necessity never to upset potential benefactors. Nor was life at the top made much easier by having, as Chair- man, Lord Harlech — another 1960s char- acter — whose behaviour he was wont to compare unfavourably with that of news- paper proprietors. Fortunately David escaped before lasting damage was done and — for his last few important years - returned to journalism, where his personal- ity and style swiftly recovered their pristine originality and sparkle. There is a lesson here for all true journalists. Don't be tempted by the groves of Academe or the corridors of power or the money of founda- tions. Of all my colleagues who have been — Alistair Buchan, William Clark and others — the only one who has really improved his lot is the former editor of The Spectator, Nigel Lawson.
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