DIARY
I'm afraid Annabel's husband is going to be late,' our hostess said, 'he's working at Bush House, you know, the Overseas Service,' In fact it was about halfway through dinner that he appeared: a dark, strongly built man, bright- and brooding- eyed. In a minute, he had effortlessly seized the conversation and held us entr- anced for an hour or more, witty, charm- ing, above all, immensely forceful. He was too genuinely clever to show off, but it did emerge that he was, among other things, his country's leading playwright and lead- ing dissident, and that the dictator was obsessed with the stuff about corruption he was putting out on the BBC, and had personally ordered that he be followed by secret agents night and day. A marvellous man, I said on the way home, but isn't it extraordinary the way all emigres get these delusions — I mean, would a dictator really bother? Then not long after, Georgi Markov died suddenly, leaving behind an extraordinary tale about being stabbed by a poisoned umbrella. How awful, I said, I expect it was a heart attack, emigres often have heart trouble. Relatively soon, it was confirmed that a tiny pellet of ricin had been injected into his thigh. Last weekend, 11 years later, it was reported from Sofia that Georgi Markov was murdered on orders from the Bulgarian Politburo as a birthday present for Todor Zhivkov, who was in a boiling rage about the weekly broadcasts on the BBC's Bulgarian Service. If Markov was still alive, I imagine he would be the next president of Bulgaria — he seemed less unlikely presidential timber than Vac- lay Havel. But then the record of my imagination so far is not exactly brilliant.
Andrew Neil has offended against the first law of newspapers: journalists do not sue other journalists. The last time I was accused of genocide, for example, I merely dispatched a pained letter to Mr Auberon Waugh, imploring him to desist from these intemperate travesties of the truth. Quite useless, of course, but at least it didn't Clutter up the courts with pompous and vexatious litigation which can only further lower journalists in public esteem, if that were possible. For Mr Neil to resort to the courts when he has hundreds of pages at his disposal every Sunday is a confession of rhetorical failure. If he can dish it out, he Ought to be able to take it. The jury has been very kind to him. I do not for a Minute endorse Mr Peregrine Wors- thorne's ludicrous picture of the ideal editor as one accustomed to lunching at the Athenaeum with Nobel prizewinners. There have been editors of that sort, though I suspect such editors are more likely to be attacking the Athenaeum's FERDINAND MOUNT indifferent cooking in the company of permanent secretaries and chairmen of the BBC. Indeed, this sort of editor often runs the BBC as well (Lord Rees-Mogg and Sir William Haley, for example). I suppose Mr Worsthorne's beau-ideal would have been Geoffrey Dawson, fellow of Eton College and quondam Estates Bursar of All Souls — and the most frightful editor even the Times has ever had. Dawson's contempor- ary, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, who spent his evenings getting drunk with pretty women in night clubs like the Slip-In, wrote twice as well and knew ten times more about international politics. All sorts of unMoggish people have been memor- able editors — Mussolini, Michael Foot, Karl Marx, Cyril Connolly, Alexander Chancellor, Malcolm Muggeridge. Casa- nova himself edited a journal of dramatic criticism for .a while.
Nor is it true, as Mr Worsthorne claims, that a rackety way of life deters a good editor from taking a high moral line. In fact, the journalist who is incapable of humbug really ought to be in some other line of business. Casanova, for example, was always extravagantly outraged whenever he came across dishonesty or the maltreatment of women. ln Vienna, he
'I got into a fight about ID cards.' indignantly denounced the Commissioners of Chastity appointed by the Empress Maria Theresa to curb illicit love-making. The Commissioners became such a nui- sance arresting and jailing any women they suspected of soliciting that unaccompanied women took to carrying rosaries to show their chastity — so the tarts started car- rying rosaries too. Twice a year, the Commissioners had a batch of unlucky girls deported down the Danube to 'a marshy and unwholesome province on the frontier of the Turkish dominions'. The name of the ghastly place was Timisoara.
The search is on for a successor to Mr Terry Hands as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. None of the names so far suggested has had the ring of conviction about it. The present team of RSC directors have almost all been re- sponsible for some cringe-making produc- tions — with the possible exception of Mr Bill Alexander. I have not so far seen mention of my old friend Giles Havergal of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre. But has any other director currently at work in the British theatre built up a European reputa- tion of the sort enjoyed by the Citizens?
With generous help from the Lawn Tennis Initiative, Islington Council has built some beautiful new indoor courts on the site of the old Metropolitan Cattle Market — a topspin lob's distance from the lodgings where Samuel Beckett's Murphy settles down with his Celia. (Beckett him- self was quite a player of the game when young, the phrase 'in spite of the tennis' is a haunting refrain in Waiting for Godot.) It is an elegant establishment, almost ritzier than the Vanderbilt Tennis Club at Shepherd's Bush which costs £1,000 or so to get into. The soft lighting and delicate blue-grey pastel carpeting are more like an airport lounge than a tennis-court. Unfor- tunately in order to register to play on these pleasure grounds of the socialist republic, you have to fill in a form 'to help us monitor usage of the tennis centre'. Apart from name, address, telephone number and sex, you are also expected to respond to the following: 'I would describe myself as: (a) Black (Afro-Caribbean) (b) Black (Asian) (c) White (UK) (d) Irish (e) Cypriot (Greek) (f) Cypriot (Turkish) (g) Other (please specify).' This must be the first time, even in Islington, that Irishness has been classified as a colour. Beckett would, I think, have liked that. And why the obsessive interest in the Cyprus prob- lem? Are the courts going to be parti- tioned?
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