Tripe
From Barbara Arnie! Black Sir: So much tripe about my husband and myself has been written lately that it seems selective to reply to Peter Oborne's column alone. But my association with The Spectator makes it necessary.
For the record then: the anecdotes in Peter Oborne's column (The Ballad of Connie and Babs', 24 January) are made out of whole cloth. They are sheer invention.
(1) He writes of a meeting when my husband is with executives and 'Barbara, clad only in a leotard and shades, had swept into the room .. . ' I do not, did not and would not attend a business meeting or indeed any meeting (since school ballet classes aged 11) in such a bizarre outfit. Actually, I don't possess a leotard.
(2) I am supposed to have said 'It's always best to have two planes, because however well one plans ahead one always finds one is on the wrong continent.' Apart from the fact that such a comment makes no sense in real life or fiction, I have never seen or been on Hollinger's second company plane and would have no occasion even to refer to it.
(3) Re Eleanor Mills as a last-minute guest at our home who was sent packing before dinner. I didn't know Ms Mills. I'm not certain why she was asked to leave. That was a matter between her and my husband. I think it had something to do with a potentially difficult situation that involved the new job she was going to at the Sunday Times and two of our guests who were in an imbroglio with that paper. 'Barbara Black,' Oborne writes, 'then told her to go to the kitchen and out through the servants' door, where the driver would pick her up and take her home.' I appreciate memory can gild events, but the sequence was straightforward: we were very embarrassed and my husband asked my assistant, Penny Phillips, to arrange a taxi for Ms Mills. Ms Mills refused and asked if there was 'a back way out'. Mrs Phillips said there was, but through the kitchen. Ms Mills insisted on taking it. I was uninvolved in any of this, as a telephone call could have confirmed.
(4) I am supposed to have remarked to a 'fellow newspaper mogul after he had lost an editor': 'I do so sympathise with you: one does have such trouble with one's help.' The notion that I would refer to a fellow journalist (or for that matter any employee) in that condescending and idiotic manner is surely a bit much even for Peter Oborne to swallow.
The only foolish remark that Oborne cites which I did make and which has been quoted ad infinitum by now is the remark to the Vogue writer Julia Reed that 'my extravagance knows no bounds'. I have been saying that wryly about myself all my life in every economic circumstance. I think I must have heard it in a bad radio play once. I don't know whether I used it in conversation with Reed in reference to handkerchiefs, handcream or handbags, but it certainly was the most ill-timed throwaway comment I could have made.
Barbara Amid l Black
London W8
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