DIARY
Iremarked to a government minister the other day that the life of a journalist seems infinitely more agreeable than that of a politician. `Up to a point,' he said. 'But, when the chips are down, we are on the playing-field, while you lot are on the touch-line.' I found myself debating whether we journalists are, by our nature, fitted only to be professional onlookers. When the editor of the Economist was appointed deputy governor of the Bank of England, our City editor demanded tartly, `Don't they know in Downing Street that journalists aren't fit to do things?' I can approximate the memory of a brutal line in Tom Stoppard's Night and Day, when Diana Rigg savaged John Thaw's reporter. Journalists, she sneered, believe they are only doing a bit of reporting before getting down to the great novel, great poem, seri- ous stuff of their lives, 'whereas the truth is that in their rotten papers they are doing the best work of which they are capable'. Lord Rees-Mogg's legal intervention in the Maastricht debate, although contributing a welcome touch of high camp self-parody, seems to support this thesis. The Indepen- dent would probably be in better case today if Andreas Whittam-Smith, having achieved the remarkable feat of creating a newspaper, had appointed somebody else to manage it for him. I am uncertain whether Sir Norman Fowler's successive careers in newspapers and politics prove or disprove the point. There is certainly a long roll-call of able journalists who failed to become MPs, headed by Robin Day, Ludo Kennedy and Rees-Mogg again. Bill Deedes believes that the relationship between the media and government has now grown seriously out of balance, because so many of the young things engaged in the former are conspicuously brighter than the young things doing the latter. It may certainly be said that, for a Conservative supporter, the touch-line today feels a much more comfortable place to be than the playing-field.
Along weekend with my 10-year-old son in the idyllic remotenesses of Suther- land, part fishing, part camping. I am no longer game for days on end in a tent, because I miss my bath too much. But it is great fun to recapture for a night or two the joys of life under canvas. We look down on those who think camping is a matter of pitching a huge tent beside a car. The real thing is about packing everything on one's back into the hills, steering by compass and sleeping by a lochside. A 10-year-old is too young to carry much in his rucksack, and I groan under the weight of his food and sleeping bag as well as my own. We cook the inevitable sausages•and beans, and pray
MAX HASTINGS
for a breeze to keep the midges off. We spurn the awful primary colours of the `ramblers', and wear clothes and pitch tents that blend as far as possible with the soft greens and browns of the hills. The only disappointment about camping on high ground is that dead heather makes a poor campfire, compared with fallen branches. We sleep like the dead, and stampede the deer at our waking.
For my son the Scottish expedition could not, I fear, match the success of our previous one, because the train's engine failed to catch fire. Last August, a few miles outside Inverness we halted with flames billowing, fire extinguishers playing. It soon became clear that it was all going to take a very long time to sort out, so Hast- ings father and son dropped discreetly to the track and walked to a nearby road, where a kindly passing farmer squeezed us into the back of his pick-up and deposited us at the Station Hotel in Inverness, refus- ing all rewards. Whenever I have asked Harry since what was the high point of those holidays, he has unhesitatingly pitched on the great fire, and is especially disappointed by the betrayal of my promise that British Rail would soon do it again.
Twice a day when I drive through the City of London, my blood pressure rises as we pass the new barricades. It is easy to understand the attractions to the insurance industry of shutting off the capital's finan- cial centre. From every other point of view, however, the decision seems grotesque. It represents a high-profile success for the Provisionals, and breaches the first rule of counter-terrorism — don't do things that will please the enemy. Point defence of possible targets is a huge waste of
He got the girl.'
resources. Surveillance and intelligence penetration of terrorist groups and their sympathisers are the only effective means of containing the IRA. Everything else, including those silly public exhibitions by policemen stopping London traffic with sub-machine guns for a week or two after bombs have exploded, is designed solely to impress the bourgeoisie. The Guardian car- ried a wonderfully batty piece of self-paro- dy the other day, accusing the security forces of being responsible for the death of art informer killed by the IRA in Northern Ireland. The Guardian thinks the whole business of bribing, blackmailing and pres- suring informers perfectly beastly. Yet in reality, of course, moles, undercover agents, together with the efforts of MI5 and police anti-terrorist teams, offer the only realistic hope of controlling the bombing campaign in our lifetime. It will be remark- able if we see a political outcome, because the short-term cost of imposing any radical settlement on Ulster will remain so intimi- dating both to Dublin and Westminster. I am one of those strange Englishmen who likes Ireland very much, North and South — indeed, I lived in Kilkenny for a couple of years. But it is because I know the coun- try so well that I am wholly disbelieving whenever the Government announces a political breakthrough.
The judiciary is not wrong about every- thing.• I was delighted to hear that a judge had been laying into the RSPCA from the bench recently, lacerating its methods of investigation after yet another busybody prosecution. I have been an implacable foe of the RSPCA since an occasion some years ago, when I was alone in the country writing one afternoon and an answered doorbell revealed a uniformed figure. `RSPCA,' he announced. 'We have had a complaint that a pony is being maltreated here.' I was so stupefied that in a sort of daze I led him round to the stables. He inspected the pony and agreed that, like my wife's other animals, it showed every sign of dining nightly at the Ritz. By now, my indignation and curiosity were working furiously. We had been having trouble with a malicious neighbour. 'Was it a Mrs So and So,' I asked, 'by any chance, who con- tacted you?' We can never discuss these matters,' said the inspector woodenly, but with a flicker of the eyelids. Bull's-eye, I thought. 'Well, now do we get an apology?' I demanded. 'We are only carrying out our duty,' said the inspector, hitching up his jackboots as he climbed back into his van. What a body, the shock troops of a horde of suburban cat-lovers. The most serious challenge now is to prevent the RSPB from going the same way.
Previous page
