W hen an overexcited American marine raised Old Glory over Umm
Qasr, all those who had been so stirred by the words of Lt-Col. Tim Collins recoiled in horror. Had Lt-Col. Collins not said, plain as a pikestaff, 'We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own'? And were the Stars and Stripes not, but 48 hours or so later, fluttering over Umm Qasr? It was an American who put the flag up, but it is to the Brits that we owe its being taken down. An aide at the MoD was watching the action from a bunker over here when he spotted the flag. He rushed to the phone and managed to get hold of one of the very few people in the defense department senior enough to get a call through to Donald Rumsfeld's private office and demand that the flag be taken down. The call went through. From seeing the flag go up on the screen to having it taken down took about 14 minutes,' I'm told.
Oxford University's new Chancellor, IChris Patten, still active at 58, has suffered a reverse. He took this weekend to the Malrnesbury tennis court of an old friend, the former Tory MP Richard Needham, and promptly snapped his Achilles' tendon. After four agonising hours in a Cirencester casualty department, he managed to return for dinner where, I'm told, he was 'forced to recline like the famous portrait of the dying Chatterton, while the womenfolk busied themselves attending to him with edible dainties and various forms of anaesthesia'.
F"people have been following the war in Iraq more assiduously than Sir Vywian Naylor-Leyland. Every time the radio brings news from the Iraqi capital, the poor fellow jumps out of his skin. That is because his nickname at White's derives from the magnificently oedipal moment when he took aim at a pheasant with a 12bore and somehow discharged a portion of the shot, at fairly close quarters, into the well-tweeded buttocks of his father. He has been known ever since as Bag Dad.
I f not properly conducted, the hedgehog cull on the Isle of Uist could yet become a costly and hopeless miniature reprise of foot-and-mouth. 'They're going about it all the wrong way — all sniffer dogs and lethal injections and all that,' my agricultural correspondent reports. 'It'll be costing an arm and a leg and will leave loads of the little buggers on the island anyway. I've been killing tiggywinkles for years. The way to catch them is to dig a hole, put a plastic bucket in it, and leave a load of dog food at the bottom. Hedgehog crawls in to eat, can't climb out of the bucket, and you come along a few days later and knock it on the head. Cheap as chips.'
Dr Raj Persaud, possibly the most widely quoted authority on psychology since Sigmund Freud, is up for membership of the Reform Club. Among subscribers to his candidacy so far are fellow members of the punditocracy Mary Kenny, Jeremy Vine and Michael Buerk. His seconder, in what looks like an agreeable example of Faintly Bogus Telly Experts sticking together, is Dr Thomas Stuttaford, the most widely quoted authority on medicine since Hippocrates.
Amid all the excitement over the great Bingo Bonanza, not many of us watching the Budget remarked on what seems to this river-dwelling mammal to be a subtle but significant tweak of rhetoric. An expression which has been for years a socialist shibboleth — that the NHS be 'free at the point of delivery' — has been revised by the Chancellor (he used it twice in his speech) to 'free at the point of need'. Is it cynical to suggest that by revising 'delivery' to 'need' the Chancellor is aiming to give himself a little more wriggle room? You might need treatment, but the government will fail to deliver. The service will be free. Thank you, Gordon. The Chief Police Officers' dinner in Guildhall last week gave these hardworking plods a welcome break from overboiled canteen cabbage: melon, figs and Parma ham; lamb with parsnip mousse, cocotte vegetables and 'redcurrant jus feathered with Somerset goat's cheese sauce.; cheesecake; VSOP cognac, vintage port, single malt whisky, et cetera. The top brass were serenaded as they sluiced by the band of the Kent County Constabulary, with a musical programme including 'Westward Ho!', 'Country Roads', 'Danny Boy', 'Land of Hope and Glory', 'Will ye no come back again?', Hooked on Classics (a selection of classical favourites) and a medley of Robbie Williams numbers entitled Swing When You're Winning, Let nobody say our senior police officers are out of touch with the zeitgeist.
when Lord Jenkins went into hospital shortly before his death, his friend Sir Anthony Kenny — the former Master of Roy's old college Balliol — received a phone call from Lady Jenkins wondering if he'd be kind enough to drop off some reading material for Roy. 'What does he like to read in hospital?' he asked. 'Middlebrow biography,' Lady J. told him. Shortly before his visit, Sir Anthony spoke to Roy on the phone, who set him straight, 'Upper-middlebrow biography, please.'
WassisnameagainT said my taxi-driver as we weaved through the Devon lanes to Totnes station. `Wassee called? Lord Irvine?! had that Lord Irvine in the back of the cab, and I really put my foot in it. I had no idea who he was, and I said, "Why are they all just politicians these days, and no statesmen?" He flew off the handle. "What you say may be true of other parties, but it is certainly not true of mine!"' The Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre's loyal wife Kathleen recently rang the editor of another national newspaper and begged, sobbing, that there be no further mention of her husband's recent heart operation. What innocence! Does she not know that her Paul makes a living by brutal intrusions into the privacy of others? Does she not read the Daily Mail, which on Monday carried a miserable snatched photo of a well-known soap star, suffering from the Epstein-Barr virus, on her way to a Harley Street appointment?
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