Diary
T think it is high time that the Foreign -11-Office began to insist on travel agents advising British citizens that it is unsafe to travel to certain parts of Spain. Quite unaware of how deeply lawless post- Franco Spain has become, my 86-year-old Mother and an elderly woman friend of hers flew to Seville last Sunday, only arriving at midnight, the flight having been badly delayed because of a Spanish air strike. On the plane from Barcelona — too late to turn back, of course — Spanish passengers next to whom they sat warned them of the dangers that lay ahead, ex- pressing surprise that two unaccompanied ladies should be travelling to Seville alone. Although inclined to pooh-pooh these warnings, my mother and her friend did arrange with two other British couples who had hired cars at the airport to travel into town in convoy, led by a representative of the car hire firm. But even this precaution did not suffice to save them from being attacked by brigands who smashed the car windows with a brick, before stealing their belongings, passports, money etc., all this on the main road. Next morning, still badly shaken by this horrible experience, and the three-hour police ordeal that followed it, mY mother and her friend went to the very helpful assistant British consul — a Cuban lady where they found three other couples, in addition to their own compan- ions of misfortune of the previous night, Who had suffered much more serious Physical assault. Nor, according to the consul, was any of this at all unusual. Not surprisingly, my mother and friend decided to fly straight home, given the breakdown of law and order in the area. But why had they not been told as much before leaving? Urged on return to London to write a letter to the Times recounting her experiences, mY redoubtable mother replied: 'Not at all, they will make a paragraph for Perry's diary,' thereby displaying a splendidly co- operative attitude to the exigencies of this kind of weekly journalism, which I only wish other friends would emulate.
Thank heavens Lord Dacre was weekending away last Saturday, as the only place I could find to park my car was bang outside the Master's Lodge at Peter- house. When the porter remonstrated at my trespass, I excused myself by saying that the Master would not object because he was a friend of mine — a whopping white lie made necessary by my being in a great hurry to reach Trinity College chapel in time for Oliver Letwin's wedding, which was everything a wedding ought to be: a coming together in that splendour of hope- ful love which to most sensible minds appears, as Conrad put it, 'like a triumph
of good over all evils of the earth'. Even so it seems to me a pity that the facing choir stalls in these ancient places of worship are so high that only the heads or faces of those on the opposite side are visible — except when they are standing up. As a result, from where I sat, the bride's friends all looked a bit like row on row of 14th- century gargoyles, which is not at all the desired impression at weddings where one is already far too prone to be hostile to those in the 'enemy' camp. Because Oliver works at Number 10, there were quite a number of Tories present, including Sir Keith Joseph and Dr Rhodes Boyson the new Tory Party at prayer.
Dr Owen is my choice as the next leader of the Tory Party and this could well happen if the next election result is so close that the Tories would be able to form a government only with the support of the SDP-Liberal Alliance. In that event, it is all too likely that Mr Steel would refuse to give Liberal support, preferring to see a Kinnock Labour government come to pow- er, regardless of its unilateralist, etc prog- ramme. Not so Dr Owen. Surely it is quite inconceivable that he would wish to have any responsibility at all for putting a unilateralist government in power, if he could possibly prevent it, which he could, by supporting Mrs Thatcher, in return for which he would get a senior post in the next Tory-SDP coalition government, say Secretary of State for Labour. In no time at all, it would become as crystal clear in his actions as it already is in his words, that on all the most important issues in politics today he is the ideal Tory leader to unite the 'wets' and the 'dries', as his slogan 'tough and tender' indicates. Nor is this only a matter of his policies. The style and appearance — even the accent — are also just Right, being authoritative without a trace of either patrician patronage or bourgeois bossiness. At the moment, there is no obviously satisfactory eventual sue- cessor to Mrs Thatcher. One has only to mention the possibilities — Tebbit and Heseltine — to become aware of the extent of the vacuum at the top. Given the slightest chance of choosing Dr Owen, many in the party would leap it at. In this connection it was interesting to note that last Monday's Gallup Poll in the Telegraph showed that David Steel would be the voters' choice as leader of a merged Alliance Party. Of.course he would be. For most Alliance supporters Dr Owen is far too right-wing. His only real possibility of reaching Downing Street lies through the Tory Party, for whom he could well be the answer to all their prayers. Few would have predicted four years ago that a registered Democrat would deliver what amounted to the keynote speech at Ronald Reagan's Republican coronation last month. Yet it came to pass in the formid- able shape of Jeane Kirkpatrick, and to objectors who say that such surprises only happen in American politics, I would reply that Dr Owen as the next Tory leader would not really be all that much of a turn-up for the book, since he is so much the best and most natural candidate — as once was former Liberal Winston Churchill — as to make his eventual choice almost inevitable.
At a time when Britain's own house is at its most disorderly, her reputation abroad for keeping order stands higher than for many decades, and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that we seem to be acquiring a new international role in the same absent-minded manner as we last acquired and then shed an empire. Our armed forces are on loan, at other coun- tries' request, ' in no fewer than 31 sovereign states — training troops, advis- ing on security and so on. This is an astonishing figure, and is in addition to our presence in some 17 Nato and Nato-related countries. Each unit may be small in numbers — no more than a dozen or so in many instances — but is great in influence. As Third World countries are ever more tempted to kick out our ambassadors by the front door, they seem only too happy to invite in more and more brigadiers by the back.
Why do I find almost all women journalists who write about public affairs so tiresome? I think it is because they are at once absurdly aggrieved and ridiculously optimistic, as against the mas- culine mode in politics which Bagehot described as 'cheerful but not sanguine'. Thus women journalists are always waxing ever more indignant over ever more esoteric areas of human suffering, like the sexual deprivation of paraplegics without ever seeming prepared to take on board the possibility that there are certain prob- lems about which society can do very little, even with the best will in the world.
Peregrine Worsthorne
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