DIARY
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE 0 f the Book of the Year choices I have read so far, the following, in the Sunday Times, takes the biscuit for banal- ity, vulgarity and illiteracy. 'My favourite book that I have read this year is History and Hope by C. V. Wedgwood (Collins £17.50). These short essays are remarkable for their variety, depth and breadth. I am all the more fortunate in knowing Dame Veronica as a person of rare quality as my wife is her literary agent.' Dr Owen, you presume and you are right.
The Prince of Wales, understandably enough, is very worried about the media treatment he receives, and recently asked a few editors — none of the tabloids because he never reads them — to luncheon at Kensington Palace to discuss how matters could be improved. His worry is not so much about the cheap and impertinent gutter press obsession with his marriage as with the failure of even the quality press to report his public activities accurately and seriously. For example, he said, they all allowed the Rod Hackney affair to be exaggerated out of all proportion. So bad had this problem become that he was beginning to have doubts about the worth- whileness of his job. 'I sometimes wonder why I don't pack it in and spend my time playing polo,' he said as much in sorrow as in jest. None of the editors present was able to offer very much practical advice. On reflection, however, I think that there is something which he could usefully do: have many more lunches of this kind with senior journalists. For the trouble with royalty is that they don't have direct relations with journalists in the way minis- ters do. If a minister feels that his good works are being dangerously distorted or ignored he gets on to the offending editor direct and the editor, in turn, if he wants to check some story out, will get on to the minister. Editors and ministers are on that kind of close and informal terms. In the case of the Prince of Wales, however, there are no comparably direct avenues of com- munication. Does the gap have to remain so unbridgeably wide? I sometimes think the royal family have gone about the business of democratising their institution the wrong way round. They move among the general public much more informally than they would ever have dreamt of doing in the old days (to the point where some total stranger recently actually asked Prin- cess Diana about her marriage) but have made no comparable relaxation in their relations with top people. At this lun- cheon, for example, the Prince made quite a point of complaining that I had got him quite wrong in a recent article which remarked on his lack of sympathy for, or understanding of, Thatcherism. In fact, he insisted, much of his public work was given over to encouraging small, local initiatives and truly private enterprise and if this was not in the spirit of Thatcherism he did not know what was. My article, in short, did not do justice to his views at all. Normally, of course, before writing such an article I would have gone to see the public figure involved. But that is my point: an interview with the Prince would have taken months to arrange, with endless obstructions, in the shape of Sir John Riddell and other courtiers, to surmount. Photographers to- day have much greater access to royalty than editors. But maybe that recent small luncheon marks the beginning of a more sensible approach.
0 n the same subject, Frank Longford tells me that he intends to introduce a debate in the Lords soon about royalty and the gutter press. So far so good. Unfortu- nately, he intends to couple his concern about gutter press mistreatment of the Prince and Princess of Wales with his no less vehement concern about gutter press treatment of Myra Hindley. I have tried to urge him to forget about Myra Hindley, since he will lose their Lordships' sympathy — not to mention everybody else's — by citing her. But Frank won't be deflected. He wants to make the point that the press treat Princess Diana, the most loved woman in Britain, in exactly the same outrageous way as they treat Myra Hind- ley, the most hated woman in Britain. Nobody escapes their venom, neither the Wow he's Democratic lowest in the land nor the highest. The point is well taken. But dragging in Myra Hindley really will be a case of spoiling a good argument for a hap'orth of tar.
Irecently overheard the following ex- change between two very respectable `Mummy says' kind of girls in a chic Knightsbridge restaurant. First girl: 'Did you have a good weekend?', Second girl: `Yes, thanks, lots of lovely bonking.' Am I wrong in thinking that this new word bonking has made it possible, perhaps for the first time ever, for even the most modest of females to talk about sex with- out any pudeur whatsoever? The girls in question would rather have died than say `lots of lovely f---ing', or 'lots of lovely screwing', or 'I got laid'. Before bonking got invented all the other euphemisms suggested rather brutally and crudely that sex was something men did to women. Bonking is a friendly, gentle, cosy kind of word which does to sex what Burke said hypocrisy does to vice: loses half its evil by losing all its grossness. Do we know who first coined the word? I am told it was Emma Soames. If so, she deserves much credit.
Iam delighted to learn that Conrad Black, my esteemed proprietor at the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, has decided to bail Encounter out of its persistent financial difficulties. He has been reading Encounter for years and feels strongly that its vigorous continuation is very much in the interest of the Atlantic community. He is also a great admirer of Mel Lasky, under whose long editorship the magazine has built up such a formidable reputation for anti-communist campaigning. My own feeling, however, is that Encounter needs to forget about communism for a bit and concentrate on other less familiar targets. Mel doesn't agree. He thinks that the fight against communism has to be won over and over again, since there is always a new generation of dupes in danger of succumb- ing to the Marxist spell. That may be so. Nevertheless, as a reader, I long for Encounter to broaden its horizons beyond the cold war battlefield. Let me remind Mel that Nancy Mitford published her famous U and non-U article in Encounter — which did wonders for the circulation when Stalin was still alive. If it was deemed responsible for Encounter to print such marvellously non-ideological stuff then when the dangers of communism were at their height — surely the case today for a bit of cultural escapism is far, far stronger.
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