SHARED OPINION
I don't want to be remembered as the man who wanted Val Doonican destroyed
FRANK JOHNSON
hat's selling at the moment? That is what most people, irrespective of whether they intend to write a book, ask when they meet a publisher. Certainly in my case; I cannot think of a book I want to write, yet I always ask the question when I meet pub- lishers. They tend to reply by naming the subject of whatever book they are trying to shift in the bookshops at the time: 'Any- thing on soft furnishings.' Or: 'Biographies of mediaeval feminists are hot right now.' Eventually, they become more truthful: anything to do with Nazis and the war (since Antony Beevor's Stalingrad), as well as diaries (since Alan Clark's). It some- times seems as if half the people one talks to at London parties are keeping diaries and the other half are having diaries kept about them. I like to believe that I am sus- pected of falling into both categories. Mr Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's press secretary, certainly falls into both.
Those of us who are thus suspected must therefore have a fellow feeling with Mr John Major, whom we assume must have kept some sort of record, and his Downing Street adviser, the late Judith Chaplin, whom we now know kept some sort of record of him. The line from her now-pub- lished, or partially published, diary that has attracted most attention is Mr Major saying of Lady Thatcher, when he was prime min- ister and she was causing trouble for him: 'I want her isolated, I want her destroyed.'
It could be argued that the remark reflects nothing but credit on him. It shows that as prime minister he was no bully, threatening only the weak or harmless. Those of us who assume that we might appear in the future in other people's diaries should remember that. I would not want any diary in which I appear to quote me as saying: 'I want Fenner Brock- way destroyed, isolated.' Or: 'Val Doonican must be crushed, obliterated — reduced to toast. D'y'understand me?' Mr Major has set an example to other diarists to try to destroy a more powerful class of people. Diaries, then, look like selling well for some time to come. But is it not possible that what really sells many books is not so Much the subject as the title? That, and tim- ing. Regardless of, or in addition to, what one assumes to be the excellence of its Prose, the title could explain the apparently excellent sales of Mr Will Hutton's The State We're In. There are not enough evolutionists and opponents of a unitary Britain to explain the book's commercial success. It also came out when the Tories, allegedly full of sleaze and nearing the end of 18 years in office, were even more unpopular than usual with the sort of people who buy books about current politics. Such people assumed that the state we were in — economically, social- ly and constitutionally — was bad, but they needed to know why, the better to keep their end up in conversation over the coriandered broccoli in north London.
Books with titles which promise to make easy something which is in fact hard are even more successful. The cleverest and most dishonest title of this sort of which I can think is kin Macleod's Bridge Is an Easy Game. Going back further, there are Shaw's Everybody's Political What's What and H.G. Wells's A Short History of the World. More recently, there was How to Flatten Your Stomach by the coach Jim Everroad, pub- lished in Los Angeles in 1974, which enjoyed 14 printings by 1980, the date of my edition, and probably many more subsequently. Americans are today especially good at such books, or perhaps just at such titles. There is Wagner without Fear by Mr William Berger (1998), an untrue title but a good book. The other day I picked up a masterpiece of a title: Mr Kenneth Macksey's Why the Ger- mans Lose at War (Greenhill Books). I shall report here when I have read it.
Anecdote suggests that punning titles also make people buy books. The memoir of John Wyndham, Harold Macmillan's private secretary, was good whatever its title, but the title helped: Wyndham and Children First. Several contemporary trends in publishing could be drawn together by some enterpris- ing agriculture minister. 'All the time he sat in New Labour's Cabinet, Nick Brown thought only of milk quotas, for he was keep- ing a secret dairy' could run the blurb for The Nick Brown Dairies — catering for the book- buying public's perennial love of the bucolic.
Being the complete townie, I would con- tinue to seek out diaries. There are more available than one might at first think. Look- ing down a second-hand list earlier this year, I noticed: Real Old Tory Politics: The Political Diaries of Robert Sanders, Lord Bayford, 1910-35. To some of us, that sounds promis- ing, but I have not yet been able to find a copy. I have, however, just discovered Fleet Street, Press Barons and Politics: The Journals of Collin Brooks, 1932-40. I do not suppose that many of you had heard of him either. Here is one entry, for January 1939, with its authentic period whiff of both British anti- Nazism and British anti-Semitism: Oscar Hobson [a Guardian city editor] is still very dubious about the stability of the pound and very vehement about Germany. He has taken into his home a young Jewish refugee of 19 and is to take in his younger brother. I refrained from asking if he had ever taken in a couple of young English unemployed.... He says that Geoffrey Crowther, of the Economist, has just come back from Berlin, and that he confirms the story of Goebbcls being beaten up by some outraged husband. He also says that Hitler has now found him- self a German girlfriend. Her name is Braun. She is the usual Teutonic broad-hipped, blonde type, and she likes swigging beer but dares not swig when Hitler is present.
All of which is a reminder of how badly we need a decent forgery of Hitler's diaries or, perhaps even better, those of Eva Braun, who might well have been as interesting a diarist of Hitler as Judith Chaplin was of Mr Major.
The policeman who arrested Mr George Michael, the British pop singer, in a Los Angeles public lavatory, is suing Mr Michael for satirising him in song. This news will evoke memories among older British homo- sexuals of the days when frequenting such premises in Britain were the only way to be sure of meeting males of similar interests. Apparently, they like to swap stories of those distant, illiberal times. Mr Michael's case prompted a friend to tell me one this week. The late Sir David Webster, a homosexual and, for two decades or so after the war, gen- eral administrator of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden was in a cubicle in one such recognised meeting-place. Someone next door passed a note underneath inquir- ing: 'What do you want?' Sir David, ever anx- ious to make the public think of Covent Gar- den as being at the centre of our national life, wrote back: 'Two tickets for Callas's Tosca.'
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