LETTERS Sour grapes
Sir: Philip Hensher (`Have you seen this?', 20 April) protests too much. From his account of his sacking as a House of Com- mons clerk, you would have thought he had been victimised by a malign and humour- less employer. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The clerks' department is such an oasis of tolerance that, on Hensher's admission, to be sacked from it is almost unknown. It is an astonishingly laid-back organisation, where the biggest crime is to work too hard.
I was a clerk-novelist myself for 15 years and didn't even get my licence endorsed. This despite departures from the straight and narrow which would never have been countenanced in the Foreign Office. I have been thrown out of a nightclub with a Tory MP and chased out of a pub with a Labour MP. A blind eye was invariably turned.
What I didn't do, and what Hensher seems to have done in spades, was to bite the hand that fed me. Public servants are not robots, but they are servants. They den- igrate their masters at their peril.
I was particularly saddened by Hensher's caricature of Donald Limon, the Clerk of the House. Anyone who knows Mr Limon will testify that he is one of the mildest men in existence — slow to chide and swift to bless, as the old hymn has it.
Hensher is a gifted novelist who can only go from strength to strength now that he doesn't have to trek into the Palace of Westminster between chapters. He shouldn't have marked his departure with the whiff of sour grapes.
Max Davidson
73 St Bernard's Road, Oxford
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