High life

Time out

Taki

13y the time you read this I will most likely be taking my first (however en- forced) holiday from the Spectator after a run of 372 weeks. Without meaning to brag

I thought it was about time I drew atten- tion to the fact. After all, the gutter press — oblivious to the truth as usual — have labelled me a playboy, forgetting the days, weeks, even months that Auberon Waugh, the sainted editor, the ex-sainted ex-editor, and even Jeffrey Bernard take off each Year.

Well, I will let the Spectator readers de- cide who the playboys are among us. After 372 weeks of hard labour I can honestly say that only two of my columns have failed to

appear, and not because I was in Lan- guedoc, or in Tuscany, or even Memphis, but simply because someone deemed them too nice. Which leads me to suspect that it will be strange suddenly not to be writing the column. Perhaps not as strange as the Place I'll be at, if the worst comes to the worst, but nevertheless rather abnormal.

Coming to the end of the writing of a column — for however brief a time

makes one want to summarise, to reach some kind of conclusion, to say something grand. The irony is that the more one tries to think of a conclusion, or of something on a grand scale, the more one realises that something only fools or pompous left-

wing American pundits do. Let's face it. Writing for the Spectator has been the thing that I've loved the most these last seven and a half years, my two Kinder and a woman or two naturally excluded.

summing why persevere with some kind of What up? Self-importance, that's why. what is there to say? Not much, except that it still surprises me when I read that

Kennedys were arrested the other day Lot violating laws protecting foreign

embassies in Washington while protesting

against the apartheid system of South Afri- ca. I say it surprises me because I think that

by now they might have learned. Learned that at this moment the gravest human cri-

sis on the African continent is being played out Ethiopia, where the massive starva-

rn was brought on by the policies of a

from Marxist tyrant who took his lead trom Stalin and used starvation as a politic- al instrument. Vet the Kennedy kids, like so many of those who think like they do, bang on ab- out the only regime in Africa that one feels safe to attack any time, anywhere. No Kennedy child has as yet been arrested Protesting about the genocidal war against

f.kfghanistan the persecution of the Catho- 0,C Church in Poland, or even the tyranny °,,! the Kremlin over the Russian people. Not to mention the savagery of the North

Vietnamese over the South, or the fact that Libyans go around shooting people.

It is all a matter of priorities, but the trendies somehow never seem to under- stand it. They want to effect changes in Western policies toward South Africa. South Korea, El Salvador and Turkey, which they would never attempt to do where Bulgaria or Vietnam, let alone the Soviet Union, is concerned. Just imagine what people of the West would have done if an American right-winger had tried to shoot the Pope under orders from the CIA. Or better yet, just imagine what the press would say if South Korea financed its army by drug dealing, as the PLO partly does. Syria reportedly runs heroin laboratories, North Korean diplomats have been caught bringing narcotics into Europe, while the Bulgarians run guns into the Middle East in exchange for the drugs they move into Nato Europe, yet it's Turkish human rights we worry about.

I guess it's a mark of our moral flaccidity that we continue to maintain relations with governments that kill their enemies in our very own backyards, a la Zhivkov, and en- courage the kind of show-boating the Ken- nedys and their apologists tend to adopt whenever their names drop out of print. And speaking of drugs and the Kennedys — I still have not managed to discover the difference — here are my parting thoughts on the subject. I have always believed that any apologist for them — the drugs, that is — should be locked up and the proverbial key thrown away. The fact that I got caught with some should not disqualify me from preaching or speaking out against them. On the contrary, in fact, like an old Marxist seeing the light and turning. The pushers and the drug apologists should be attacked, but so should governments who deal with regimes that openly plie the drug trade. Like Castro's Cuba, for example.

But I disgress. When I was stopped at Heathrow my first reaction was what peo- ple like Charles Moore, Mary Kenny, Richard Sykes and Dick West would think. And, of course, my father. Ironically, all of them have been understanding, while it has been others — people who have spilled more happy dust than I've ever taken who have dined out on my problems. But I will take the advice of my friend Anne Somerset and not name names. This should be a happy occasion. After all, I am finally about to take a long-needed holi- day, and because of it I've even managed to get the Taki philosophy across. I hope to be back soon, and in the meanwhile I wish all of you a very happy Christmas.

It has a pleasantly nutty taste.'