FURTHERMORE
Someone had blundered •
it was me
PETRONELLA WYATT
Bless them: none of my friends have mentioned it, not one. It is only shame and remorse now — and a less worthy concern to wrong-foot my enemies — that prompts me to draw attention to it myself.
Some of you may have concluded from my column last week ('Why I am no longer Thatcher's child') that I was unable to dis- tinguish between the Treaty of Rome and the Single European Act. Indeed, I almost came to the same conclusion myself. I had meant to say that Lady Thatcher was a sig- natory of the Single European Act of 1985. While rereading the paragraph over the weekend I saw that I had said something different. I had said that Lady Thatcher had signed the Treaty of Rome. That was in 1957. Lady Thatcher was not even an MP.
Horrors! My eyes grew fixed and dull. I staggered back. Someone had blundered it was me. Fool! Ass! How had it hap- pened? Was it some mysterious electric agency? Or was it diablerie playing tricks with my subconscious mind? Why had I thought of Rome at all? Could some mali- cious phantom have implanted in my mind the Rome summit of 1990 that led to the resignation of Howe and thus to Lady Thatcher's downfall?
I felt wormlike, futile, powerless. If the hurricane bids the tree to bend, what else can it do? I remember reading that the great historian G.M. Trevelyan had once written in an article, 'following France's defeat at Austerlitz'. Why? Duff Cooper, in his sublime life of Talleyrand, attributed to his subject the remark, 'It it worse than a crime, it is a blunder.' Again, why? Duff Cooper knew very well it was not Tal- leyrand who had said this, but Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe.
Then the other week it happened in the Daily Telegraph. A feature on the disgraced Lord Brocket asserted confidently that Caroline Lamb, during a dinner at Brocket Hall in the 19th century, had popped naked from a soup tureen 'in front of Lord Mel- bourne and his Cabinet'. Why, once more? The Telegraph would, without question, have known that Caroline Lamb died long before Melbourne became prime minister.
Thus I pondered my disgrace. I was a soul in hell. I contemplated suicide. The editor talked me out of it. He said it would be inconvenient (one would, perhaps, have preferred a less ambiguous endorsement). I consoled myself with the recollection that Matthew Parris, the living journalist whom I most admire, had made a long series of factual errors in a recent column in the Times and had devoted the whole of his next article to unravelling them. I cheered myself further with a new publication called The Guinness Book of Political Blunders. This had an embarrassment of mistakes to choose from, committed by far greater fig- ures than me. It included President Rea- gan's magnificent error of 1982: 'Now would you join me in a toast to President Figueredo, to the people of Bolivia . .. no, that's where I'm going . . . to the people of Brazil.' He was, at the time, in Colombia. By Tuesday my mood was changing. In fact, I was becoming defiant. Had I really done something so terrible? What if I had confused a treaty? Phooey, a mere baga- telle. If my enemies intended to seize upon it like rats, let 'em. They might have heard of the Single European Act, but could they recall the location of the summit at which it was agreed? Ha! The answer, incidentally, is Luxembourg. I looked that up.
Moreover, what did they know about other treaties? What could they tell us, say, about the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648? Well, Mr Tony Marlow? I will wager that you cannot name the signatories. So I will do it for you. They were France, the Holy Roman Empire, Sweden and the Protestant estates of the Empire. This started me thinking about the rise and fall of powers. Sweden and Holland were then two of the most influential nations in Europe. As they say in those _series on elderly actresses, where are they now? It is odd how falling flat on one's face gives one a world view. But treaty others as. you would be treatied yourself. I expected, therefore summoning up my usual optimism with regard to human nature — that the letters to the editor would come pouring in. Fun- nily enough, as I write, we have received 'It's multiple choice!' only two. Only two! What is wrong with our readers? Either they are uncommonly unobservant or they are uncommonly humane. I like to think it is the latter. In their position I would not have done the same.
Icannot agree with the attacks on British tabloids for making tasteless remarks about Germany. Personally, I doubt if it is possi- ble to be tasteless about Germany. If our jokes are bad, theirs are worse. A friend of mine in Berlin described how, after the German victory over the Czechs, one man hung his wife out of the window.
You can see where they get it from. The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany by John Rohl (out in paperback, CUP) is the final word on the German generic sense of humour grotesque, bathetic and homo-erotic.Wil- helm loved 'pranks' in all-male company. Count 'Em' Gortz, who was very plump, could 'dance like a howling dervish and do all kinds of nonsense for the Kaiser'. One of his favourite tricks was to roll backwards down the hillside 'like a hippopotamus that has gone berserk'. On another occasion, Gortz and the future foreign secretary, Alfred von Kiderlen-W5chter, 'did the Siamese twins' for Wilhelm by tying them- selves together with a large sausage.
A even more ignoble fate befell the head of the military cabinet, Dietrich von Hillsen. Von Hiilsen died of a heart attack at Donaueschingen while dancing for the Kaiser in a large feather hat and a tutu. It is somehow difficult to picture Edward VII commanding Lord Haldane, the minister for war, to prance in a tutu, and howling as he expired. For the Kaiser's hunt at Liebenberg, von Hillsen's brother Georg proposed to Count Gortz:
You must be paraded by use as a circus poo- dle! — That will be a 'hit' like nothing else. Just think: behind shaved (tights), in front long bangs out of black or white wool, at the back under a genuine poodle tail a marked rectal opening and, when you 'beg', in front a fig-leaf. Just think how wonderful when you bark, howl to music, shoot off a pistol or do other tricks. It is simply splendid!! ...In my mind's eye I can already see HM laughing with us ...I am applying myself with real rel- ish to this 'work' in order to forget that my beloved sister — the dearest thing I have on earth — is at this moment dying in Breslau. No matter! — HM shall be satisfied!!
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