Sir: I was amused to open my Spectator and find
that — in a spirited attempt to identify non-Conservative opponents of New Labour — Robert Taylor casts me in that role.
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but Mr Tay- lor's imagination has run away with him. He misrepresents my views entirely, and his purported quotation from me is simply a baroque concoction.
In particular, Taylor attributes to me the opinion that I 'fear Labour may be going into terminal decline'. Actually, I think that if Labour wins it stands an excellent chance of holding office for a long period of time.
Even naughtier, Taylor puts into my mouth a cobbled-together mixture of his own invented words and a passage, taken out of context, from a lecture I gave at Coburg University on 16 September 1994 (before New Labour was invented) and which was published in Munich the follow- ing year.
Not only doesn't he give the date of this passage, or any indication of its source, he gratuitously adds the words 'New Labour', which did not appear in the original; puts quotation marks round his own Piltdown- like amalgam (part ancient Pimlott, part modern Taylor); and cheekily presents the construct as if it were a remark uttered by me in the heat of the 1997 election cam- paign.
Can't the Tory press do better than that?
Ben Pimlott
9 Milner Place, London N1
Robert Taylor writes: Methinks Professor Pimlott doth protest too much. My notes of our long interview are not 'a baroque con- coction'. The thoughts written in his 1995 article were exactly the same as those expressed to me last week in our conversa- tion. Professor Pimlott was also busy com- piling an article containing that precise opinion for the Australian newspaper when I visited him in his office two weeks ago.
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