Notebook
When the late Richard Daley became Mayor of Chicago, his son was work- ing for a local insurance company. Im- mediately business poured in that Company's direction from all the municipal authorities, including the police department and the fire department. When Mayor Daley was questioned about the propriety of all this, he said confidently: 'It is a father's duty to help his son.' The Observer, in a long 'Exclusive' article last Sunday, was clearly hoping to endow Mrs Thatcher with the same sense of parental duty. It noted that while she was on an of- ficial visit to Oman in 1981, urging the Sultan to award a £300 million construction contract to Britain, her son Mark was also secretly there, working for the company which eventually got the contract. But as it appears there was only one British company seeking the contract, which was to build a new university, the Prime Minister cannot be accused of favouring her son's firm over another. One might merely conclude that between them Mrs Thatcher and her son had achieved quite a coup in the British na- tional interest. If that is the case, though, why are they not both more proud of it? Why will neither Mrs Thatcher nor her son answer any questions about it or even admit that he was a consultant to the fortunate company, Cementation International Ltd.? If Mark was really responsible for helping to secure this spectacular contract, he should be publicly praised and possibly given a medal. It is his mother's failure to give him any credit which is the most Perplexing aspect of the story.
Ihave only just remembered that I have ancestors called Dundas. This is at a time when everybody called Dundas is busy con- sulting genealogists and lawyers in the hope of becoming a millionaire. Perhaps I should do so as well. The excitement follows the discovery that a man called Charles Albert Whitley Dundas, who died in 1962 without having made a will, was the owner of shares in the Press Association which today could be worth more than £3 million. This is because the Press Association owns 41 per cent of Reuters news agency, which now Plans to offer itself for sale to the public on the stock exchanges of London and New York; and the estimated market value of Reuters is generally put at more than £1,000 Million. The carve-up of Reuters, in breach of the 1941 Trust Agreement which is now described as legally worthless, is turning out to be the greatest lottery Fleet Street has ever seen. It leaves all the other bingo games and millionaires' clubs in the shade. The Press Association has appointed a special trustee to investigate claims and hunt for other untraced shareholders who could stand to benefit. Practically anyone might turn out to be lucky. Which brings me back to Mr Charles Dundas. Researchers work- ing for Burke's Peerage say that his shares now rightfully belong to Diana Parsons, a farmer's wife who lives near Salisbury. Mrs Parsons, however, is not Mr Dundas's daughter. She is the daughter of his second wife, Daphne, by an earlier marriage and is therefore only his step-daughter. If Mr Dundas died intestate, it seems odd that all the money should go to her, for he had a perfectly good son of his own called Jeremy by his first wife Priscilla. Unlike his second wife Daphne, Priscilla is still alive, and so is Jeremy. He is living at the moment in Harare, Zimbabwe. Now I am sure there must be good legal reasons why Mrs Par- sons is to become a multi-milionairess while Jeremy slaves away, doing whatever he does in Harare. But it does seem extraordinarily bad luck on Jeremy. On the other hand, luck is what lotteries are all about.
'please join the Germaine debate,' urges
the Sunday Times, which this week published the first of a series of acrticles by Dr Germaine Greer, based on her for- thcoming book Sex and Destiny. I would like to oblige, but as the Sunday Times is asking for 'hard evidence' of 'intimate mat- ters', I think I will not. There would seem to be an element of recantation in Dr Greer's book. Looking back to the days when she campaigned for sexual freedom for women, she says: 'It seemed obvious that we had to acquire freedom from the fear of pregnancy in order to be able to ex- ercise free will in sexual matters and so we went more than half-way to the steroid pill, demanding it as a contraceptive long before it was actually presented as one. We could not be expected to realise the fact, but what we had done was simply to change one bind for another.' She now sees danger in con- traceptives and virtue in chastity, but she also says: 'It must not be thought that I am here suggesting that we should all abandon our permissive life style. .. ' So what is she in fact on about? From a reading of just the first of her articles, I would tend to agree with the Guardian's leading article last Monday, which credits her with general consistency in her approach. She has been concerned all along with how women can feel free and equal and happy. She has con- cluded that absolute availability does not make them so. She now wants them to play a bit hard to get. That is surely good advice. But one gets the feeling that she sees the problems facing western women as ultimately insoluble. She is a romantic and a pessismist who is trying very hard to be honest. This at least makes her very sym- pathetic.
In the meantime, the Mail-on-Sunday's answer to the Sunday Times has been to serialise the confessions of Roman Polan- ski, whose book Roman is to be published by William Heinemann next week. The ex- tracts make disagreeable reading, even though the idea of the book appears to be to present him in a rather more favourable light than that in which he is popularly seen. Having not read the book, I cannot tell how faithfully the extracts in the Mail- on-Sunday reflect its spirit. But Polanski's co-author, Mr Edward Behr, the European Cultural Editor of Newsweek, is in a state. of outrage. He has complained to the Press Council that the first 'extract' was 'a rewrite, in the style of the News of the World, stitched together with paragraphs and sentences which are not from the book at all'. 'Instead of publishing selected ex- tracts of the book, as Mr Polanski and I had been led to believe, the editors of the Mail-on-Sunday... put together three pages of tasteless, sensationalist, miserably written drivel, interspersed with brief quotes from the book out of context,' he writes. He also blames Heinemann's for let- ting him down. It would certainly appear from the Mail-on-Sunday's serialisation that the paper is more interested in Mr Polanski's sexual misdemeanours than in whatever explanations he may have offered for them. But it will be interesting to see what the Press Council decides.
/Those members of the Turf Club who I threatened to blackball Mr Jeffrey Ber- nard had better beware. The crisis is not over yet. Mr Bernard's principal sponsor was the Marquess of Hartington, who played a major part in saving the Club from ruin. Many cannot forgive the fact that he has been slighted by some of the cockier new members. Revenge is under discussion.
Alexander Chancellor
Previous page
