The great and the grumpy
Harry Mount
BRIEF LIVES by Alan Watkins Elliott & Thompson, 27 John Street, London WC1N 2BX, £10.99, pp. 223, ISBN 1904027164 Denis Healey will never be the same, once you discover, as you do in this fizzing collection of mini-biographies, that his favourite question is, 'Do you have sexual fantasies when you smoke cigars?' Peregrine Worsthorne is now forever fixed in my mind exchanging shirts with the first Mrs Nigel Lawson in a crowded Wheeler's restaurant during a Brighton party conference. And the dynamics of Private Eye fall into place when you know that, in the 1950 scholarship list for Shrewsbury, Richard Ingrams came first, Christopher Booker third and the late Paul Foot fifth.
Alan Watkins, the eminent political columnist, now for the Independent on Sunday and for many years in these pages, is the master of the well-deployed fact, and, more importantly, the personal fact. You get the flavour of Roy Jenkins when you hear that he suggested, over lunch with Watkins, a
joint business venture putting good-quality wine in one-litre bottles and selling it to restaurants, Jenkins thought that the normal 75 cl bottle is not enough for two, and too much for one. That sort of anecdote is much more revealing than the normal stuff of political biography: how many times Jenkins addressed the Oxford Union or opened a prison or whatever.
The only criterion for inclusion in this collection — they're all writers or politicians, with the exception of Osbert Lancaster and Watkins's father, a Carmarthenshire teacher — is that Watkins met the subject. So you get Kingsley Arnis exactly as he was, in the flushed flesh at the Garrick: two or three glasses of Macallan's before lunch, followed by a few glasses of Gewiirztraminer, St Joseph and Beaumes de Venise. That sort of carefully controlled, if not abstemious, drinking is not responsible, though, for Amis's disagreeable nature later in life. Watkins puts that down to a pathological phobia of being bored, as he captures in a snatch of dialogue between them, again at the Garrick.
'He's never done any harm to me.'
'He's a f—g bore.'
Although no sensationalist, Watkins has no qualms about the sexually graphic: Tom Driberg apparently did not go in for buggery, unless it was requested of him. As Watkins puts it, in his trim, unflashy prose, 'His preferred activity was fellatio, with him playing the oral role.' Carefully building bombshell fact upon bombshell fact, Watkins paints the whole man. There is no need for conjecture or generalisation; for what are we to the outside world other than what we do and say?
And Watkins is around when people say memorable things. He's there when Paul Johnson attacks courgettes (`Filthy, foreign, Elizabeth David muck') and William ReesMogg pronounces, 'It is a well-known fact that all West Country Catholics are racially prejudiced. Especially if they are of Welsh extraction'. He's there when Ian Gilmour says of White's, 'This club is full of shits.' 'Why, in that case,' asks Watkins, 'are you a member of it?' In any institution of which you are a member, there are bound to be more people you don't wish to meet than people you do.'
Brief Lives first came out in 1982; this is an updated edition. But it doesn't have the feel of warmed-up leftovers, it's like a box of fresh chocolates, filled with favourite flavours only: no violet creams, no need to skip and dig into the second layer before the first is finished. I gobbled them all in one sitting.
Previous page
