High life
Getting away with it
Taki
Rougemont here's a marvellous scene in Huckle- berry Finn in which Colonel Sherburn faces down a mob that has come to lynch him. With the gang at his doorstep, the good colonel appears at a window cradling a rifle in his arms. 'The idea of you lynching any- body!' laughs Sherburn. 'It's amusing. Why a man's safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind — as long as it's daytime and you're not behind him ...'
I thought of Colonel Sherburn when a bewigged buffoon gave Ralph Harris until the end of February to reveal the names of those who gave 0,000 or more to the Neil Hamilton fighting fund. If Harris is a man he'll tell the bewigged one to take a flying you know what. If he's like the Hucklebeny mob, well, we are, after all, living in the age of Clinton and Blair. Let's face it, lies and spin have triumphed over truth and hon- our. After seven years of exposure, the Clintons remain unfazed by truth. After 1,000 days, ditto Tony Blair. Both Clinton and Blair are under the media's protection. That's why neither has been laughed out of town. Personally, I'll take the Beast of Bolsover any day over Blair, and then some. Matthew Parris got it right when he wrote in The Spectator that Blair will one day disappear without a legacy, just lotsa spin.
If ever there was a gang that couldn't shoot straight it's Tony's bunch, yet they're getting away with it like gangbusters. Jack Straw, a man with a downstairs body trapped in a downstairs mind, is proposing to create a lawyers' Shangri La with his plan to ban indirect racism. What a clown! As if the problem of young black hoodlums mugging old ladies in Mayfair and Bel- gravia wasn't bad enough. The first time one of them is caught he could claim unfair treatment for not being allowed to keep the Rolex.
'I tend to bury things.' Mind you, I had a world scoop intended to appear on these here pages, but then I thought better of it. It might look like a low blow against a much weaker competitor. So I decided to give it to the New Statesman instead. There's a big shot walking around, a friend of Tony Blair, a man who once was left a fortune by a mysterious Belgian countess, or was she Italian? The man used to work with Robert Maxwell, sold a flat to Gordon Brown, gave hundreds of thou- sands of pounds to New Labour, lent money to Peter Mandelson, and generally acted in a similar manner as good old boys used to in Chicago during the Roaring Twenties. Go for it, New Statesman. Expose the bum.
And speaking of low blows, the master is one Peter McKay, writing in the Mail under the pseudonym of Ephraim Hardcastle. McKay is a funny-looking chappie, a short, rotund, smiling Scot whom no self-respect- ing young lady would bring home to mum. He's pub material, and with as much access as Rudolph Hess after the war. Hardcastle wrote that I was financing David Irving's libel suit against Penguin and an American woman. It's a total fabrication. He did it in order to outrage my Jewish friends, believ- ing that I would let it pass. I am doing nothing of the kind. I have engaged a lawyer and will sue unless he apologises and retracts every miserable word he wrote. Journalists are funny creatures. They are a necessary part of our democratic culture, like chickenpox and measles when one's a child. They are invariably outside looking in, and very envious of those inside. Both sexes are malicious, mendacious and physi- cally unattractive. Last Sunday, one India Knight, not exactly Helen of Troy, wrote that there's something creepy about overly good-looking people pairing up. She then proceeded to be snide about Tim Jefferies and Claudia Schiffer. Tim is a friend of mine. He's never done anything bad to any- one, has wonderful manners and his only 'sin' seems to be that beautiful models go for him. 'Clever, beautiful women pick clever, not necessarily handsome men,' writes la Knight. Is that so? She assumes without knowing either party that they're both dumb. Perhaps, but not as dumb as most journalists I know, and certainly much more honest, nicer and better looking. Hacks should stick to reporting, however tendentiously, about politics, and leave the beautiful people alone. And thank their lucky stars they were not born in Sparta, my maternal home. Back in those good old days, the Hislops, Rusbridgers and McKays of this world would have been thrown off Mount Taygetus at birth because of their Ugliness. Not so the Tims and Claudias. Come to think of it, Madeleine Albright and Robin Cook would have never made the cut, poor dears.
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