High life
Cop the lot
Taki
It is now perfectly clear to me (as President Nixon used to say) that both the fuzz and Customs & Excise will not rest until most of the Spectator's regular contri- butors are safely behind bars. Although one would think they would be satisfied having nicked the man who made the word catamite familiar to the general public — not to mention those bewigged buffoons posing as banisters and judges nowadays — they are now desperately trying to send Jeffrey Bernard to Pentonville for the
duration, before they start on Alice Tho- mas Ellis, and on down the line.
I say desperately, because Jeff informs me that it took 12 able-bodied men to make the arrest — nine fuzz and three C&E — which shows even to an amateur sleuth like me, they must mean business. How I wish that by the time you see this, dear readers, Jeff was with me in New York, far from the Carter-Rucks of this world, and even further away from Penton- ville. (The Americans, being unwilling to extradite IRA murderers, would be unlike- ly to extradite Jeff on the charge of making a book, something both the Governor and Mayor of New York could well have indulged in as youngsters.) Ironically, Jeff's problems remind me of the libel case I lost last summer. It's full of hot air and pompous people. In my case, Justice Otton was so aware of the hot air being flung about the courtroom, he ordered the bewigged ones to take them off. (All he really should have done is to tell them to shut up, but seeing Hartley without a wig was worth it.) In Jeff's case, I can picture some vainglorious and disdain- ful civil servant drawing up papers in order to try and send England's greatest humor- ist to the same place they sent the Hellenic numero uno a couple of years back.
But what really outrages me is that while most of the police force was busy staking Jeff out in various pubs and Soho drinking emporiums, thieves broke into my favourite neighbourhood bookshop and went off with hundreds of copies of Prin- cess Michael's, Kurtz & Cronin's & God Knows Who Else's book on eight foreign princesses who climbed rather high. Which shows there is no honour among thieves, because if there's one thing one learns in prison, it's never to steal a book from someone who's stolen from others to write it. They told me that when I checked into the Vine, and repeated it to me on my way out. Obviously, those dastardly crooks are first offenders, or have never been caught before.
Poor Princess Michael. I truly sympa- thise with her. Not only did she feed and provide refreshments for a lot of greasy types who pose as literary lions in expecta- tion of her book publication, she even risked her own life by insisting that British Airways lay on a private jet to fly her to London when her New York jumbo-jet was forced to land up north due to bad weather. She did all that in order to be on time for a lunch-launch of her book, and not since I gave myself away to the Heathrow Customs in order to write my book on prison life, have I seen such eagerness to promote an opus.
Be that as it may, the press has not been nice to Princess Michael of Kurtz & Cro- nin. I, too, have been accused of plagiar- ism in the past, and although I was completely innocent I nevertheless sym- pathise with her. (How can I possibly be called a plagiarist when all I wrote was, 'To bugger or not to bugger, that is the question all queers are asking today'?) My advice to her is to take time off from her tennis and horses and book launches and study the course that's advertised in all the major quality papers; you know the one, it starts by showing us a man who has an IQ of 250, yet he's unable to remember anything, and can hardly read or write. That should refresh her memory, and next time she's more likely to put in the quotation marks.
Needless to say, I shouldn't worry about her as much as I do. She's managed to charm Prince Michael, Lord Weidenfeld, Nicky Haslam, Duff Hart-Davis, Jilly Cooper,.not to mention the Queen herself. My impeccable Palace sources tell me that when the Queen enquired some five years or so ago as to how the house Princess Michael bought in Gloucestershire was paid for, she was told that the Princess had sold some woods near Vienna. When a rumour later circulated that the house was a generous gift from an Italian admirer, the monarch betrayed not a small amount of humour by asking Princess Michael, 'And how is Mr Woods?'
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