1 , 'affaire Soames was famous. In February 1969, Christopher
Soames, the then British ambassador in Paris, attained a d long-sought private lunch with President de Gaulle, who had earlier blocked British entry to the EEC. De Gaulle aired his vision of a different Europe, one run by its big nations, including Britain. Soames hurried back to the embassy to be debriefed, but found trying to remember what de Gaulle had said 'like trying to tickle bits of garlic out from behind [my] teeth'. After due thought, the Foreign Office decided de Gaulle's plan was a nasty French plot and leaked it, further embittering Anglo-French relations. Now we have another affaire Soames, once again a dispute about what was said across a diningroom. Christopher's son Nicholas, the shadow defence secretary, was eating in the Dorchester with his brother Jeremy last week when he spotted Philip Green, the retailer who was attempting to take over Marks & Spencer, dining with Jeff Randall, the business editor of the BBC, and a man from the Sunday Times. It was the eve of the shareholders' meeting at which a vote was taken on the Green takeover bid (against). Mr Soames shouted across the room something like. `Ah! We know how these things work. One call to the press: that'll do them!', and Jeremy joined in. Nicholas meant that the journalists could be exposed for colluding with Mr Green, and I think he was joking. But Mr Randall felt affronted that his legitimate journalistic work of meeting bigshots was being impugned, and Mr Green, who is Jewish, believed that what Mr Soames was saying was anti-Semitic (which it surely wasn't). I suspect that feelings of class, which usually lie half buried somewhere in most British conversations, were also present on both sides. As in 1969, the story leaked. The Mail on Sunday absurdly decided that Mr Soames was such an evil racist slug that it 'splashed' with him. My natural sympathies are with Mr Soames, since he is usually genuinely comical, butt think in this case that he was in the wrong. It probably isn't very funny to be bawled at in public by 66,6 per cent of the adult male Soames population of the British Isles, particularly when you barely know them (though Mr Green is not someone to whom the concept of bawling is entirely foreign). Mr Soames should be bawling about the threat to the Scottish regiments.
When I last spoke to Nicholas Soames on the telephone, he suddenly started yelling, 'Leave that soldier alone!' I wasn't doing anything with a soldier, so I expressed
bewilderment. 'Bloody tourists!' yelled Mr Soames, 'They're trying to march with the soldier as he changes the guard. STOP IT!' (I think he must have been driving past Horseguards at the time, but I'm not sure because the conversation ended in confusion.) Noisiness seems to be as hereditary as baldness. The late Isaiah Berlin once told me that shortly after the war he went to Moscow to visit his heroine, the dissident and poet Anna Akhmatova, in her flat. He was proud to be doing this, and fearful of the attentions of the KGB. Suddenly he heard someone in the suburban street below shouting, 'Isaiah! Isaiah!' at the top of his voice. It was Randolph Churchill, Nicholas Soames's uncle, who had somehow traced the thinker from England.
Many of my generation have attracted attention by alleging that our parents — those now aged between 70 and 90—were 'emotionally illiterate'. We were the victims, I read, of parents who could not show love, or even approval. People pop up on television to say things like, 'The Queen is a very cold mother', as if this could be asserted with the factual confidence with which one says 'January is a very cold month'. We, it is implied, are different. Like Salman Rushdie (see The Spectator's Notes last week), we do not smack our children. We 'are there for them', we give them 'quality time', we do not make them victims of passive smoking. I think, though, that some of them may not agree with our self-description when they are old enough to start searching for a publisher's advance. They may allege that 'quality time' was a concept invented for our convenience to substitute for quantity time — the value of long hours passed quite dully and unplanned
in the company of the young. It is interesting to see the waves created by Madeline Bunting's book, featured in the Guardian, arguing that modern parents work far too hard. It comes as more suggestions are made that mass childcare for very small children is ineffective, or worse. Yet one of New Labour's proudest aims is to have more and more mothers paid by the tax and benefits system to leave their twoand three-year-olds in mini-collective farms. We now think it very hard to send seven-year-olds away to boarding school, but are we breeding a generation whose earliest memory is of leaving home and not seeing their parents?
One keeps trying not to get involved in yet another fracas about what is wrong with the Tory party, so I shan't say much. But isn't it the first rule of recovery not to talk about the 'golden legacy' which the Conservatives left the country in 1997?
T ast week we went to a 'Dormouse Event'. We met in a carpark Somewhere in Kent and were escorted through a forest. After a quarter of an hour we stopped and inspected ten little boxes that the Wildlife Ranger had tied to some trees. One dormouse was within. I had forgotten how pointed, almost fox-like, is his dormouse's nose, how large, dark and protuberant his eyes and how bushy his tail, He sank his tiny teeth into the ranger's finger. What privilege these animals enjoy, protected by licence, cared for at public expense, deferred to by pilgrims such as ourselves, biting with impunity. Dormice live four times longer than woodmice, because they breed less often and sleep virtually all the time. I feel that they offer a 'lifestyle choice' from which human beings could profit.
Ihave just received the new history of my prep school, Claremont, St Leonards-onSea. I am honoured to feature in the chapter called 'You're in Good Company', with other old boys such as Peter de Savaq, the 'colourful property magnate', the two sons of President Tubman of Liberia, and Prince Peter Offiong-Archibong, from Nigeria. In my time, the school also recruited a number of Indian boys who were all sons of grocers from the Canary Islands. One of these had a vest which, because it had been dipped in the Ganges, he was reluctant ever to wash or remove. At last the matron, Miss Crabtree, intervened: 'Holy vest or no holy vest, that thing goes to the laundry next week!' What sentence would that get her under David Blunkett's exciting new law?
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