Hard times
Petronella Wyatt
T cannot help but feel sorry for Michael 1Trend, the disgraced Conservative MP, who allegedly defrauded the taxpayer by claiming a whopping sum in false expenses. Michael Trend's career and perhaps his life is now in ruins and he can look forward only to an eventual ignominious obscurity.
I wish to announce at once that Mr Trend is a family friend. Ho, you might say, if someone is a friend it's all right then, they have merely 'acted like a fool'. Whereas had I never met Mr Trend you might expect me to excoriate him as an example of corruption in British politics.
You would be perfectly right. One prefers to believe one's friends are fools rather than scoundrels. In many cases, unfortunately, this is a delusion. The human capacity for liking a person simply because they are pleasant to one is quite astonishing.
But in the case of Michael Trend, the story is different. As long as I have known him, which is since I was about ten years old, he has rarely sucked up to me, to my intense annoyance. On occasion he has been downright insulting, leaving me with steam pouring from my ears. Once, when we were both leader writers on the Daily Telegraph, he changed one of my leaders without telling me, which went down badly with rutli.
Despite this he was a good, faithful and honest friend. I first met Mr Trend when my elder brother took to him while they were both at Oxford. We then had a house in Italy and Michael soon became a frequent visitor. Under the close observation of a child he seemed to be kind, amusing and, for the most part, good natured. His rudeness, I believe, was a form of selfdefence, for even I could see that he lacked self-confidence.
In the evening he often downed a bottle of grappa without turning a hair, but then my brother and he did all the careless things undergraduates do. Holidays would not have been half such fun without them. On the way back from our favourite trattoria, one or the other would sit on the roof of the car and sing '0 Sole Mio'. When my mother began suffering from the attentions of an Italian doctor celled Renzo Romanelli, the pair of them strung posters between the olive trees on which they had written 'Renzo washes whiter' and Renzo Rules OK'.
I think Michael's time at Oxford was the happiest of his life. He certainly displayed no inclination toward rapaciousness or dis
honesty. When the grass in the olive grove grew very long my parents asked him if he would come out and cut it. In return they insisted on paying for his economy class ticket. That week was the only time I saw him persistently bolshy.
The grass had hit about three or four feet. My father wanted it as flat as a croquet lawn. The implement Michael was given would have made anyone cross. He was handed a rusty scythe with a wobbly handle. Horrified at the prospect of such Herculean labours, he protested that his fair skin would not stand so many long hours in the sun. He would fall sick with sunstroke, He simply wouldn't do it.
It was decided that perhaps the inducement of a little entertainment might do the trick. I was to be the entertainment. It was suggested that I sit in an olive tree and read books to him as he worked. Michael agreed. So there I was perched in the branches, reading aloud, while Mr Trend Cut the grass, resembling an Egyptian slave, for he had wound a white cloth about his head against the sun.
[cannot recall most of what I read, but I do remember regaling him with a story of how King John lost the treasure in the wash. I don't know if stories of treasure gave him ideas about money which precipitated this disaster. but I doubt it. In fact, Michael never seemed to care very much about money, even after he married. When he left the Telegraph and became an MP, however, I imagined its import must have struck him a little, particularly as his wife produced a large number of children very quickly.
This was his first mistake. A middle-class man caring only £60,000 a year cannot afford more than one or two children. The Trends lived very modestly in Windsor but when I went to visit them, less and less frequently, Michael looked increasingly careworn and nervous as the bills mounted and mounted.
Michael had always been a worrier — a trait which did not ideally suit him to a career in politics — and his desperation must have at last become gargantuan. How could an intelligent man imagine he could get away with it, is the usual question. In many cases it is arrogance, but in the case of Michael [think he was simply unworldly.
His solution was the wrong one, and how he must he suffering. He treasured above all respectability and now that is gone. Yet I know many highly thought of people — Ionic columns of the Establishment — who are also defrauding the taxpayer and getting away with it, either because they keep Swiss bank accounts and return to London with cases full of cash or use dodges such as making themselves companies. This is legal, but the effect is the same. The only difference is that they were and are sophisticates and poor Michael Trend never was. The irony is that this man is the polar opposite of the greasy, complacent Tory.
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