THE SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

There is one reform which would fit in well with the Government's view of itself, and that reform would be to remove from de- partments of government the immunity they largely enjoy from planning controls. If we are to have planning controls—and I see no other way of preserving sufficient country- side, seaside, and lake and estuary land and water other than by buying the land and leas- ing it back—then the regulations should be run and administered locally rather than na- tionally, and above all, there must be no exceptions. A regional scandal I see all too often, and each time with anger, is the Post Office building in Colchester which is the worst building-in-a-position I know of. It destroys a fine skyline, and in every con- ceivable manner it is an architectural affront and a planning disgrace.

Homes fit for horses

A scandal of national importance—for matters which affect the centre of London are national matters—is the new Knights- bridge barracks and stables, into which sol- diers and their wives and horses have lately moved. It is not only pretty ugly as a set of buildings goes, and extremely ill-mannered in the way it closes off the Park. It is also a nasty thing to contemplate. It is preposter- ous to house horses in such expensive state: and the argument that the horses are neces- sary for the soldiers to sit on, and the soldiers are necessary to guard the Queen or at any rate to change the Guard, and that together they make for a fine tourist attraction, is a feeble sort of argument. If ceremonial is required and the Guard- changing demanded, then the requisite horses and soldiers should have been put in an obscure part of Buckingham Palace gardens, behind the tall walls, out of sight of the pub- lic. This would have the additional advan- tage that the soldiers on their horses would not interrupt the traffic but would, in fact, be living where they work, as servants of the Queen.

Monumental rubbish

I see that the architect. Sir- Basil Spence, says 'The architect is a servant, a tailor, who cuts and measures the thin chap or the fat chap and tries to make him comfortable. He is not a reformer.' I agree that architects are not often reformers, but not that they are just servants. Architects, to my mind, are interested above all in putting up monuments to themselves: and that is why, when we are uckY enough to possess an architect of enius, we get such marvellous monumental buildings, and why, when—as is usually the ase—we do not possess such an architect,

e end up with so much monumental rub- sh.

Also, unlike tailors, most architects much refer to cut and measure fat chaps and make them comfortable, than thin ones; and, best of all, they like to cut and measure fat chaps whose clothing is not governed by consider• ations of taste and not regulated by planners. Such fat chaps are government departments,

No pudding for Tony

Sometime after the election and his con- sequent loss of office, Anthony Crosland and his wife Susan were among the dinner guests of Mr and Mrs Michael Clark. he of the Plessey electronic empire. The dinner party was not at the Clarks' lush Essex estate (indoor swimming pool heated to eighty degrees) but at their Eaton Square flat not far from the duplex luxury of Harold and Diane Lever, he of the late Cabinet.

Ex-environmental minister Crosland, in what was described to me as his best ex- uberant condition despite the lost election job, prospects and power, was sat next to Shirley Clark, his hostess. He kept peevishly complaining about the smallness of the small- talk, and wanted instead some big talk. He said things to Shirley Clark like 'I find all this small talk inadequate. I don't want to hear any more of it' etc, etc. At last, she said to him, 'If you keep going on like that, you won't get any pudding'.

Needless to say, Crosland did not take this threat seriously. Instead, just like a socialist, he kept going on. When the pudding arrived, it was no mere bread-and-butter pudding, but a rather special souffle. There were ten people at the table. Nine of them were served. Crosland wasn't. He sulked the re- mainder of the evening then stomped off with his American (or ex-American) wife. Since then, no sweet soufflé letter of thanks, not even a bread-and-butter-one, from the Croslands to the Clarks, who, I have it on excellent authority, are unlikely to invite the Croslands down to the country to sample the rewards of capitalism.

Incidentally, I had always thought that Michael Clark commuted around the out- lying factories of the Plessey empire in a powder pink helicopter. It isn't. It is sky blue.

Wanted fast! Blood!

Our television critic, novelist Patrick Skene Catling (whose latest novel, The Catalogue, about artificial insemination, has just come out), was feeling weak and worried deep down in the Cotswolds last week. Having failed to find much domestic consolation (Dianc, his wife, slaving away in the kitchen), and feeling neglected and under-reviewed, he consoled himself for a while then rang 999, eventually saying, need a complete change of blood'. Half an hour later, with a terrible smell of burning rubber and squeal- ing brakes an ambulance crashed to a halt outside the eighteenth-century stonebuilt thatched roof Cotswold manor house. 'Where is he?' the ambulance attendants asked the flabbergasted Diane Calling. 'Where's who?' she asked. 'Mr Catling', the ambulance men said. 'he needs a complete change of blood.'

She talked to them quietly for half an hour or so, and they departed, mollified, with their eight pints of blood intact, back to Cheltenham whence they came.

The emergency ambulance and blood transfusion services emerge from this true story very well indeed. So does Diane Cat- ling. I am not so sure about Patrick, ex- cept that he tells the story against himself. His trouble, as his friends are quick to tell him, is that when he really needs a com- plete change of blood, and rings 999. and ends up with the Cheltenham blood and ambulance people, they are going to say 'Oh yes Mr Catling, we have heard all that before'.

It is quite irrelevant, but there is a slight link between this anecdote and the one about No pudding for Tony. Catling's first wife, blonde ex-Sunday Express journalist Susan Barnes, is now Mrs Crosland.

The Labour Lobby

For a couple of years I worked as the Man' chewer Guardian's Labour Correspondent and at that time the Labour and industrial correspondents of the various newspapers had just begun the process of setting them- selves up as a Group. I refused to join it, being rightly suspicious of such groups and envisaging it as another Lobby in the mak- ing. I am not a journalist who believes that the system of Lobby, or political, corres- pondents who, in return for pledges of secrecy as to sources, get spoon-fed with information which it suits the Government to give them, is a good system for newspapers or for the public, although certainly it is a first-class system for the government of the day. and quite enjoyable for the Lobby cor- respondents themselves. Nowadays, the Labour Correspondents' Group has just about become what I feared and expected it would: a kind of junior, or poor man's Lobby, with its chairman and its secretary and its rules about off-the-record Christian-name matinees with Robert Carr and Co. One David Maude. apparently the Labour correspondent of the Trotskyist paper Workers Press wants to join the group. What on earth he wants to join it for. I cannot imagine, except that I suppose all Trotskyists secretly want to belong to outfits. The group. however, or some of its officers. do not want David Maude, presumably because they do not think he is important enough, and they might not like his politics. He could, I suppose. make matters slightly awkward for the communists already in the Labpur correspondents' group.

THE SPECTATOR