I n his 50th birthday interview, the Prime Minister made mention
of something that had helped him to weather opposition to the war. 'I got a letter from the father of someone out there at the beginning, with very strong support,' he told the Sun. 'Then he wrote to me after his son had been killed to say it was terrible. But he said, "I still think it is the right thing to do." 'It seems odd, given that only 30 British soldiers were killed in the war, that the identity of Mr Blair's correspondent has not yet come to light. Downing Street said this week with exemplary piety, The Prime Minister's correspondence is private. If the man wants to come forward, that is up to him. The Prime Minister used the fact. The man wasn't named.' They said that they 'didn't know', however, whether the PM had done his correspondent the courtesy of asking his permission before describing his letters in public and, potentially, exposing him to being doorstepped. It's inconceivable that the Prime Minister would have simply invented such a correspondent in the way you might invent a teenage attempt to stow away to the Bahamas or an early memory of a football match, but it would surely do him good if the man came forward.
Two of the most polished ambassadors 1 for the neo-conservative outlook on life are planning a joint project. David Frum, the man who wrote President Bush's 'axis of evil' speech, and Richard Perle, the presidential defence adviser, are writing a book together. The proposed division of labour, I'm told, will be to have Perle doing the thinking and Frum doing the writing; the idea for the book is to set out the next bit of the Big Idea. They favour the brisk, sleeves-rolled-up title What's Next? Their publishers, I gather, prefer The Hardest Line.
After eight years teaching the young at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, Andrew Motion leaves the chair of creative writing there in September to start a creative-writing programme at Royal Holloway College, London. 'When started at UEA eight years ago,' says the Poet Laureate, 'there was just one prose course. Now there are two prose courses, a poetry course and a life-writing course. This will be a new challenge. I'll be a oneman show to start with.' He expresses no view on his successor at UEA. 'One of the most gracious things that Malcolm [Sir
I Malcolm Bradbury, who founded UEA's course] did when I took over from him was to have nothing whatever to do with it.'
I'm indebted, incidentally, to the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd for uncovering the most telling reading yet of the state of the Washington peace process. She reports that Donald Rumsfeld threw a cocktail party the other day in Embassy Row to celebrate victory in Iraq. Among the guests: Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, our own Tony Brenton (the fill-in guy at our embassy), and the ambassadors of the Netherlands and — would you credit it? — Eritrea. NFI: the French ambassador (who glowered instead through the net curtains of his residence across the road); the German
ambassador; and — urn Cohn Powell. She quotes a State Department official saying, 'People here didn't know about the party.'
Imentioned last week the mysterious, panicky withdrawal of the latest volume of Harold Macmillan's diaries on the eve of publication — owing, apparently, to the discovery of a serious libel on a person still living. The publishers declined to say who the libel concerned, even as they yanked review copies from the very desks of the nation's literary editors. Now the editor of the diaries, Peter Catterall, who teaches modern history and politics at Queen Mary, London, calls to lay the matter to rest. It looks a bit as if Libelgate may have been a psyops-style face-saving exercise. 'It was purely a clerical error on the part of the publishers,' says Catterall. They realised it hadn't been properly checked through, and so they withdrew it. Bit of a mountain out of a molehill.' And of the idea — widely floated that Lord Healey would sue over being described as having been a Communist? 'The lawyer contacted me about that three times,' sighs Catterall. 'I said: it's in his autobiography — how much more explicit can you get?.
Is this, as DailyMail headlines are prone to ask, the world's most upmarket junk mail? I was flattered to be the only vole canvassed the other day for a 'pan-European survey conducted among opinion-leading figures in Europe' by a market-research company called Ipsos-RSL. As a sweetener (they want you to fill in four close pages of multiplechoice questions) they enclose a crisp new dollar bill. I did what was only natural: pocketed the cash, and binned the survey. Blow me, but there arrives only a fortnight or so later a second letter, with a second dollar bill, 'in case our first letter was mislaid, or you have not yet returned the questionnaire'. Any other leading opinion-former receiving such a communication is recommended to keep the dosh. If they want our opinions, they must pay the market rate — one dollar at a time, if necessary.
The expression of restrained pleasure on Prince Philip's face as his wife became Queen can now be explained. 'The events of 1953 are engraved on my memory. . . 'he writes in an introduction to Jonathan Rice's book 1953 — The Crowning Year of Sport. 'The greatest thrill came, appropriately, on the morning of the Coronation, when we were woken with the news of the British Everest Expedition's success in reaching the summit of the world's highest mountain. This gave me very particular pleasure as I had agreed to be Patron of the expedition.'
Whatever their effectiveness in the Gulf, we can be reassured that on the home front our secret services are still second to none in weeding out wrong 'uns. A friend who recently underwent security vetting for the civil service was asked — in all seriousness — whether he was or had ever been interested in train-spotting, nature-photography or morris-dancing.
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