DIARY
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER It is not every day that we journalists stumble on a story of national significance literally outside our own front door, but such was my fate last summer when the local builder in our little Somerset village applied for planning permission to build six new houses across the road in place of two rather charming old cottages which he had allowed to fall down. Both his applications were rejected firmly by the council, as being out of accord with our local structure plan and what the planners quaintly de- scribed as the `arcadian' character of the village. But in each case he appealed to a DoE inspector, and to general astonish- ment won his permissions. I made further enquiries and discovered that this kind of thing has recently been happening all over southern England. Particularly since a new circular 14/85 last July, the Government has been leaning on its inspectors to overturn the decisions of local planning committees on an unprecedented scale, making a nonsense of local structure plans and causing intense rage among the mem- bers of planning committees. Since I re- cently reported this in the Daily Telegraph, many further instances have come to light of what the deputy chairman of one Ox- fordshire planning authority this week de- scribed in a letter as a 'perversion of the planning process'. The explanation for what is going on, as she pointed out, is that developers have discovered that they can make fortunes by building in attractive villages, where land without planning per- mission is still comparatively cheap — and the Government, thanks to sophisticated lobbying by the housebuilders, has devised this extremely questionable method of overriding the normal democratic planning process to give them almost all they want. One irony is that the circular under which this curious practice is taking place was issued in the name not of that champion of the free market Nicholas Ridley, but that of his predecessor as Secretary of State, the supposedly greener than green and whiter than white Mr Kenneth Baker. It is time enlightened Tory MPs from marginal southern constituencies woke up to the dismay this chicanery is causing among many of their supporters, before the Alliance discover it as a votewinner.
Fired by a dramatic picture of Iron Age walls in the Times, we spent an interesting if somewhat melancholy afternoon last Saturday going over to the great hill fort at Maiden Castle, where a young team spon- sored by 'English Heritage' and the Prince of Wales has been taking a new look at the area originally investigated by Mortimer Wheeler's celebrated 'dig' in the 1930s. The first shock was to see how far, since my last visit 20 years ago, the modern housing estates have advanced from Dor- chester along the once narrow little down- land road leading to the site. The newly disinterred grain pits, overlooked by a huge 'public observation platform', looked considerably less dramatic than in the Times picture. The desultory group of girls in jeans and men in beards standing around them, like escapees from a Youth Oppor- tunities scheme, contrasted strangely with a photograph of Wheeler's alert, neatly dressed team at work 50 years ago, Sir Mortimer's Rolls in the background. The slightly surreal scene last Saturday was made more so by the presence on the ramparts of a large crowd of bemused French-speaking Africans from Benin and Zaire, who had come up on a day trip from an English language course in Torquay. Past the 'English Heritage' information boards and the hamburger van doing roar- ing trade, we beat a hasty retreat.
Descending into Dorchester we left the car in a multi-storey car park servicing the supermarkets and video shops of a large new brick-and-concrete development called inevitably 'the Hardy Arcade'. The delightful Museum in Dorchester's main street seemed at first to have lost little of its old world charm, until we entered the splendid cast-iron galleried Victorian Room, lined with Hardy watercolours of Dorset churches and old village fire en- gines. This was dominated by what looked like the remains of a dozen old car engines from a scrapyard. To the particular baffle- ment of my young sons, these turned out to be 'sculptures' by one Nigel Slight who, according to a programme note,
hopes that the quasi-archaeological connota- tions of his works will lead people to speculate on the wider implications of our relationship with the environment — our origins, our directions and our ultimate fate. He quotes from a statement seen at the Museum: `Hill forts reflect a society in a state of increasing stress.'
How very true, we thought. There was a delightfully ironic tale of our times the other day in the new produc- tion of Lysistrata being staged at an open- air theatre in Athens. This most fashion- able of Aristophanes's comedies, with its feminist anti-war theme, was given its premiere in front of an all-female audience — except, it turned out, for one man in drag who had smuggled himself into the front row, next to Greece's pop singer cultural supremo Melina Mercouri. When his disguise was penetrated, his defence was that he was a homosexual. How much more appropriate it would have been had the chosen play been Aristophanes's Thes- mophoriazusae. This is a much funnier comedy about a gathering of the enraged feminists of Athens to protest at the insulting portrayal of women in his tragedies by Euripides. The playwright smuggles his effeminate uncle into the secret meeting, disguised as a woman, only for the excitable viragoes to unmask him. The play winds to a climax with Euripides successfully calling the ladies' bluff by threatening to expose them to their hus- bands for the shameful way they have been carrying on while the men were away fighting the Spartans. In keeping with comedy's proper role as a challenge to fashionable absurdity, it is hard to think of any time in history when it would have been more apt to revive the Thesmophor- iazusac than today. But I cannot see the contemporary feminists of Athens, or their London counterparts, sitting willingly through such a hilarious mirror to their own humourless aggression. Much better to feed the animus by putting on yet another version of dear old Lizzie Strater.
Eyebrows were raised in Britain by the news that Stevie Wonder, Jane Fonda and other international disciples of radical chic were invited to Archbishop Tutu's en- thronement party in Cape Town — even if, on the day, most of them failed to turn up. Just as many eyebrows were raised in moderate circles in South Africa, I gather, by the fact that among those conspicuously not invited was Alan Paton, founder of the Liberal Party, whose Cry the Beloved Country did more to alert the world 40 years ago to the spiritual evils of apartheid than anything else. Mr Paton's crime, in the Archbishop's eyes, is that he is today once of those many moderates, white and black, who are opposed to sanctions, on the ground that they will bring South Africa nearer to the brink of chaos and polarise the races still further. Whatever else the politically conscious new Archbishop of Cape Town stands for, one thing is certainly the principle that 'he who is not with me is against me'.
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