his week's Richard Desmond story concerns Des the Crusader for
Ancient Freedoms. This great patron of letters is a man with whom liberty-loving Spectator readers and opponents of the nanny state everywhere can find common cause. He was once wandering through the nonsmoking newsroom of his Daily Express, cigar nicely on the go, when one of his female employees asked him whether he'd mind not blowing smoke in her face. Quick as a flash came the riposte. `Would you rather I pissed on you?' he joshed.
A nother important, possibly A insight into the lives of those more powerful and important than ourselves. Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail and god-emperor of Associated Newspapers, is a shy and retiring man but nevertheless indulges himself at alfresco events with a party trick. He catches live wasps in his hands, plucking them from the air and squeezing them to death. Not WASPS, mind. Wasps. I pass it on as heard.
Help,help me, Rhondda! Help me get him out of his seat! Such are the cries reverberating through the valleys after the exposure of Mr Chris Bryant's peaks in a pant-wearing gay Internet proposition scenario. Well and good. A chap who doesn't have the courage to go fully naked before his public (see pic accompanying this column) isn't worth the name of MP. Yet more shocking was the news that not only is Mr Bryant a former vicar but, according to an Oxford contemporary, this most thrusting member of Labour's backbench team was also a member of the feared Oxford University Conservative Association. It is time for full disclosure. Are there skeletons of a dark heterosexual past, too, lurking in Mr Bryant's closet?
-rirst out of the blocks to chide the
Rastafarian poet Benjamin Zephaniah for turning down his Order of the British Empire was Trevor Phillips, who so far bids fair only for the Order of the Brown Nose. Sorry. I should explain. lest The Spectator again find itself referred to the police for incitement to racial hatred, that that is not because Mr Phillips's nose is, in point of fact, brown. It just so happens that it is. So is the Vole's. Rather, it is a figure of speech. intended to connote that Mr Phillips is so far wedged in the aft portion of the Prime Minister (let us call it, in
deference to Lynne Truss's bestselling book on punctuation, the 'semi-colon') that all he can discern, mostly, are the soles of Chris Bryant's shoes. Sorry. I should explain, lest The Spectator be investigated on suspicion of homophobia, that this is not intended as a speculation on Mr Phillips's sexuality. Rather, it is a figure of speech, intended to connote
. oh. I give up. Where was I? Ah yes. Trevor Phillips. It'll have to wait till the next paragraph.
Still with me? Right. Mr Phillips, in the Evening Standard, attacked Mr Zephaniah for turning down his honour, arguing that black Britons serve their community better by accepting gongs than by turning them down. Fair enough. But. my dear, can there be a reader who hung on to his breakfast in the face of the patronising humbuggery, the smuggery, the sheer claiming-creditfor-Mr-Zephaniah's-success brass neck of the way he put it? `So you sent back your OBE.' he wrote. 'Full marks for bravado. As dramatic gestures go, it's not original but you did it with more flair and style than the usual selfrighteous prigs who do this sort of thing. It's the kind of joyous provocation I've come to expect from you since 1982, when as a TV producer I put you in front of a nationwide audience for the first time. I was determined to present the best of black Britain to Christmas viewers. The poem you wanted to do gave our lawyers the conniptions... We took the risk. I've never regretted it.' Mr Phillips wraps up these self-promoting maunderings thusly: 'Frankly, the radical demand is not to refuse honours
— it is to insist that as long as the system exists, we too receive our fair share of recognition.' Aargh! Wouldn't it be worth making him Sir Trevor just to shut him up?
Asplendid apology thumps on to the mat. It is one of only four million letters sent by the Royal Mail's chairman Allan Leighton to 'apologise personally' to customers 'inconvenienced' by the recent postal strike. It emerges that 'we are working together to ensure that your postal service is maintained in the future', but that 'our customer compensation scheme does not apply when services are disrupted due to industrial action'. Happily, in a gesture of goodwill on behalf of all their customers, the Royal Mail — 'working with Postwatch. the consumer body for postal services' — plans to make a million donation towards London's bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. Hmm. What if I like receiving letters but hate, say, pole-vaulting? Or if I am 92 and feeling a bit peaky, and don't view the 2012 Olympic Games as quite so urgent an issue as, say, a telegram from my grandchild? Or, for that matter, if I calculate the cost of sending a letter to four million people and find out it adds up to, give or take, a million quid?
publicity-shy Mirror editor Piers Morgan muses to Docklands Magazine on how he would like to be remembered: 'As the Ian Wright of journalism. Scored quite a few good goals, got into a lot of trouble, had a good laugh but you wouldn't necessarily want to be stuck with him on a desert island for too long.' Quite so.
Insult to the intelligence department; latest in a long series. It's the publication of a parable about the afterlife by Mitch Albom (author of the phenomenal number one bestseller Tuesdays With Morrie), entitled The Five People You Meet In Heaven. `All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time. .. 'is the quote they have pulled out, neatly composting T.S. Eliot and Chicken Soup For The Soul, for the flyleaf of this 'timeless tale appealing to all'. It is a book, we are assured, 'that readers of fine fiction, and those who loved Tuesdays With Morrie, will treasure'. If there is a heaven, can it be possible that sappy books like this will be on its shelves?
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