Me Questing Vole F ' F
, urther to my mention of the Deputy Prime Minister's newfound enthusiasm for croquet, a kindly reader, Charles Hastings, directs me to the account of another Prescottian sporting distinction. In his excellent new biography of Anthony Eden, D.R. Thorpe records the circumstances in which, in January 1957, the young Prescott was cabin steward to Eden during his cruise on the RMS Rangitata. 'Most afternoons a boxing tournament was held on deck,' writes Thorpe, and the Edens were prevailed upon to be at the ringside from time to time. Eden even stepped into the ring to present prizes in the form of bottled beer to the victors, who usually included his now cabin steward John Prescott. Indeed, so often was Prescott on the winning side that Eden believed he deserved greater recognition for his efforts and took to presenting him with bottles of wine in the privacy of his cabin, so as not to raise expectations elsewhere among the ship's pi igilists;
Sir Peregrine Worsthorne and his matchlessly lovely wife Lady Lucinda Lambton are girding up to lead the protest — by direct action, if necessary — against the building of a monstrous, 500-lorry service station on the M40 at Hedgeley, near where they live. 'It's not a question of not in my back yard.' says Lady Lucy. 'It's a question of not in London's back yard. This is the nearest piece of unspoilt country to London. Ft's only 20 minutes from Notting Hill Gate and it will be ruined for all the people who come out on weekends to walk there. The appeal's coming up this month, but if it fails, Perry and I will both lie down in front of the bulldozers. It's to no avail, though. I know. My friend Gavin Stamp tried that with the Firestone building and he was hoisted aloft in the bucket of a JCB.'
Remember Jayson Blair, the enterprising young New York Times reporter who left the paper gasping and clutching its throat after it emerged that his reports had been — to use the Downing Street buzzword — 'sexed-up' a little? Had his employers at the Times taken a single glance at his student poetry before employing him, the whole sorry saga would have been averted. Here's a quatrain from 'Kaleidoscope': 'Soaring and taking me to the highest skies/See a kaleidoscope when I glance in your eyes/Deep brown that presents many colours/Red, blue, green, yellow, and others.' And there's plenty more where that came from. I know it's cruel to laugh. But ha ha ha ha ha.
Tn the balmy coming times, when every 'young adult will have a degree in kiteflying (unclassified) from the University of Arsefordshire. we will look with relief on the passing of the cruel and divisive age of standards in higher education. Comfort for the afflicted, meantime, comes from the scholar Brian Harrison, writing in the Oxford Historian, who reassures those still mired in regret because they barely scraped a Desmond (2:2) in their finals that they are in good company. Past holders of rotten degrees include William Morris. John Ruskin, Cecil Rhodes, Harold Nicolson, Arnold Toynbee and A.E. Housman: all of which thickos got a 'pass'. Evelyn Waugh and Nevil Shute got thirds. The fourth seems to have been reserved for theologians — Professor Harrison discreetly declines to name the bishops of Winchester and Coventry who took that degree.
Ann Coulter, the flaxen-tressed warriorqueen of America's libertarian Right, is a tricky creature. As well as taking care to conceal her smoking from her poor old mum, bless her, I now learn she has been known to knock a year or two off her age. How much happier she'd be if she learnt to love the numeral four.
And speaking of tricky, is the veteran travel-writer Paul Theroux taking us for a ride? In his new collection of stories, The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro, he includes one that purports to be non-fiction, a memoir of the South African writer Lourens Prinsloo. 'I could tell this story by inventing a fictional name,' he writes,'. . . but there is no point. And I have been around too long to hide myself in fiction.' He says Prinsloo is already far too 'well-known' and 'widely read' to be disguised as another, and he describes in some detail the plots of Prinsloo's Afrikaans
stories, lamenting that they were never translated. Makes you want to find out more. But seek the well known and widely read Prinsloo on Amazon, Google, cuttings libraries or a worldwide search for secondhand books, and mention is there none.
-With Clare Short and Robin Cook waiting for the bodies of their enemies to float past, it has to be asked whether, before he made all those rash assertions about weapons of mass destruction, the Prime Minister could have taken counsel from the past. In 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley', Ezra Pound wrote of the soldiers of the first world war: 'These fought in any casedand some believingipro domo, in any case [. . . ] Died some, pro patria [. . . ] believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving/came home, home to a lie,/home to many deceits,/home to old lies and new infamy [. . .I and liars in public places [. . . ] For two gross of broken statues./For a few thousand battered books.'
Now that Lord Irvine of Lairg has bravely weathered the storm and accepted a staggeringly enormous pension increase, all that remains for him is to be given the opportunity to enjoy it. Word is that a reshuffle in a little over a week will give him the opportunity to slip into retirement, to the satisfaction of all. The question is, which prime ministerial favourite is likeliest to step into his clogs as Lord Chancellor? Two are equally deserving. Will it be the former Blair flatmate Charlie Falconer; or Peter Goldsmith, who as attorney general got the PM out of a tight spot with his ruling on the legality of the war?
SowhY did the visit to this country last month of Archbishop Ncube of Zimbabwe — an outspoken critic of human-rights abuses there — go all but unreported? My colleague Peter Oborne wrote in these pages that Archbishop Ncube had agreed to an effective news blackout at the request of Church officials here who didn't want to rock the boat with Mugabe. The Bishop of Leeds, David Konstant, who chairs the bishops' department for international affairs, denies it. He told the Catholic Herald, 'There was no press ban. It is very straightforward. The article is not true.' Yet Archbishop Ncube, the Herald now reports, is saying publicly that his silence was the result of an agreement with Catholic bishops here. Wouldn't you like to believe both are telling the truth?
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