Blowing his top
From Dr John A. H. Wylie
Sir: Mr Patrick Cosgrave is, surely, amongst our most perceptive political commentators but even he can scarcely have witnessed so immediate a confirmation of the soundness of his analysis of the morale of the Conservative Party published in The Spectator on December 2, 1972. I refer to the revealing disclosure of the petulant and monstrously wasteful telephone call made, to Sir Desmond Plummer in Tokyo, by Mr Heath when that worthy's enganglement with London's traffic compelled him to take his ungainly feet for some fifty exhausting yards. This childish display of pique, so shamefully apposite to the Prime Minister's obsessive and vindictive political comportment, is pathognomonic of ' Aminia '; the syndrome briefly but vividly described by your correspondent, the Reverend John Pearce, in the self-same issue of your journal. Graver though, breeding conspicuously apart and a manifest preference for boats to toy soldiers, is Heath's menacing behavioural likeness to the capricious, tyrannical and vexatious Czar Paul.
Is it too much to hope that Sir Desmond or some similarly placed viotim might, perhaps, be cast in the mould of Count Pahlen? Sir, my scarf?
John A. H. Wylie 9a Portland Place, Kemp Town, Brighton
Sir: If the account of Mr Heath's late-night call to Tokyo is correct the nation is in urgent need of the services of two doctors and a magistrate. The patient has been reported as saying Perhaps it is not a bad thing for the Prime Minister to blow his top occasionally. Perhaps he ought to blow it more often.' The next stage will be for us to hear we have Napoleon in residence at Number Ten. That of course is one of the better-known symptoms of the malady.
J. D. Godber 22 Sandcross Lane, Reigate, Surrey
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