DIARY NICHOLAS COLERIDGE W hen any Cabinet minister bails out, his
letter of resignation and the Prime Minister's instantaneous reply, both re- leased to the newspapers in good time for the morning's editions, always merit care- ful study. Nigel Lawson's was, I thought, a good one: brisk and slightly bumptious with the expression, 'It is in the best interests of the Government for me to resign my office without further ado,' (my italics), as though he were trying to get out of a round of tedious goodbye drinks parties with the Cabinet and his old team from the Treasury. And then, of course, there was the statutory thank-you-for- having-me paragraph ('I am extremely grateful to you for the opportunity you have given me, particularly over the last six-and-a-half years' etc etc) that every minister's secretary surely has ready and waiting somewhere in the memory bank of her word processor. The Prime Minister's reply also had a formulaic feel to it: the review of Lawson's successes and the reminder that these were a collaboration with herself, the slight jibe that he is leaving before his task is complete, and the gracious acknowledgment that Therese Lawson has played her part with 'splendid support', What I enjoy about these letters is that they are the prototype of an awful new phenomenon of modern working life outside Westminster: the resignation press- release. As recently as three years ago, when a senior person left a publishing house or a bank, or jumped from one auction house to another, his colleagues merely shrugged and set about finding a replacement. Now his resignation has to be celebrated with a special no-hard-feelings publicity circular. The formula for this is simple. The person who is leaving says something anodyne along the lines of, 'This is one of the greatest companies in the land, and I'm leaving with profound regret to take up a fresh challenge,' (not specified, especially if he's joining a rival outfit). Then the chairman, or more usual- ly managing director, of his old firm contributes an even more vacuous para- graph that begins, 'Commenting on the resignation, Mr Winston Blagg, managing director, said, "In a decade of ever- increasing profits when we have some extremely exciting secret new plans for expansion, shortly to be announced, we wish him well in his new Life."' Last week I happened to have lunch with two different friends who've just made the transition from one good job to an even better one; one in television news and the other in marketing. Both marvelled at the hours that had been spent in cooking up these Soviet-style press releases designed to make a molehill out of a hillock. The great irony, of course, is that, with the exception of the Lawson-Thatcher exchange, these
carefully worded valedictory statements are scarcely read by a living soul, and certainly never reproduced in any news- paper.
Yves Saint Laurent's latest fashion collection last week, shown in a tent in the Louvre, excited extraordinary press cover- age on account of his 20 or so 'bare bosom' cocktail dresses; Grecian-style togas that expose the whole of the woman's left breast. Fashion editors were strongly di- vided over their merits. Liz Smith, writing in the Times, gave them a rave review. The middle-market tabloids were censorious, especially the Daily Mail, where the fashion editor had a lot to say about the degradation of women under the heading 'Paris Fashion topless sensation' and a rather coy line-drawing of the offending style (presumably thought more tasteful than a photograph). In my view there were many, many outfits in Saint Laurent's collection that were much better than the one-breasted cocktail dresses, but that is not the point. As the beautiful African and Asian girls Mr Saint Laurent chooses to model his clothes processed down the catwalk, and the world's photographers rose to their feet to shoot, I estimated, 25,000 frames of the parading nipples in under a minute, everybody in the tent had something to gain by it. For the house of Saint Laurent, and their licensees all over the world, there was perhaps a million pounds' worth of publicity. For the broad- minded, there was an opportunity to be exactly that. And for fashion editors on newspapers where fashion is thought a little bit peripheral, there was a chance for 'They'll only show Denis Skinner after 9 p.m.'
some good old-fashioned moral outrage, never a bad thing with annual pay reviews coming up. The one-breasted cocktail toga will, needless to say, never actually be worn by anybody at all, but that is not the point either.
Invited to a jolly lunch by the wine merchants Berry Bros & Rudd in St James's, I had a slight feeling of frustration on entering the dining-room. Eight or nine different wine glasses had been set by each place, but who can drink nine glasses of wine during a Tuesday lunchtime? At the same time, if your hosts have gone to such trouble to choose delicious wine, ought you really refuse? It seems churlish to accept an invitation from a wine merchant and then be a puritan about drinking. One of the array of glasses, fortunately, con- tained water: our party were unsuspecting guinea pigs for Berry Bros's clever new venture, their own mineral water from the Hildon spring in Hampshire which feeds the river Test. The bottle is smart — a cross between a gin and a milk bottle — with a swanky label, and the water tastes a lot cleaner than the Test looks these days. The label on the back of the bottle, however, is environmentally upbeat, informing you that the water 'represents the quality and needs of those who belong to the pure generation'. Not a particularly wine- merchantly sentiment. At Berry Bros & Rudd their joke name for the water is Berrier, or Ruddoit.
Every second person I meet these days seems just to have had their car stolen, usually driven away during the night from outside their London house and never seen again. When they ring the police, they are told that no officer can come round until they (the dispossessed) have checked the car pounds, in case their car was in fact removed by traffic police and not by thieves. Even if you have off-street parking they still make you do this. Nor does there seem to be much you can do to deter car-nappers. In Zambia, where the prob- lem is even worse, people go to extraordin- ary lengths. A businessman in Lusaka, who'd lost two cars in three months, decided the only solution was,to chain his new car to his bedstead. The chain was wound three times round the bumper, through a special flap in his front door, along the passage and onto the iron bed- end. Shortly after midnight his bed began to move. Seconds later he had smashed through the front door, still in bed, and was travelling at 40 miles an hour down the street.
Nicholas Coleridge is Editorial Director of Conde Nast Publications.
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