DIARY
ANDREW ROBERTS The most original, stimulating and impressive man I have ever met is no more. When I lunched with Jimmy Goldsmith on 1 May, his conversation and anecdotes ranged from Harold Wilson to Mongolian politics, from the Zulus via Nato expansion to some hilarious gossip too potentially libellous to mention. 'If we get less than 100,000 votes today,' he told me when I reminded him there was a general election that day, 'we'll go quietly.' He got 811,000, but he has gone nonetheless. His doctors warned him in January that the exhaustion of fighting the campaign would undoubted- ly shorten his life. Whenever he took time off from Putney, he was mocked for his absence by several journals, including this one — as though John Major spent the whole campaign in Huntingdon or Tony Blair in Sedgefield. But even pancreatic cancer would not deter him from his fight against European federalism, for how, as Macaulay wrote of Horatius, 'can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?' Less than three weeks before his death, refusing all drugs that might ease his pain but cloud his extraordinary mind, he sent signed copies of his books to my baby son, 'whom I hope I will one day have the opportunity to meet'. That cannot now happen, to my most profound regret. My prediction is that he will be remembered as a philosopher long after even his business achievements are forgotten.
Last week at a dinner party, I took a £250 wager at evens from the military histo- rian Antony Beevor that William Hague will be prime minister before 1 January 2010. As every Tory leader since Austen Chamberlain has made it to No. 10, and as no Labour government has lasted longer than six years, I ought to win, so why am I pleased I refused his sporting offer to dou- ble the stakes?
Last week's BBC 2 programme on Pearl Harbour repeated the old canard that Churchill knew the attack was imminent but deliberately did not tell Roosevelt in order to get America into a war he could not otherwise see Britain winning. Quite apart from the (rather scanty) merits of the case, should Churchill go down in our esti- mation if it were true? It might not accord with New Labour's 'ethical' foreign policy, but it is worth remembering that America was not then an ally, warning them could have compromised our cracking of the Japanese naval codes and it was imperative to widen the war in late 1941. I'm almost certain Churchill did not know what was about to take place, but I'm even more cer- tain I wouldn't condemn him for his action — or in this case, inaction — if he had.
To the rather aggressive Sedgefield elector who ripped up the leaflet I'd hand- ed him and snarled, 'What have the Tories ever done for people like me?' I must with- draw my retort, 'Well, unfortunately they gave you the vote.' Researching the Third Reform Bill for my life of Lord Salisbury, I now realise that he was far more likely to have been amongst those emancipated by Gladstone in 1884, rather than the some- what grander £12 rural tenants enfran- chised by Disraeli in 1867.
Last week's Spectator cover story by Clare Colvin attacking the BT Friends and Family scheme did not mention one aspect in its favour. One number on the list BT sent me turned out after investigation to be Ziani's, the superb Italian restaurant in Radnor Walk in Chelsea. Friendly though this family restaurant undoubtedly is Roberto, Chico or Toni will always some- how be able to squeeze in two extra diners — I must be going there too often if it appears higher on the list of my most fre- quently called numbers than those of my brothers and sister.
Riding to the aid of Michael Gove, the embattled Times journalist who has alleged in the Spectator that as many as three Clarkeites might have voted for John Red- wood in the first round of the Tory leader- ship contest in order to wreck Lilley's and Howard's chances of uniting the non- Hague Right, might I say that I have heard the same three names from high-ups in the Lilley and Hague camps and the same tale from a former prime minister. It would make perfect hackish sense for Tory Wets to have done this, only to switch to Clarke in the last round, and such behaviour was common practice in the university politics from which two of the three hailed.
For all the irritation one might occa- sionally feel for the Church of England, what pleasure it sometimes brings in its noticeboard on the Court and Social page of the Daily Telegraph. Tucked away in the Appointments to the Clergy column, one can read of an Englishness that defies satire. This month, for example, Jonathan Boston, who was formerly vicar of Horsford and Horsham St Faith with Newton St Faith, is now to be priest-in-charge of Private Eye's St Cake's column, do your worst — Litcham with Kempston, Lexham East, Lexham West, Mileham, Beeston- next-Mileham, Stanfeld and, last but not least, Tittleshall with Godwick (Norwich).
The recent attempt by the historian Henry Kamen to rehabilitate Philip II of Spain might not have convinced everybody, but it must have come as music to the ears of Neil McKendrick, the new Master of Caius College, Cambridge, the only college founded under Philip's charter, when he was married to Mary Tudor. The renais- sance of Caius, which has annexed and completely renovated the Squire Law Library, converted the Master's Lodge into a latter-day palace and launched the only appeal in its 440-year history, is only begin- ning. Browsing in an old print shop for a present to congratulate himself on being elected, McKendrick discovered the long- lost mid-18th-century plans Sir John Soane drew up for an impossibly grand hall at Caius, which pressure of space made impracticable. Thanks to the recent leben- sraum and a fantastically generous dona- tion from Lady Colyton, the widow of the Tory statesman Henry Colyton, Soane's hall will be constructed, final disproof of Marx's dictum that history repeats itself as farce.
A final, reactionary thought. Seeing the vast crowd in Hyde Park at the Countryside Rally, it seemed to me that for a single pla- toon of militia cavalry, admittedly support- ed later by a company of hussars, to try to arrest the radical reformer Henry Hunt at Peterloo in 1819, especially after all the talk of farm hands drilling with makeshift weapons, was a jolly brave undertaking.
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