DIARY
DOMINIC LAWSON Spectator summer party every July. Few bother to send a thank-you letter, even those who were not invited. One person who is always invited, and always sends a thank-you letter, is the wonderfully well brought-up Mrs Jilly Cooper. But for some reason Jilly always forgets to put a stamp on her thank-you letter. Indeed, while I always delight in her witty and kind mis- sives, I cannot recall any of them bearing a stamp on the envelope. Such absent-mind- edness is charming rather than irritating. Not that we at The Spectator mind paying the Royal Mail for the safe passage of Jilly's letters. After all, reverse-charge tele- phoning is very common practice on the part of writers ringing up The Spectator. So why not do the same by post?
Some people are plagued by the impres- sion that policemen are getting younger all the time. This makes them worry about the maintenance of law and order. My own fix- ation, perhaps similarly tied to aging, is that judges are getting more and more lenient. Or maybe it is simply that the same lenient judge is trying more and more important cases. Last Friday, a particularly nasty case of blackmail resulted in the blackmailer leaving the court a free man. Mr George Vandaleur, a 29-year-old masseur, tricked an army officer into being photographed bending over dressed in lace knickers, frilly pink blouse and maid's white cap. Three days later, Vandaleur rang up the army officer, a married man, and demanded £3,000 for the photographs. The officer sensibly contacted the police, who then tape-recorded Vandaleur making the same demand over the telephone. Judge Neil Denison sentenced Mr Vandaleur . . . to 140 hours' community service. Judge Deni- m (hobbies: walking and reading rubbish) told the Old Bailey that he had not sent the blackmailer to jail, because of his charity work and because he had heard that Mr Vandaleur was caring for a friend who was HIV positive: 'If I sentence you to prison I will probably be sentencing him to death.' It says much for the massaging techniques of Mr Vandaleur, that they are deemed by the judge to be capable of arresting his friend's medical condition. Perhaps his Community service should be spent massag- ing other victims of the HIV virus away from 'certain death'. But Mr Vandaleur is not the only criminal who ought to be grateful to Judge Denison. In January, a businessman, Mr Rajinder Bisla, was found guilty at the Old Bailey of killing his wife. She was a shrew, apparently. So Mr Bisla strangled his nagging wife, in front of their three children. He was freed by Judge Denison, who told Mr Bisla, 'You have suf-
fered through no fault of your own a terri- ble existence for a long time . . . finally your self-control snapped.' The court was told that the late Mrs Bisla was a 'very domineering lady who wanted to rule the roost over the family, hurling insults in Punjabi and English'. Most irritating, to be sure, but scarcely, I feel, justifiable grounds for homicide. And besides, any man who has a nagging wife is at least partly respon- sible for her behaviour. I should like to have heard Mrs Bisla's side of the story, but, having been throttled to death, she was unable to provide Judge Denison's court with anything other than exhibit A. I hope that if ever I commit a crime worthy of the Old Bailey, Judge Denison will be the man appointed to find the punishment to fit it.
Alast Sunday's papers showed, the intrusion of privacy has reached intolerable levels. I should like here to offer my sympa- thy to the man on the receiving end. I am referring, of course, to Pope John Paul II. In last week's Sunday Times there was a photograph which truly evoked the hoary old question, 'Is nothing sacred?' It showed two nuns peering through gigantic long- lens cameras on tripods into the Pope's bedroom at the Gemelli hospital, Rome. Sister Agnes, Sister Mary, what do you think you are doing? But then I peered more closely at the photograph, and under- neath the two habits I thought I could dis- cern other, more familiar faces. But could Patsy Chapman, editor of the News of the World, and Bill Hagerty, editor of the Sun- day People, really be prepared to sink to such depths? It would not need a new pri- vacy law to make impersonating a nun a serious offence.
Lassie fluffs her lines major-general retires and, with the aid of a lump sum army pension, buys some lovely farmland and a house in Kent. Some years later, Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand decide that a tunnel across the Channel is one thing they are both prepared to promote. The major-gen- eral's farmland, by now devoted to set- aside (another great EEC brainwave), is in the wrong place at the wrong time. In order to provide for the putative extra traffic, the M20 is to be extended across his land neatly bisecting it, in fact. But the motor- way planners are no fools. Building the road a few hundred yards away from the house itself means that they are not required by law to make an offer for it at market prices. But they are allowed to make a compulsory purchase of the strip of farmland on which the motorway is to run. Now it is running, and from the front door of the house the noise is stunning, even if the view no longer is. The geese which used to swim in the artificial lake, now on the verge of the motorway, can no longer stand the noise, and spend their summers some- where quieter. Soon British Rail get in on the act. They plan to build part of the Ken- tish section of the new London to the Channel Tunnel rail link on much the same land. But they, too, are canny enough to place the track sufficiently far from the house — more than 200 yards — to avoid the legal requirement to make a bid for the major-general's house. Then, at last, the old soldier's luck turns. A property devel- oper decides that the infrastructural links around the old farm are — or will be — so good that the place would make a very suc- cessful golf-course. To the major-general's surprise and pleasure, the developer makes a fair bid for all the farmland not owned by either the Ministry of Transport or British Rail. He is even prepared, should the gen- eral and his wife agree, to buy the house itself, and turn it into a clubhouse. He pays a small sum of money for the option, to show he is serious, and makes a planning application to the local council of Maid- stone. This proposal, you will not be sur- prised to hear, is the one bit of construction which the authorities are not prepared to nod through. Twice they block the proposal to turn the desecrated farmland into a golf- course. Shouting above the roar of the traf- fic, they proclaim the area one of natural beauty, an accolade that the Ministry of Transport's planners can rarely have received. So the retired couple are stuck. Even if they were not my parents-in-law I think I should be very angry about this. Once, in this country, retired generals who served their country well were given land by a grateful nation. Nowadays an ungrateful nation takes their land — and their rights — away from them.
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