Will Waspe
Lights may be going out all over the world — but not at El Vino, the well-known Fleet Street wine shop, where they still insist that customers must wear collar and tie or they won't be served. Last week, though, my ebullient colleague, press columnist Bill Grundy, set a precedent. Grundy strolled into El Vino wearing a white roll-neck sweater. A journalist friend bought him a drink — whereat the staff 'noticed' and it was menacingly muttered to Bill that they hoped he would observe the rules (which, incidentally, are not displayed anywhere). Our man, eager to oblige, asked for a tie to put round his roll-neck, but they had lost the one they keep for such occasions. So, not having actually been asked to leave, Grundy stayed. He thus became the only man ever to have a drink at El Vino without a tie — except for a journalist with a broken neck and an Australian bishop in a dog collar.
Inside information
After Skinflint's experience with Paul Callan (see last week's Spectator), no doubt we should all be wary of stories concerning the authorship of anonymous New Statesman articles. Waspe, however, will risk the guess that the forthcoming NS profile of Lord Drogheda — of the Financial Times and late chairman of the Royal Opera house — is largely the work of political correspondent Alan Watkins, an extremely close friend of the pulchritudinous Gillian Widdecombe, music critic of the FT and a long-time favourite in the Drogheda circle.
Discordant song
There were stormy days, I hear, at the Greenwich Theatre during rehearsals of the revival of John Whiting's Marching Song with Kenneth Haigh and Gwen Watford, and not everyone saw eye to eye with director Jeremy Spenser. The upshot was that Spenser sang his own 'marching song' in the second week and Greenwich boss Ewan Hooper took over the production himself, replacing also the designer and lighting man with his own nominees.
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