DIARY MAX HASTINGS
As a diary reporter twenty-something years ago, I regarded Conservative Party conferences among the highlights of the calendar, for all the usual reasons, to do with extravagant lunches and even more extravagant dinners, and the eager (if generally fruitless) pursuit of the innumer- able pretty girls who purported to work for the BBC. In those innocent days before security took over, even the greenest reporters could also hobnob with front- benchers, who were much more readily accessible than in London. Nowadays, my visits to conferences have become merci- fully brief, and the perspective has changed. At Bournemouth, I could scarce- ly glimpse a Tory MP through the serried ranks of Daily and Sunday Telegraph writers who had discovered pressing reasons for being in town. Every time one of our own staff offered to buy me a drink, I reflected mean-spiritedly upon the sheaves of expenses that will pass my desk a week or two hence. One of the embar- rassments of being an ex-reporter editor is that there is no nuance of the process of composing expenses with which one is unfamiliar. Now that I am on the other side of the fence, I feel a twinge of shame about developing bureaucratic tendencies, not to mention a touch of nostalgic envy of all those young diary reporters who are still thick on the ground at these affairs. Bour- nemouth and Blackpool in October are splendid places to meet old chums, but I am not persuaded that they enable even the most energetic political correspondent to read the mood of the party. This is much better done on delegates' home ground, in the constituencies, or at Westminster. The late and much-missed Robert Carvel of the Evening Standard took a jaundiced view of the value of young men like me squander- ing our employers' substance for weeks on end at the conferences. 'Brighouse and Spenborough, Brighouse and Spenbor- ough — that's the place for you, laddie,' he declared, citing that well-known and grisly northern marginal. And to Brighouse and Spenborough I was dispatched with dis- maying frequency. But the annual confer-
ence ritual, of the press room reading each others' entrails and pronouncing judgment on the mood of the faithful in the Sunday papers, is too well-established for any organ to dare to rain on the parade. The
political correspondents will continue to do the hard working through the autumn season, and the great army of Fleet Street camp followers will continue to do the hard dining.
At the Daily Telegraph we have been devoting much space to education. For all the protestations of commitment by the Prime Minister at Bournemouth, there seems no will by the Government to address the fundamentals of this issue. Ministerial opinion divides between those who say they would like to spend more money, and regret that there isn't any; and those who argue that the problems can be solved by making better use of existing resources, and that more cash would furth- er corrupt the education system. But I believe that most Tories, as well as most of the country at large, want to see a dramatic commitment of resources to education, far exceeding any present plans. Of course there is scope for administering schools more efficiently. A draconian shake-up of teacher training colleges is needed. But there can be no possible substitute for paying teachers much more highly, if there is to be real improvement in education quality over the next generation. Every additional £1,000 given to teachers costs the Treasury over £400 million a year. Myself, I believe teachers will have to be given at least another £3,000 a year at current prices, to attract and keep the sort of people the profession needs. It is some- times forgotten that even independent school-teachers are also lamentably paid. There are plenty of able, experienced, hard-working men and women who now earn £16,000 a year as teachers. In what other business or profession could anybody of quality conceivably be held in a job for this sort of money, barely the earnings of a London secretary? If we want teachers with middle-class outlooks and values and surely we do — we must pay them sufficient to enable them to support middle-class lives. If, as a society, we continue to pay contemptible salaries, we cannot be surprised if we end up with 'I've just read your Booker Prize cheque its fantastic, I can't put it down.' contemptible teachers. I do not think this Government, or any government, can afford simply to shrug, and declare that we cannot meet the costs of paying teachers more highly. The price of failing to do so, for this country a generation from now, will be higher than that of humiliation in the Gulf, or inflation, or failing to build a Channel Tunnel rail link.
Country-dwellers' lack of enthusiasm for the city-dwellers who influence their lives has been with us for ever. But the past two summers have created an unpre- cedented depth of bitterness towards radio and television weather forecasters. Night after night, their cheery tones have assured us that while there may be a few showers in the west of the country, 'the best of the weather will be in the east, where it should stay dry with lots of bright sunshine'. Sitting in their miserable bunker in Hol- born, these ridiculous men and women seem oblivious of the fact that every household in the land with more than a few square feet of garden is desperate for rain, rain, torrents and weeks of rain. Even now, in late October, we kick up dust storms as we walk through our paddock, and the lawn is rock hard beneath our feet. Planting bulbs has been a nightmare. Two- and even thjee-year-old trees are looking very unwell indeed. Most of us have not the smallest desire to live in a parched Mediterranean landscape, a patio culture. We expect to be wet and muddy all winter, and for as much of the spring and autumn as the countryside needs. Almost every- body who lives outside city centres agrees that they never again want to see a summer like this one past. When will the message reach the weather forecasters, whose mindlessly jolly scripts seem to be directed solely at the inhabitants of Pimlico?
While on the subject of weather, the rustic sages are all promising a hard winter,
because autumn has produced such a memorable fruit and berry crop. We are consumed by annual guilt, as we heap tons of apples on the compost heap to rot. Out shooting on Saturday, between drives we picked pounds of mushrooms, and ate nothing else on Sunday. The sloes on the bushes are the largest we have ever seen. But it is, of course, an annual delusion to fool ourselves that making sloe gin and slodka is an economic way of using the fruits of the hedgerows. We buy immense quantities of Peter Dominic gin and vodka to fill the berry bottles, then wait in vain for a winter's day cold enough to justify drinking the stuff. We could be snowbound for a month without getting through the 1987 bottling.
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