DIARY
CHARLES MOORE Now that Mr Kinnock has said that all Labour Party policy should be reviewed in the light of the result of the last election, defence is once more debatable within the Labour Party. People seem to think that unilateralism will hold sway for one more year, but may then be swept away, or superseded by changes outside Britain. In this question, Mr Kinnock appears to be developing a subtle tactic: he encourages policy change, but retains his own personal opinions. The Times on Tuesday put it thus:
. . . although the Labour leader is happy to let- details of defence policy be subject to review like other areas of party policy he retains his own conviction that nuclear weapons are not a safe, efficient or econo- mical way of defending Britain.
How very like Mrs Thatcher on a pet Tory subject — capital punishment. She has always supported the rope, and won popu- larity for doing so, confident that her colleagues will make sure that it is never brought back. Whenever the subject is raised, she complacently laments the status quo. So it will be with Mr Kinnock. 'Of course I'm dead against the Bomb,' he will say, 'always have been; but I can't force this matter of personal conviction upon my less enlightened comrades.' At party con- ference defence debates, he will clap floor speakers who attack the platform, just as Mrs Thatcher does in the annual Tory law and order debate: yet another lesson of Thatcherism that Mr Kinnock has learnt.
Miss Linda Bellos, the leader of Lambeth Council, predicts that `so long as we are ruled by Thatcherism, gas chambers will be here within seven to ten years for lesbians, gay men, blacks and socialists'. At present, however, there are only coun- cil chambers for them. On Thursday of last week, she and I were fellow guests on the television programme Question Time. On that very day, Miss Bellos had supported a legal budget for her council and as we ate dinner before the programme she was being vilified on television by her former colleague, Mr Ted Knight. For the first time in her life she was facing the accusa- tions of betrayal which are always hurled at those who start their careers on the Left. Hence the 'gas chamber' remarks to retain favour with old comrades. At our dinner, Miss Bellos was not polite about Mr Knight, but she was sweet to me. Just before we appeared before the audience she informed me, like a kindly matron, that my tie was not straight. I predict pearls and twin-set in 'seven to ten years'.
0 n Saturday, we went to Ascot. We were munificently entertained by Lord Wyatt, the chairman of the Tote, and thanks to the wisdom of his daughter, Petronella, I won more money than I lost. She and the Home Secretary, another of her father's guests, are running a cam- paign. There is at present no blue plaque in London to commemorate any of the houses of Sir Robert Peel, which is particu- larly galling as there are two for Disraeli and one for dim prime ministers like Spencer Perceval and Bonar Law. There was a plaque for Peel in Whitehall Gardens until his house was demolished in 1938. Miss Wyatt and Mr Hurd want a new one. The London Committee of the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England is in charge of blue plaques, and prefers to stick them onto the actual building rather than the replacement on the site, but this is not an absolute rule, and could surely be waived in the case of such a great man.
An Ascot postscript: a man came up to me, said that I didn't know him, that he had been reading the Spectator for 30 years, that it had never been better, and then vanished. Buoyant with gratitude, I splashed out on the next race, and lost.
Mollie, Lady Butler, who has recently written a memoir of her two husbands, August and Rab (Weidenfeld and Nicol- son), speaks highly of Rab's mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge. It was certain that Rab was a skilled committee chairman and a true and powerful friend of the college, but I am afraid that he was not gifted in his relations with the undergradu- ates. I was up at Trinity in his last years. In. that time, I doubt if he knew more than 30 undergraduates 'name to face'. He enter- tained generously, but it was Lady Butler who brilliantly compensated for his lack of attention and, we assumed, lack of in- terest, by her own encyclopaedic memory and great warmth. There were a few occasions, however, when he opened up and became the best of company. On one of these, a small dinner for a retiring chaplain, he told me a very odd story. Mrs Thatcher, then newly made the Tory lead- er, had come to address the Cambridge Conservative Graduate Association. Rab, its president, took her into the lecture room before anyone had entered it. 'She was wearing a black dress,' he said, `so I took a piece of chalk and wrote "Scotland" on her breast with it. She said, "Why are you doing that?", and I said, "There was a queen of England who had 'Calais' written on her heart, and you should have 'Scot- land' written on yours."' Funnily enough, I believe this story.
There are comings and goings at the Spectator. Ferdinand Mount has ceased to be our political columnist. He wrote his first column exactly ten years before the week of his departure. It was called 'The bureaucracy that kills' (rather a plonking title and therefore not, I am sure, his own) and was about the obsession of Messrs Heath and Wilson with the machinery of government which, he detected, already looked old-fashioned. In those ten years, British politics has changed more fun- damentally than in any other period since the war, and Mr Mount has chronicled the change with unique wit and brilliance. He has also played a part in the process, leaving the Spectator from 1982-84 to be the head of Mrs Thatcher's Policy Unit. There has been no more distinguished contribution to the Spectator in the past decade, and I am glad to say that it is not about to end. After Christmas, Mr Mount will return as a writer of numerous cover pieces and lead book reviews. This week we welcome his successor, Noel Malcolm, formerly our radio critic, who reports from Brighton on page six. We also welcome our new deputy editor, Dominic Lawson, who joins us from the Financial Times, and the return of our foreign editor, Timothy Garton Ash.
Ten and a half thousand miles away, where the future of the Spectator is ulti- mately decided, there is great excitement. Mr Warwick Fairfax, who is 26, has de- cided to buy our owner, the John Fairfax Group, and make it into a private com- pany. To do so, he has had to sell off various bits, to two of those frightening grotesques who always appear in Austra- lian boardroom battles, Mr Kerry Packer and Mr Robert Holmes a Court. The Spectator, I am assured, stays with the shrunken Fairfax. I hope that it continues to be regarded with the same helpful enthusiasm from which it has benefited under Fairfax's chairman, James, half- brother of Warwick.
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