The Questing Voie
The National Portrait Gallery's highly superior toilet book Heroes and Villains (accompanying a new exhibition, it offers 'pro' and 'anti' essays alongside illustrations of some 35 historical figures) contains something of a scoop: the last published work of the late Lady Diana Mosley. She died sticking to her guns; the work is a short essay in which she nominates her husband Oswald, head of the British Union of Fascists, as a hero. 'He was a great patriot, and was saddened by the steep decline in Britain's power and influence, she writes. 'But he was optimistic for our future in Europe.' In the same volume, incidentally, Mo Mowlam identifies Delia Smith as her hero, and reports that after 'a lot of practice' under Delia's tutelage, she has 'just about got' how to prepare a soft-boiled egg.
Afriend returning from Brussels, being aware of my childish interest in politics and serious study of comics, brings a copy of Troubled Waters, an engrossing 'graphic novel' set in the bustling halls of the European Parliament. It is published in glossy full colour under the auspices of the impressively titled Editor-in-Chief, Directorate-General Information and Public Relations of the European Parliament (Publications and Events), one Jacques Hinckxt. M. Hinckxt has spent our money well, Troubled Waters could not be better as an introduction, for impressionable tots, to the thrills and spills of European government. It follows a single MEP, a smouldering beauty named Irina Vega, as she attempts to steer a clean-water directive through a plenary session of the Parliament in Strasbourg. 'If I don't manage to win Parliament over, we'll have missed a wonderful opportunity to use our environmental powers,' she declares early on. 'And it's the fate of future generations that's at stake — and of the whole planet!' 'Yes,' her male parliamentary assistant shoots back. 'Solidarity is the only answer.' And so on. Will Valery Giscard d'Estaing soon supplant the Incredible Hulk, then, in the affections of Europe's comic-reading youth? Don't be silly. Of course he will.
nthony Cheetham — a man described, variously, as 'the most talented publisher of recent times' and 'the Slobodan Milosevic of British publishing' — achieved a rare double when he was eased out as chief executive of Orion. Orion is the second publishing house he founded from which he has been shown the door by new owners. Did he see it coming? It appears not. I'm told that the first that Mrs Cbeetham, herself a literary agent, knew about her husband's departure from Orion was when a scout came up to commiserate with her.
Gordon Brown: hunky, heterosexual, gruff, straight-talking, a man of convictions. Tony Blair: effete, slippery, visibly wearing lippy and eyeliner, and as bisexually creepy as Joel Grey in Cabaret. Yup. It's The Deal. Watching this meticulous and sympathetic historical reconstruction on the gogglebox on Sunday night was the occasion to reflect. Had there been any advance signs that what once looked like an honourable pact between statesmen would end up more nearly resembling a turf battle between the Krays and the Richardsons? Just the one. On the very night of 1997's Historic Labour Landslide, a group of politically minded pals decided to spend the evening people-watching in Granita. the Islington restaurant where the Historic Pact was, or was not, sealed. The sole celebrity present? The retired gangster and renaissance man 'Mad' Frankie Fraser.
meanwhile, Michael Cockerell's documentary on the special relationship this week turned up a curious tooth-related footnote to history. George W. Bush, some will remember, when asked at a joint press conference — soon after he and Mr Blair had first met as president and prime minister — what they had found in terms of common ground, said, 'We both use Colgate toothpaste.' Interviewed for Mr Cockerell's programme, Mr Blair revealed, grinning slightly alarmingly, 'It was true! I went back and checked!'
onference season is, of course, a time at which, more than ever, the curious geography of Labour's imaginative landscape is exposed. What with 'pilot schemes'. 'beacon schools', 'foundation hospitals' and a superabundance of 'targets', it is ever more unclear whether we are in the sea, the sky, or on a building site. Are the beacons there to warn the pilots off the rocks, or to guide them safely in to land? Are beacons atop foundations, or is that where they put the targets? The sooner a Spatial Metaphor Tsar is appointed, the sooner the journey, or battle, will be won,
And so to the bread-and-circuses department. 'A future fair for all' is the slogan that our leaders have adopted at this year's Labour conference, in the hope that if they hang it from banners, they will bring a disillusioned electorate back on board. Does it do the trick? I'm minded to hang tough. It'll take more than dodgems and toffee apples to buy us off this time, buster.
what could be more pleasant than to hear of the schoolboy secrets of distinguished public men? A friend and coeval of Lord Irvine of Lairg — a perennial favourite of this column — reports that in his early years, the future Lord Chancellor boasted the Kenneth-Grahame-inspired nickname Toad'. Such, anyway, was his 1950s monicker at the Glasgow grammar school Hutchesons, the fiercely academic alma mater of, among others, John Buchan. Derry, showing less of the prickliness for which he has since become renowned, had the good nature to adopt the nickname himself.
We mourn here, immoderately, the death of George Plimpton — founder of the Paris Review, genius sportswriter and unrivalled gentleman amateur. Before he died, he offered a last piece of sporting advice to posterity. 'I don't think George had played golf in years, but he used to save up oddball tips for me and others,' his friend Charles McGrath tells the magazine Slate. 'The most recent was about how to extend the swing through impact, and the trick, George said, was to station an imaginary dwarf several feet in front of your ball and then (you have to recreate those broad Plimptonian vowels here) "smack the dwarf in the ass." Mr McGrath adds: 'I don't know whether it works.'
Hostages to fortune department, finally. The following blurb, in the Independent: 'John Cleese: Why I don't want to be funny any more.' What need we further mock?
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