DIARY
BORIS JOHNSON Every so often, in the course of the life- long struggle against our own natural incompetence, we know when we are licked. In five minutes they were expecting me to give a speech at my former prep school's sports day. I could hear the Tan- noy announcing the last relay race. Moth- ers, fathers, boys and girls were making their way across the Sussex sward towards the grassy amphitheatre. And at that moment the flies on my otherwise excellent new pair of corduroy trousers, bought at a farming supply shop in the Tanat valley, had burst. Bent double in the bathroom, sweat beading the brow as the Tannoy announced the imminence of the prize-giv- ing, I staggered around trying to fit the teeth of the zip back into the groove. Rowena, the headmaster's wife, took one look at the problem and went in search of assistance. Finally my wife did something brilliant with a safety-pin and, shaking slightly, I went out to give the parents and pupils of Ashdown House my message of hope. Perhaps everything is as wonderful as it seems, I suggested. Maybe Blair and co. have had a genuine prefrontal lobotomy and become Tories; in which case we should rejoice, because the Tory mission was temporarily accomplished. We Tories could slump gratefully back to earth like an exhausted booster rocket, like Cincinnatus to his plough. And if not, if Blair did some- thing monstrous like put VAT on school fees, then the Tories would be back.
AI spoke, I observed one of the changes in the 20 years since I left the school. That green beech where so many of us gouged our names with penknives had mysteriously fallen down. It was all differ- ent in my day, I said pompously to Nigel Sheinwald, the Foreign Office supremo whose child won the high jump. We used to get up before daybreak to recite the paradigms of luo, do sit-down-clap-downs in the rain before being flogged into break- fast where we tried pathetically to make the sausages edible by smearing them with marmalade. Now, I complained, it's all duvets and payphones so the little brutes can ring mummy in Honkers, and only six Latin classes per week. It's all gone, I said, that Junker culture, that Spartan drill. Give me a break, said Sheinwald. You never saw such a happy, successful school. Ashdown has doubled in size, bucking the trend of the boarding sector. It has added an indoor swimming-pool, tennis courts, music facili- ties and 60 girls, and it keeps those scholar- ships coming. I brooded, torn between the right-wing savagery that yearns for disci- pline and the verbs in -mi, nostalgia for the jokari bat and construe, and the new T-shirted co-educational soppiness and happiness, until my four-year-old daughter said, 'I want to go to your school,' and I decided that Sheinwald was right, and Blair would be mad to touch it.
Go on, Ken, his bien-pensant support- ers urge him in the small hours of the night, as they sit around with the whisky. Just say it: say you are against European monetary union. Only thus, they believe, can the for- mer Chancellor break out of the 49-vote corral of the centre-Left, capture those right-wingers who secretly crave his rum- bustious style of leadership and stop William Hague in the race for the Tory crown. Please, Ken, they say: Paris is worth a mass. Everyone in London says you are the only human being in the race, if only you could change your views on Europe. Is it boneheaded stubbornness that makes him just shake his head, as the smoke of his cigar trickles from his nostrils? Or does Ken perhaps understand the great truth that this is not about politics, but tempera- ment? It is not his views on Europe that command the furtive support of so many 'Oh look - a newspaper's fallen out of the middle of all these freebies.' right-wingers; far from it. It is the fact that he will not change them to suit his audi- ence. Ken Clarke knows, somewhere in his capacious gut, that if he is to win the sup- port of these right-wing Tory Eurosceptic headbangers — and he yet may — he must on no account tell them what they want to hear.
Sounds about right — a bit on the high side,' says Sara at Thomson Currie, estate agents in Upper Street, Islington. High! You might think exorbitant was a better word. How can you explain an asking price of £615,000 for what Tony and Cherie's near neighbour Charles Moore describes as a rather dingy, overlooked end-of-terrace house in Richmond Cres- cent? Ah, but we denizens of Quislington know how, for we have some experience of the factors which have produced a £240,000 increase in the value of château Blair since 1992. Let us ascribe £15,000 to the quiver- ing prestige of owning the original labora- tory of Blairism; the very kitchen on whose pinewood table they thrashed out Britain Deserves Better, not to mention the fish- eries policy (Britain Deserves Batter), or the alcohol excise policy (Britain Deserves Bitter); then there is the garden where Tony sat in his Japanese dressing-gown- style cardigan and scrawled out the mani- festo that launched the new era. And yet this specific Blair premium is only part of a more general phenomenon. As Sara of Thomson Currie observes, the whole Isling- ton boom, including the 65 per cent increase in the value of their house, is at least partly attributable to the presence of Blair and the Blairites. Suddenly, just over two years ago, when John Smith died in his Barbican apartment, everyone wanted to share the excitement of chowing down in Granita on the off-chance that Gordon might be there, pronging a moody forkful of something seared; of shopping in Sains- bury's on Saturday afternoon in the hope of gently clashing trolleys with Cherie. Isling- ton was hip; it was the training-ground of the coming revolution. 'It was quite fun that people used to see Cherie taking the children to school,' says Sara at Thomson Currie; and people poured in from outside the area. And yes, the golden glow spread up the road, even to the less fashionable Highbury addresses where some of us live, so that the noughts spun like taxi meters in the estate agents' windows. And now what? They're off! They're killing the trend they started. It is the final indignity. Not content with seizing power and humiliating the Tory party, Blair is blighting the very value of our house by his departure. What premi- um attaches, I wonder, to the house of a Tory candidate (failed) for Clwyd South?
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