DIARY
A.N. WILSON
It was in this column that I was made crown prince of the Young Fogeys by Alan Watkins — what? nearly ten years ago. Not so young and not so fogey now. It makes me think of the Dylan song — 'But baby, I was older then, I'm younger than that now'. The other day, I went on a phone-in for a commercial radio station to discuss these serious matters. It is hard to shake an image. Asked by one caller what I should vote, I said Labour and expatiated, at tedious length, on the iniquities of the Tory Government. The next caller said, `You right-wing bastards who write for The Spectator are all the same.' I saw what he meant, but for the sake of something to say, I expressed disagreement. 'Anyway,' continued this furious caller with what was obviously meant to be a deadly thrust, 'your books are not half as good as your father's.' I said that, as far as I knew, my father had not written any books. 'Aren't You Auberon Waugh, then?' asked this caller. 'You sound just like him.' I don't, actually.
Having been credited with starting a fogey movement, by wearing dilapidated clothes to the office when I worked at The Spectator, it could be said that I was responsible for the resurgence of the Labour Party. A year ago, this great movement of ours was miles behind in the opinion polls. Expensive advertising cam- paigns did nothing to reverse the trend, and nor did the disastrous performance of the Tories. Neil Kinnock was still regarded as unsuitable Prime Minister material, and no one trusted the Labour Party to beat Mrs Thatcher. Then I wrote an article in The Spectator ('Time to turn to Labour', 11 March 1989), urging every person of good sense to vote Labour and, since then, the Party has never looked back. I am starting to think what title to choose, should Mr !Cannock see fit to elevate me to the peerage; but I'm not counting my chickens yet. However big the landslide in the local government elections, the Labour Party has a genius for losing general elections. If they ever get round to announcing their Policy on any of the great issues of the day — such as Hong Kong refugees or poll tax they are certain to frighten off electors by squabbling among themselves. I just hope that they will continue to imitate the guile of the Conservatives at election time and at least pretend to agree until Mrs Thatcher is sent for a well-earned rest in Dulwich.
M. y chief claim to fame at the moment is that I went to school with Salman Rushdie, the celebrated controversialist. Rushdie was a tall, handsome sixth-former when I was a pretty little new bug, and it has amazed me that no newspaper editor has ever approached me for my story. There might have been revelations of the kind made by George Melly and Peregrine Worsthorne about the Happiest Days of Their Life. Sad to relate, I don't think Rushdie and I ever spoke to one another at school, since we were in different houses. He remembers being horribly bullied there because of his racial origins. Public schools are revolting places in this respect. The only Indian boy in my house at Rugby was persecuted mercilessly, and Jewish boys, of which there were many, were considered very bad sports if they bridled at the term 'yid'. Grown-ups like to say, 'Everything's different in these places now'. I do hope that's true, though I heard a horrifying story the other day of a sixth-former (female) at one very famous public school who was pelted with potatoes every time she walked into the dining-room on the sole grounds, as far as she could make out, that she was an Indian.
It was faintly disturbing to read in the newspaper the other day that Mrs Thatcher now prefers to be driven, whenever possi- ble, in armoured vehicles. We read that on a recent visit to Bermuda to meet President Bush, the RAF were obliged to fly out a special armoured Daimler for her 48-hour stay on the island. It seems a strange use of . so I'm hoping for a termination in Britain.' public money. No previous Prime Minister has considered herself so unpopular that she needs to be protected in this manner. It is all of a piece with her wishing to change 10 Downing Street into a Presidential Residence, with rooms pretentiously rede- signed by the eccentric revivalist architect Sir Quinlan Terry, and vast iron gates blocking off what used to be a public thoroughfare. These gates, incidentally, were designed not by Sir Quinlan but John Thorneycroft, son of Peter who, together with Enoch Powell, may be said to have dreamed up the idea of Thatcherism' 20 years before the lady came on the scene. Opinions will differ as to the aesthetic merit of the gates, which one can hope are only a temporary blot on the landscape. It seems a strange case of the sins of the fathers being visited on the heads of the children that John Thorneycroft, who works for English Heritage, should be spending his time designing ironwork to protect a Prime Minister from a public furious at the implementation of his father's ideas: the decimation of British industry, the worst trade deficit in British economic history and higher taxation (if you include VAT) than in the worst days of Labour.
Ithought it was rather interesting that Laura Ashley recently announced a £4.7 million loss for the year ended 27 January. The previous year, there were profits of £20.3 million. A number of reasons have been adduced for this astonishing reversal of fortune, including a loss of £2 million on over-production of catalogues. (Two mil- lion! It makes the losses of The Spectator seem trivial.) I suspect, though, that it is an indication of a change in public taste. Laura Ashley, both in clothes and fur- nishings, provided comparatively good, comparatively cheap pastiche of old de- signs. Children in smocking and women dressed like Chekhov's Three Sisters could recline on pseudo-Victorian Chesterfields, admiring themselves in the maple-framed looking-glass hung against the almost- 1880s wallpaper. It could not go on for- ever. Perhaps someone, for a change, will think up some good original furniture designs, which are not just reversions to some earlier mode. When my father was a young man in the 1920s and 1930s, he designed most of his furniture himself and had it made up by craftsmen — tubular tables with glass tops, handsome rectangu- lar oak bookcases, etc. All this beautiful and well-made stuff got thrown out even- tually in favour of inherited or bought 'antiques'. It would be much prized today, if I still had any of it, by the Young Fogeys of the Thirties Society (President Gavin Stamp).
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