DIARY
ALASTAIR FORBES Imust say I found it impossible not to feel twinges of sympathy for Lady Thatch- er when reading of her round-the-clock bleating in America about the pains she was suffering in the only limbs she had come to count on, those of power, so suddenly amputated by the Heseltine chal- lenge and the Major succession. Every morning, we learned, she wakes to the same memorable cry of her movie-star pal Ronnie Reagan, 'Where's the rest of me?' For I could not help recalling how frustrat ing I had long found it when, after being summarily sacked from a weekly position as a political columnist after 15 years, filing days would come round with nowhere to express myself on the issues of the day. (Remarking to the former wife of my then Press Lord proprietor that I should have earlier sensed that he was 'no longer behind me', I got the cynical reply, 'Perso- nally, I never felt he was behind me unless he was on top of me.') But to La Thatch- er's egocentricity has now been added historical revisionism and the boiling over of the too long simmering cauldron which finally scalded her from office that she now calls a putsch, as do her diminishing band of faithful. Certainly the aspect of her rule — or reign as she probably, and perhaps pardonably, prefers to call it — that always surprised me was the extreme poverty of her Intelligence and the appalling syco- phancy of her entourage. Did her daugh- ter, with a budding career in the media, never pick up, from an ambitious ear to ground or pillow, information worth pas- sing on to Mum? One can see that her twin brother ('not as nice as he looks', they say) was too busy about his greedy yuppy avocations to have proved a useful infor- mant. But what are the consorts of the powerful for except to be reliable intelli- gence gatherers? Instead of for ever drop- ping the name of 'Winston', whom she never knew, she would have done better to have read the remarkable letter he re- ceived from his wife in 1940, from which I quote:
My Darling,
I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know.
One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me and told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough, sarcastic and over- bearing manner. . . You used to quote 'On ne regne sur les 'Ames que par le calme' — I cannot bear that those who serve the country and yourself should not love you as well as admire and respect you. Besides, you won't get the best results by irascibility and rudeness. They will breed either dislike, or a slave mentality.
Please forgive your loving, devoted and watchful Clemmie.
Alas for 'Maggie', nothing like that ever came from Sir Denis's pen, even when held by John Wells in Private Eye. And from what I could discover, the only people who ever gave her the sort of pieces of their minds that might have made her pause and think were one or two Cabinet colleagues, but only after they had been sacked, and to whom she naturally turned a deafer ear than ever. All this has left her former sycophants in the media the diffi- cult task of trying to tame their shrew lest at the general election she brings down the Tory party on the head of the unfortunate John Major. These contortions have been amusing to watch. Take for instance Paul Johnson, that most tireless of Tory polemi- cists. At times reduced to stating the opposite of the truth as perceived by everybody else, he has been trying to flatter her into silence by attributing to her qualities hitherto unnoticed. For example 'She is not self-centred. She is not bitter . . . She must, and I believe she does, recognise that the Thatcher era is over. John Major is the boss, and an excellent one. He is right to do things his way. It is highly distinctive and the public has taken to it with relish.' Certainly not since Harry S. Truman succeeded FDR have I taken so quickly to a hitherto practically unknown politician. Not for my hackles to rise at the sound of his sincere sign-off, 'God Bless', one incidentally not only widely in use by the electorate but also ecumenically acceptable to Methodist and Muslim alike. One of the handful of friends Taki and I share, the Duke of Beaufort, certainly amused me with his story of his youngest son, who whispered into his ear after his first day at nursery school the only dirty word he had learnt which turned out to be 'toilet', but you would never catch me telling my Montessori-going four-year-old grand-daughter to call the `loo' anything else, nor do I intend to make her one day copy out the word 'pudding', as often as the upper-middle-class Nigella Lawson uses it in every article each time she might otherwise wish to say 'sweet', 'dessert' or 'afters'. When John Major spoke of a 'classless society', I understood it to be his surely admirable hope that Britain could become a much less class-ridden society. Of course all countries will continue to have classes in the sense of differently paid and regarded occupations. But one hopes that the influence of Mr Yeltsin, though he himself springs from it, will one day succeed in eliminating the privileged self- perpetuating nomenklatura which is Lenin's only legacy.
Where I live, as indeed in most other parts of the mainland of Europe, we are all, from morning till night, Monsieur or Madame or Mademoiselle, and such a prefix is a great social leveller of whose absence in Britain I am continually rather embarrassedly conscious. I see some snobs have snootily disparaged Mr Major for having called Mr Bush 'Sir' — an old- fashioned courtesy comfortably returned by his Wasp interlocutor. I was, on the other hand, shocked to hear that Mrs Thatcher, as she then was, had called the President of the United States 'George'. To Winston Churchill, FDR was never anything but 'Mr President' and only after his death did he speak of him to his widow as Franklin, his office having passed to someone else. I had myself been particu- larly intimate with Jack Kennedy until he became President, after which I never addressed him as anything but 'Mr Presi- dent', as I had Franklin Roosevelt before him, though to the former I was 'Ali' and to the latter 'Cousin Alastair'. (Though I've got an ambitious nephew in the US Senate, I don't expect there to be any other chums or kin in the Oval Office in the time left to me.) Iam very sorry that the Royal Commis- sion remit given to my loved and admired friend Garry Runciman (only in England could he be headlined 'Titled Sociologist') should be too narrow to exclude the overdue reform of the entire English legal system. Was there ever anything, even in a costumed Dickens series, to be seen as the absurd Dead Eye Dick sight of the appo- sitely monocular ex-Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, expostulating, and attacking on the box all who had dared to suggest that Chief Justice Lord Lane ought, simply in common decency, now to take early retire- ment (as so many of his more honourable fellow countrymen have been forced to do throughout the Thatcher era)? Watching this live Spitting Image performance, I was reminded of Duff Cooper's reply to Ran- dolph Churchill's query as to why he did not judge Quintin Hogg a rightful claimant to the highest offices in the land, 'Because he's mad,' to which Randolph retorted, 'Surely that's a fault on the right side!'
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