DIARY
ANDREW ROBERTS Iwas attacked at the Labour party con- ference and would like to show off about it. The meeting was entitled 'Delivering Mul- ticulturalism', and the speakers were Paul Boateng, Trevor Phillips and someone I had previously not heard of called Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, 'writer and journalist on race and feminism'. In her speech, Ms Alib- hai-Brown predicted that the Tories arc going to attack on the battleground of cul- ture', and described my recently published biography of the Victorian prime minister, Lord Salisbury, as 'the first part of this attack. We cannot ignore these people.' She also generously added, I am far too vain to forbear reporting, that 'Roberts is one of the very clever people on the New New Right'. If there are Christmas truces in the corning cultural war, I will certainly seek out her trench in the New New Left to swap cigarettes and chocolates.
William Hague tells me that he is two- thirds of the way through Salisbury which, considering its length and his commitments during the conference season, seems like pretty good going. Yet still he quoted that dreadful fraud, Lord Randolph Churchill, in his conference speech, rather than the Great Marquess. When asked by the journalist W.T. Stead to define Tory democracy in 1885, Churchill answered, 'That is a question I am always in a fright lest someone should put it to me publicly. To tell the truth, I don't know myself what Tory democracy is, but I believe it to be principally opportunism.' Talking of opportunism, the chapter of John Major's memoirs covering his 94 days as for- eign secretary is entitled 'What's the capital of Colombia?', after the question Charles Powell impishly put to Mr Major as he emerged from his interview with Margaret Thatcher. According to Major, he tri- umphantly answered, 'Bogota'. Yet on the BBC 1 programme, The Major Years, timed
to coincide with the publication of the mem- oirs, Powell recalls having asked Major what Was the capital of Ecuador, and him not hav- ing known the answer. Someone's memory must be playing tricks on him.
We Kensington and Chelsea Tories are already looking forward to the meeting in the town hall on 2 November, hoping for moments of high drama similar to those Produced by the late Alan Clark's selection Meeting. A word of advice to the four can- didates: don't patronise us. Last time, one of the hopefuls told the 1,000 or so mem- bers present, 'It's a very big world out there,' and was instantly marked down by the impossibly distinguished audience of ex-diplomats, former ministers and widows of senior colonial administrators. Doing the two-and-six tourist tour of Buckingham Palace, I was struck by the garish, bright-green neon exit sign just to the left of the Queen's throne, when every- thing else was in scarlet and gold. Must safety regulations and municipal function- ality extend even there? In the Lord Coly- ton Hall at Caius College, Cambridge, the exit signs are hidden behind scrolls which automatically flip around when the smoke- detectors (which are themselves disguised as Grecian urns) smell danger. Surely something equally imaginative might have been devised for the Throne Room?
Abullet was put through my letterbox recently, which came as a nasty shock. I have had hate mail in the past, as most columnists do, with lots of green ink, underlinings and exclamation marks, but this latest offering was of an entirely differ- ent order of unpleasantness. Special Branch asked whether I had antagonised any of the groups that do that sort of thing? It turned out that over the last three years I have at one time or another written some- thing rude about nearly all of them — the IRA, Sikh extremists, animal liberationists, etc., etc. The man who was fingerprinting my letterbox got me quite excited when he said at the end of his dusting, 'Well, I can tell you one thing for certa'n ' I was all ears. 'Your cleaning lady wears Marigold gloves,' he said (he was correct as it turned out).
'There has to be a cat flap, they have nine lives.' n a card from HMP Standford Hill, Kent, Jonathan Aitken tells me that he was recently overheard 'by one of my new best burglar friends' singing 'The Eton Boating Song' in the prison showers. I'd sent him my book and old-school pride had been prompted by one of Salisbury's bons mots about his acquisition of Cyprus at the Congress of Berlin. I felt a guilty twinge about not having slipped in a hack- saw blade which, with 80 pages of bibliog- raphy, notes and index, I might have been able to insert without sacrificing any actu- al text.
AN. Wilson has attacked me for saying in a review of Jan Dalley's new biography that its subject, Lady Mosley, will go to hell when she dies, describing her as 'this kindly and intelligent beauty'. As he well knows, fascists can be personally kind, intelligent and beautiful, but still are fascists. Now I don't know any more about the Almighty's sentencing policy than Andrew Wilson, but it strikes me that anyone who can say — as she did to me — that she didn't know whether Hitler was in hell or heaven is quite likely to follow him down.
Ionce spotted my life of Lord Halifax, called The Holy Fox, in the Nature &
Wildlife section of a Southampton book-
shop and am fully expecting to find Salis- bury shelved under the town rather than
the man. I hope, however, to be spared the fate of Geordie Greig, Tatler's new editor, who discovered his fine biography of his courtier grandfather filed under the wrong title, wrong date of publication and with the author's name misspelt. I have been hearing Lord Salisbury's voice all this week. No, I'm not cracking up — a tape was sent to me of the cylinder recording of Salisbury speaking on 18 January 1889 when the new phonograph was demon- strated to the Prince and Princess of Wales at Sandringham. The Princess, speaking of the 'machine', surprisingly put the emphasis on the first syllable. It is the only recording made of Salisbury's voice and, disappointingly, all he says over a very crackly line is, 'I have nothing to add to what His Royal Highness has so well expressed.' Even so, after six years of reading his speeches, it was weirdly thrilling for me to hear his voice, which was slightly higher pitched and more singsong than I had expected. With his accent, he would never have been asked to go on Radio Four.
To obtain a copy of Andrew Roberts's Salis- bury: Victorian Titan, please ring the Specta- tor Bookshop on 0541 557668, ref. PT403.
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