T o Gateshead to appear on Question Time last Thursday with
Nick Brown, Tom Strathclyde, David Steel and Janet StreetPorter. Until the show is filmed at 8.30 p.m., Nick Brown, the Minister for Work, hasn't been told that he is being sacked in the reshuffle. He certainly doesn't seem to betray any nervousness as we wander over the rather splendid Millennium bridge there, discussing Rupert Everett's excellent portrayal of Charles I in the otherwise dire new movie To Kill a King. Did No. 10 wait until Question Time was safely over before they broke the news? And, if so, why did they specifically ask for him to go on the show after the chief whip Hilary Armstrong had pulled out because of the reshuffle? One for the Questing Vole, I think.
Speaking of regime change, surely we ought to be asking Saddam to come back and rule Iraq again because we haven't found any WMDs. Forget the torture chambers that we have found, and the mass graves being uncovered every week, and the money that no longer goes to the families of Palestinian suicidemurderers, because, after all, the only thing that matters are WMDs, as though intelligence-gathering can ever be an exact science in a totalitarian regime where spies and 'traitors' are executed on suspicion. Sorry, but sometimes only sarcasm will do.
I've been receiving more than my usual quota of hate emails recently, not just because the Guardian (over-generously) described me as 'commander-in-chief of the hawks' over Iraq, but also because I have suggested that Prince Charles should marry Mrs Parker Bowles and that she should therefore, in due course, become queen. What is the etiquette for dealing with hate mail? I like to reply to every communication I receive, but to Mr John Bull (surely not his real name) from East Ham all I could say was: 'Dear Mr Bull, Thank you for your letter. It was so foully abusive and ignorant that I was cheered that 1 am on the opposite side of the argument from you. Yours sincerely. Andrew Roberts.'
Norman Stone, my university supervisor whom I saw in Istanbul recently. once checked up on the academic background of someone who had written him a rude letter and replied: 'Dear Professor So-andSo, For someone who, in the year 1990, published a book entitled The Continuing Integration of Yugoslavia, it rather ill
behoves you to write to anyone on that subject ever again.'
Elor all that it is incestuous to mention 1 The Spectator television critic's satirising of another regular Spectator columnist, who on earth can the gorgeous pouting hackette Clytemnestra be in Jamie Delingpole's superb roman a clef, Thinly Disguised Autobiography?
What a good thing that, if the reports are true. Foxtons are pulling down the sales boards of their rival estate agents. If this war could only become general, these unsightly things could be banished from our streets for ever and we could view rows of house fronts just as the Victorians and Edwardians did. I know a very distinguished historian who lives in Kensington and who occasionally goes out of an evening with his shears and beheads them, rather as Paul Newman beheaded the parking meters in the opening scene of Cool Hand Luke.
Will the Tories now please unequivocally pledge to reintroduce the post of Lord Chancellor when they return to power, or will they be terrified of seeming to be 'putting back the clock'? If you recall, they haven't yet promised to decriminalise hunting once it has been abolished.
'To Winston Churchill Jr's book launch 1 in the Cabinet War Rooms for 'Never Give In!', a selection of his grandfather's speeches. He reads from a speech of 1909 when Churchill was mocking Lord Curzon for supporting the hereditary principle. 'The upkeep of the aristocracy has been the hard work of all civilisations,' the then Liberal Cabinet minister told the people of Burnley. I tap Nick Soames on the shoulder: 'Rather chippy, don't you think?' 'Terrible,' booms Nick, 'it's from the old boy's blue period.'
Qn the subject of political rhetoric, the editor of this magazine is rather unimpressed with his own performances in the Commons chamber. I tell him that of course, since no one on the other side agrees with him and few on his own side care to see him shine, he can hardly expect to be cheered to the Barry rafters every time he opens his mouth; so their poor reception bears no relation to his speaking ability. This seemingly egregious piece of sucking-up garners you your present Diary.
Ranging about in the House of Commons lobby the other day, I noticed that the statue of Gladstone has a little label attached to it, which claims that he resigned in 1894 after the defeat of the Second Irish Home Rule Bill. In fact the Bill was thrown out six months earlier in 1893 and he resigned over his own government's defence estimates. At least the Commons is not as bad as the Carlton Club, where there are three portraits of Gladstone's contemporary and fellow premier Lord Salisbury. In this pantheon of Toryism one has him as the 2nd marquess whereas he was the 3rd, a second gets his surname wrong, and the third has him dying ten years before he did.
With the judging of the Elizabeth Longford Historical Biography Prize and the Samuel Johnson Prize now behind me, I can get back to reading for profit. At the dinner to celebrate the inauguration of the former, and to congratulate its first winner, David Gilmour (for The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling), I got involved in my first theological discussion since university. I'm not sure how it started, but Michael Holroyd, Margaret Drabble, Peter Soros, Flora Fraser, Jean Pimlott and I were soon busily debating the existence of God, Accident versus Design, transubstantiation and all that kind of thing. None of it helped me last weekend when my four-year-old daughter asked, more in anger than a state of true spiritual inquiry, 'Daddy, why did God make stinging nettles?'
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