DIARY
ANDREW ROBERTS Iwas not wholly convinced by my preview of BBC 2's excellent documentary Who Really Killed Aung San?, to be shown this Sunday at 7.15 p.m. Despite a good deal of ingeniously obtained circumstantial evi- dence suggesting that a shady right-wing conspiracy of British generals and politi- cians was behind the 1947 assassination of the Burmese nationalist leader, the hard connecting evidence was just not there. However, one is definitely left with the impression that, however saintly his daugh- ter Aung San Suu Kyi might be, her father — a quisling who helped the Japanese and personally executed pro-British Karen tribesmen — got what was coming to him. The programme rather reminded me of a clubland conversation about David Irving's claims that the Polish leader General Siko- rski had been killed by British intelligence, which was supposed to have organised his plane crash in Gibraltar in 1943. My nona- genarian lunch neighbour, John Codring- ton, insisted that Irving was wrong. When I pressed him, asking how he could be so sure about proving a negative, he fairly conclusively explained, 'I was SIS head of station Gibraltar in '43, so it would have been my job to do it. I'm sure it's the sort of thing I'd have remembered.'
Spotting a shadow junior minister at the Countryside Rally last week, I asked whether the next Tory manifesto would include a pledge to legalise hunting. 'We can't make policy on the hoof,' he answered, rather weedily, I thought. (Unless it was a pun, in which case very weedily.) Countrymen probably assumed that William Hague's presence implied that there would be a commitment to allow hunting's reintroduction after a future elec- tion victory. In a sentence I have wanted to pen throughout my writing career, I think we should be told.
My 1991 biography of Lord Halifax, The Holy Fox, is to be republished next month. I can at last correct one egregious error which over the years dozens of helpful readers have spotted. It was the soft loo paper, Bromo, which George VI asked Hal- ifax to send over from Washington during the war, in packets of 500 sheets, not the contemporaneous harder variety, Bronco. When I originally got the two confused, the Daily Telegraph Peterborough column was inundated with letters on the subject, with some correspondents enclosing examples of the two very easily distinguishable types. It was kind of people to take such keen notice, but one wonders who actually hoards second world war loo paper. To the Spectator party, armed with my hip flask for when the crush around the drinks tables got too heavy. But this year it was noticeably lighter, so much so that I perversely became rather nostalgic for for- mer years when we were shoved up togeth- er like veal calves. We were even given champagne, too, showing that the new edi- tor is no respecter of cheeseparing tradi- tion. There was a time when the crush was so bad that all Sir Patrick Mayhew had to do to get the Orange Order to talk to the Garvaghy Road Residents' Association was to get both invited to the Spectator party, where sheer, immodest physical proximity makes conversation inevitable. Arab and Jew, Serb and Muslim, Maurice Cowling and Lord Dacre, every hitherto hostile fac- tion is brought together by the annual squash at Doughty Street.
Lord Dacre has recently enjoyed a priv- ilege accorded few authors. Dr A.D. Harvey, a historian working on the Foreign Office papers in the Public Record Office, has unearthed the comments of German visitors to the cultural centres the British set up immediately after the war. One of the books most requested by Germans was, unsurprisingly, Trevor-Roper's path-break- ing The Last Days of Hitler. He can now, at 50 years' distance, read how his master- piece went down with the master race. Many readers emphasised the author's remarkable objectivity, and the overall view was tremendously positive. Considering some of the reviews I have received of my books, waiting half a century before read- ing them would be a luxury. In death they are parted. Where Tommy Lascelles, the Bishop of Bradford and Geoffrey Dawson of the Times failed, Sotheby's has at last succeeded in splitting up Edward and Mrs Simpson. Sotheby's insistence that the Duke of Windsor's pukka effects — such as the abdication desk and Alfred Munnings's equestrian portrait — should be exhibited in London before the New York sale in early Septem- ber did not apparently extend to all the Duchess's more bijou items, such as her plastic sunglasses and ceramic pug collec- tion. The auctioneers made it clear that they can stay in New York, to be fought over by those women who couldn't quite afford Princess Diana's dresses or Jackie O's costume jewellery.
To the anonymous Guardian reader who wrote this morning to ask whether I am 'the fat b—d who writes for the Sun- day Times', the answer is, yes, I suppose I am. It does seems rather hard, though, hav- ing lost two stone last year, still to be con- stantly described as `pinguid' by Londoner's Diary. Originally I thought it meant looking like a penguin, and consequently did not mind, but then I looked it up in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary only to find: 'abounding in fat; unctuous; greasy; oily'. My sole con- solation is that this diary is only a one-off, rather than my regular employment. When Harold Nicolson worked on Londoner's Diary for 18 months he found it 'very soil- ing to live among people so extremely empirical, quotidian, shallow and mean'. I think I'd sooner be pinguid than quotidian.
t the risk of sounding obsessive, I
A
was astonished to see in Londoner's Diary this week an announcement that a very senior Conservative politician was not going to receive Special Branch protec- tion. In the course of making a cheap jibe at the individual for not seeming to the police important enough to rate protec- tion, they were effectively announcing to any terrorist, single-issue fanatic or public- ity-hungry loner that he was a soft target. What made it worse was the mock concern for his safety they evinced at the end of the piece, as though if it had been a seri- ous consideration for them it would not have rated as a news story, with a proper editorial comment. Considering the hand- slapping that a High Court judge recently administered to the Standard for inadver- tently helping alleged IRA terrorists escape justice, Londoner's Diary might gave done well to steer clear of such a sen- sitive revelation, even in pursuit of that all-important sneer.
Previous page
