SKINFLINT'S CITY DIARY Why use cash when paper will do?

Dr Daniel McDonald obviously has a taste for strenuous effort and hasn't accustomed himself to leisure in Switzerland since clearing £16i million through the sale of his gramophone company, Birmingham Sound Reproducers. He has bid £5.6 million in cash for sixty per cent of BSA. He became a physician late in life for some inexplicable reason, never practising. He doesn't hunger for material things, except old master paintings, but has the determination to go ahead and get what his heart is set on. He should get BSA, if he wants it as much as they obviously need his venerated talent. But he has fumbled expensively in flashing cash. He has charming old-fashioned ways, not believing in the corrupting infections that have swept the city since he left England. He should not have gone to Kleinwort Benson or any other merchant bank if he wants control of BSA cheaply, but to some bold fellow like Christopher SeImes of Drakes or Malcolm Horsman of Ralli Brothers.

Painless

With his pledge of E5i million they might have been encouraged judicially to pick up ten or twenty per cent of BSA shares in the market and subsequently to make a bid with the combination of convertible paper (possibly underwritten for cash) and loan stock that shareholders have now been led to expect. Whomever he worked through would have been delighted to have sold Dr McDonald what they had acquired, treating the transaction as a rights issue raising for them what they are really after — money. BSA is in a poor state but has useful investments (including a way into the break-up of Alfred Herbert), property and a possible recovery potential — so GKN or Jessel Securities may counterbid with something less painful to them than Dr McDonald's hard-won savings.

Cold feet

For years I have had an unreasoning dislike of Lord Butler. Like Lord Curzon and Roy Jenkins he seemed to dream incessantly of the ladder and appeared to like the climb.

His book 'The Art •of the Possible' is dealt with elsewhere in this week's Spectator, but is there anywhere but in politics where a subordinate would so toadyingly cringe before a superior as when he refers to his relations with Churchill, "the libations of brandy were so ample that I felt it prudent on more than one occasion to tip the liquid into the side of my shoe." Noth ing but craven fear of corporal chastisement (or cold feet) would make any of us whose life is a life of business and care so wasteful — there was a war on just then.

Private cinemas

Reading political memoirs that touch the war and the lives of Churchill's Cabinet, there is the inevitable reference to private film screenings. Political society now prefers the box, though there may be a new life for the private late show when video cassettes arrive. Tim Jessel, Lord Jessel's son, who died tragically so young two years ago, told me that he once stayed at Sutton Place when it was still owned by the Duke of Sutherland. After dinner with the Duke and an aged Sir Bede Clifford there was to be a show in the private cinema. The Duke went to bed, Sir Bede Clifford fell asleep and as Tim said: "I'd seen the film before."

Black Prince

Prince Charles starts his next stretch of penal servitude soon — after Trinity and Cranwell, it's to be six weeks at Dartmouth. After that, there's plenty more planned by his redoubtable father. Naturally the army for a while, and then a spell with the Metropolitan police, and perhaps one of the fire brigades as well, together with a few valuable days as a traffic warden and then down a mine. For goodness sake, let's give them a rise: the Royal Family makes one proud to be British.

Royal garden parties

The traditional rule of conduct is for those jamborees, royal garden parties, to be held in high summer at Buckingham Palace. The indescribable traffic chaos stretches from Oxford Street to the Embankment, and year after year taxi drivers suggest the blindingly obvious—why aren't the parties at Windsor Castle? For those lucky enough to be asked, making their final and complete apotheosis in silk hat and morning coat, the journey would be little extra burden.

City sinners

The Reverend Joseph McCulloch has done much to enliven the City with his lunch-time dialogues in the pulpit of Bow Church but I hear that our conservative City fathers are becoming worried by the stream of agnostics, atheists, liberals and social revolutionaries, if not sinners, who have been preaching their strange doctrines in the Church. Perhaps that is why the Rector lately invited our own Editor to the pulpit as a conservative counterbalance.

What is the truth?

Last week the smart City audiences clapping in the nave were startled to hear Mr Richard Crossman discourse on truth in politics, which might be thought to be a contradiction in terms. He confessed that he had enjoyed upsetting his late colleagues by blurting out the truth from time to time but he had realized that you had to be gentle with politicians. Too much truth spoken tended to destroy their dynamism. He had therefore often to restrain himself from indulging in his natural habit of being an intellectual bully. It was curious to hear a happily married man like Mr Crossman state that marriage was helped by extending the areas of selfdeception between man and wife. The audience was convulsed but the Rector brought it back to the solemnity of the occasion by asking Mr Crossman what he would have done in Pontius Pilate's case with the question — What is Truth? Mr Crossman immediately replied that he would have sided with the under-dog and have been sacked by the Establishment in Rome. But he was never sacked by Mr Wilson who is now often seeking his advice.