DIARY
ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR This is a funny, dead time of year. Most people are away somewhere trying to enjoy themselves. Those left behind in London have a sleepy, uncommitted look about them. But there are a few exceptions — people still bubbling with spring-like energy and enthusiasm — and prominent among these are the publicity girls of the London publishing firms. Like the editors of other magazines (mine is the Indepen- dent Magazine),I am receiving through the mail an almost daily dose of breathless twaddle designed to interest me in some book due to be published in the autumn. There is, for example, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy by David Canna- dine, than whom — says Ann Geneva, publicity manager of the Yale University Press — `no one is better able to create the vanishing world of the aristocracy'. (I wonder why?) 'From Lord Salisbury to Lord Home,' she says, 'from P. G. Wode- house to Evelyn Waugh, the British aris- tocracy remains an irresistibly fascinating subject.' (Wodehouse and Waugh may indeed be fascinating, but not, I would have thought, because they were aristoc- rats.) Then there is a pithy note from the publicity director of Hutchinson, Bridget Sleddon, who says she is sending me a copy of Despatches from the Barricades by the BBC's John Simpson 'because I thought you might be extraordinarily moved, as I was, by Chapter 5'. (Perhaps I will be, but it is a bold presumption.) But the letter which I have enjoyed the most comes from Judy Carreck, publicity officer of John Murray, about The Complete Heath, a collection of cartoons by The Spectator's cartoon editor, Michael Heath. 'Heath is without doubt one of the sharpest and funniest commentators on Britain's con- temporary social scene,' Ms Carreck in- forms me. 'Always ahead of the pack, he is fast becoming Britain's foremost cartoonist although, as yet, the public know very little about the man behind the cartoons and what makes him tick.' Ms Carreck may not realise it, but this is actually a bit of a
put-down; for there is a strong case for claiming that Heath is already Britain's foremost cartoonist (though not much of a case for saying he got there fast, since he has been drawing for The Spectator for longer than practically any living person can remember). As for 'what makes him tick', possibly the less said about that the better.
Hardly less dynamic are the public relations advisers to the leading Conserva- tive politicians. Someone, for example, has arranged for Mr Nicholas Ridley to repeat week after week in the Sunday Express the views on German domination of Europe which got him the sack when he expressed
them in The Spectator, though this time he seems to be avoiding any Hitler references. (In a Cummings cartoon accompanying last Sunday's Ridley article, Mrs Thatcher is portrayed as Churchill with V-sign and cigar, but her enemy, Helmut Kohl, is shown not as Hitler but, no less curiously, as some kind of old-time Prussian soldier.) Meanwhile, Woodrow Wyatt (he who will never ask A. N. Wilson to dinner again) is declared to be on holiday, but he seems to me to be continuing his weekly column in the News of the World under different names. Two Sundays ago the signatory was Margaret Thatcher, while last Sunday it was the Environment Secretary, Chris Patten, to whom Wyatt's blimpish tone seems particularly ill-suited. I wonder who will be put through the Wyatt mill this Sunday? Pushiest of all, though, have been the advisers to Mr Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary. I do not underrate the gravity of the Gulf crisis, but Iraq is still a long way from Britain, and Mr Hurd ought to have been able to carry on with his work without being moved from his office into an underground nuclear bunker, in which he sat, looking pale and drawn, giving one crisis interview after another to the media. That was just after the invasion of Kuwait when Mrs Thatcher was in Colorado with President Bush, but even after her return to Britain Mr Hurd managed to go on hogging the limelight. It was he who announced Britain's decision to go into the Gulf, standing proud and Thatcherless in front of No 10 after a crisis cabinet meeting. There can be no doubt he is trying hard to become the next Prime Minister.
Ihave mixed feelings about the Sunday
'It's the Iraqi horror show.' Correspondent. On the one hand, I have found it a friendly, unpretentious paper, containing plenty of good stories and em- ploying several friends of mine whom I would like to see prosper; on the other hand, its continued existence in this time of economic recession has been something of a thorn in the side of my own newspaper, the Independent. Perhaps, from my point of view, its decision to go tabloid repre- sents the best of all possible worlds: it will continue to exist, but without being much of a competitive threat, if any at all, to the Independent on Sunday. But there is one aspect of the recent upheaval at the Sunday Correspondent which I have found depress- ing and distasteful. This concerns the resignation as editor of Mr Peter Cole. I hardly know Mr Cole, but he has always seemed to me a nice chap, and he was brave to give up a good job as deputy editor of the Guardian to go and edit a new Sunday newspaper for which there was no very clear demand. Furthermore, he man- aged to produce a perfectly respectable paper. Give the Sunday Correspondent's disastrous circulation figures, it was , perhaps inevitable that its financial backers would at some stage demand a change of editor. But there are ways and ways of doing these things, and one of the ways not to do them is the way chosen by the Sunday Correpondent which, it seemed to me, involved inflicting the maximum humilia- tion on the hapless Mr Cole. According to the paper's official announcement, he has 'resigned in the interests of ensuring con- tinued financial support for the paper'. Was it necessary to be quite so brutally frank?
Early this month the Civil Aviation Authority published one of its regular reports on near-collisions between aircraft. Seventeen such incidents were recorded in Britain during the last four months of 1989, but the most intriguing by far was one which took place when an American jet fighter came within 250 feet of a Dan-Air passenger plane while carrying out a mock bomb attack on Inverness airport last November. The American supersonic F- 111, one of four taking part in the pretence raid, flew 'intentionally so as to give a close miss' . to the terrified Dan-Air pilot, re- ported the CAA. We learn from the report that, far from being unusual, it is quite routine for American aircraft to engage in practice bombing of British airports. And what did the CAA propose to prevent a repetition of such a nightmare? According to a report in the Guardian, it concluded that 'practice attacks on UK civilian air- fields were undesirable without proper advance clearance'. I wonder why we bother to be scared by Saddam Hussein?
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