DIARY
DAVID STARKEY I'd been invited by my friend Edmund Hall, author of We Can't Even March Straight, to join him for lunch at Mezzo, Terence Conran's latest mega-eatery. I was to sing for my supper by helping him record a radio review of the restaurant over the meal itself. I experienced a sense of unease from the moment I joined Ed at the curvy, marble-topped bar. For the marble was dis- tinctly warm to the touch. At first we thought this was a deliberate feature — a sort of heat treatment for bar-propper's elbow. Alas, a little architectural investiga- tion revealed that the warming was a by- product of the elaborate lighting system for the counter below. But warm marble, like cold gravy, is not easily forgotten. And it served as a metaphor for the chaos of styles and tastes that is the Mezzo experience. The name is Italian but the main courses are South Asian, the puddings French and the beers from everywhere except Britain. The decor is a similar mishmash: the glass- roofed entrance is high tech; the sweeping staircase with its chrome balustrade is art deco; the downstairs seating area — with chairs designed for looks, not sitting in — is Paul Starck; while upstairs Scandinavian furniture fights it out with an illuminated array of neo-peasant pots and plates hang- ing on the wall. Even within individual dishes, the ingredients remain oddly uncombined. It is as though cooking were seen as food abuse, to be done as little as possible.
t the time, we tried and failed to
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make sense of it all. But Sir Terence Con- ran's announcement this week of his sup- Port for Tony Blair has unlocked the mys- tery. It was Aristotle who first compared politics with cooking; it took Conran's greater genius to construct a New Labour restaurant. The curious, canteen-like long tables, at which you're seated cheek by jowl with strangers, represent 'community'. Happily, the prices make sure that your neighbours are never too horrendous. The Asian-style food is, of course, a tribute to the Tiger economies; while the neo-peasant pots must be Old Labour and, like it, are firmly on the shelf. They even have the same shape as John Prescott. Sometimes Sir Terence has not quite kept up with Mr Blair's elfin progress. The fact, for instance, that all the superior staff who seat you are Women in little black power suits suggests that he is still enforcing all-women short- lists. But the masterstroke is the integration of colour and class. The (more) expensive bit is poked in the basement, thus proving that Sir Terence, like his mentor, is able to bluff on class, bluff on the causes of class. Finally, the only black I noticed in the place is given a starring role, handing out towels in the gentleman's-club-style lavatory. Aris- totle's maxim states that in politics, as in cooking, it is the consumer who is the judge of the quality of what is served. We left rather a lot of our meal.
Iwas flicking through a bookseller's cata- logue, when my eye lit on a learned work on Grimod de la Reyniere and the Almanach des Gourmands. Its title was A Palate in Revolution. I think it would have been even better as plain Palate Revolution. Sometimes misprints work a similar magic. For instance, the title of Andrew Sullivan's plea for the acceptance of homosexuality, Virtually Normal, appeared as Vanity Nor- mal at the end of a recent article of his in the Sunday Times. It's such a pity they didn't print his mugshot alongside, with its Brandoesque sulk, so that everybody could have got the joke. But I fear that the best examples are wholly made up. When I was at Cambridge, a favourite game was invent- ing titles for the autobiographies of emi- nent university figures. One leading histori- an, who never made the Regius or finished his magnum opus, inspired the winner: it was Power and Impotence: the Life of Sir -. My own contribution to the genre occurred in the unlikely setting of the histo- ry syllabus sub-committee of the University of London. Its other leading figures were Professors Olive Anderson and Michael Port. Our toughness led us to be denounced, by one outraged colleague, as the Bushy, Bagot and Green of the History School. On the occasion in question, we were reviewing a proposed special subject, Furniture and Decoration in Revolutionary France. I suggested a change of title to Upholstery and Upheaval, or Soft Furnish- ings in Hard Times.
Those were the days. At the moment I spend more of my time in the glamorous world of the media. In fact, its glamour rests entirely in the eye of the beholder on the other side of the screen. I sampled the gruesome reality this week when with the rest of the Moral Maze team I played a walk-on part in the recording of Michael Buerk's This is Your Life. The set is a neon temple of fame, bathed in Fifties colours. `It looks like an American presidential library,' I quipped. 'You mean there are no books,' came the reply. During the rehearsal the backlit cyclorama showed off to perfection the ample hips of the direc- tor's assistant (female) and the scriptwriter (male). We'd got off to a bad start with him over the pre-programme refreshments. `Who wrote this rubbish?' demanded Michael Mansfield. 'Hello, I'm Alec,' replied the scriptwriter, who was standing behind him. His idea was that the Moral Maze team should enter debating a moral question. Mischievously, I suggested that the topic should be the morality of spring- ing surprises on unsuspecting people. In the rehearsal, Michael Mansfield warmed to the theme. 'Moral blackmail, that's what this programme is,' he declaimed in the voice that has swayed a thousand feeble- minded jurors. Consternation gripped the control room. Alec appeared, flustered. 'It doesn't work. This programme is not about problems. It's a tribute to Michael.' Janet Daley, transmuted from Gorgon of the Right into Goody Two-shoes, came up with the required emollient formula. Turning to Michael Buerk, she gushed, 'Michael, we all wanted to say something nice about you, but we couldn't agree on what.' At the end, as we rose in a surging standing ovation, she whispered to me, 'Isn't it amazing how easily you can get intelligent people to behave like Pavlov's dogs?'
0 n Saturday, I found myself interview- ing Dr John Ashworth, the director of my own institution, the London School of Eco- nomics. He is due to leave in September after a single term of office. The subject of the interview was the proposal, which is being debated by the Committee of Vice- Chancellors and Principals, to raise money by charging students a registration fee. I referred to the members of the Committee as the 'bosses' of Britain's 104 universities. John remonstrated, 'But, David, you know universities aren't run by bosses. We can propose. But you academics dispose.' Or depose,' I interjected.
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