DIARY
WILLIAM REES-MOGG Ihave been staying in New York at the Westbury Hotel, on 69th Street and Madi- son. At $190 a night, it seemed good value — such are hotel-room rates these days. I have had an Arnold-Bennett-type of enjoy- ment from grand hotels for most of my life. As a child I stayed in a splendid hotel on the front at Weymouth, where one of my fellow guests was a maharajah who wore an emerald the size of a pigeon's egg in his turban. On the evening before I joined the RAF at Padgate — I went there in 1946, on the same day as a later editor of the Times, Harold Evans — I stayed in the Ade1phi in Liverpool, and remember fondly its vast baths and enormous taps. In the 1950s, as a leader writer on the Financial Times, I used to stay at the Paris Ritz, because our office was also in the Place Vendome. A room cost £2.10 a night. Usually my bill has been paid by some long-suffering employer such as Brendan Bracken or Roy Thomson. Occasionally I have gone to grand hotels on holiday, as this September I went with my wife to the Ritz in Madrid, which is just opposite the Prado. They serve lunch on the terrace overlooking the garden — an experience of grand luxury. Yet it makes me feel rather guilty that the luxuries of five-star hotels should be for me what madeleines were for Proust and daffodils for Wordsworth. They live in the memory and return like an old scent or an old song.
One figure that emerged in the United States election campaign was the number of abortions in the 8,000 clinics they have in that country. The average clinic does 200 a year — a rather smaller number than I would have expected — but the total there- fore comes to 1,600,000. That is about twice the proportionate rate for abortions in the United Kingdom. I started thinking about some of the statistical implications. There are about 125,000,000 American Women. The US abortion rate — or those that know we about — is therefore about 1.3 per cent — more than one per woman per lifetime. The birth-rate per woman which will maintain a stable population is 2.1 per cent, so the US abortion rate is about 60 per cent of the birth-rate required for a stable indigenous population. In fact the United States birth-rate is currently below the replacement level. Mexico, with a Population of 85,000,000 has as many babies each year as the United States with 245,000,000. So the 1,600,000 abortions are accelerating the hispanicisation of the United States. The average American child stays in education for about 12 or 13 years, leaving aside kindergarten and college edu- cation. At any given time, therefore, there are approximately 20 million potential American children of school age who are absent from school rolls because they have been aborted. If the average school has one member of staff to 20 students, that means that a million teaching or other school jobs have not been created. That is equal to about 10 per cent of current US unemploy- ment. Whatever else may be said for or against it, Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case which established a right to abortion, was bad news for the American economy.
Wile in New York, at a dinner party of Tina Brown's, I saw Alexander Chancel- lor, who was the last editor of The Spectator but one, and is my tenth cousin or there- abouts. He has been a frequent contributor to this diary and, as Spectator readers will know, has an enviable lightness of touch. In the graveyard at Kilmersdon in Somerset there is a large table tomb to a John Moore, our nearest common ancestor, who died in about 1670. Although Alexander and I only share a theoretical 0.2 per cent of our genes, I regard this as a blood tie. John Moore might have been surprised to know that 300 years after his death two of his direct descendants would be dining together in New Amsterdam, both of us Spectator diarists. Of course John Moore died 30 years before even Addison's Specta- tor was founded. Since my return from the United States every crisis has seemed to centre on Europe, one way or the other. A principle I try to follow is that nothing will work in Europe that the Germans cannot accept. That principle proved itself over German reunification — there was no possibility Germany would remain divided once the Russians became too weak to hold down East Germany. I think it will prevail again over the single currency. Whatever Chan- cellor Kohl says, the Germans will not swap the mark for an ecu, or the Bundesbank for the European Central Bank. Nor should they. What are the Germans worried about now? The Germans I have seen this week are not worried about Maastricht — they regard its main proposals as too far away, even as 'theology'. They are worried about a trade war with the United States, which they regard with horror. They are far more worried about Yugoslavia than we are. They have accepted 250,000 Yugoslav refugees — Sarajevo is only an hour's flying time from Munich. They are very worried about the economic collapse of Russia and the future of Boris Yeltsin. Germany natu- rally looks east, to the problems of East Europe and Russia, just as Britain naturally looks west, to the United States. What we have in common is a suspicion of a little Europe, an idea which is entirely French in inspiration. Chancellor Kohl no more dares to put Maastricht to a referendum than John Major does. I seem at present to be almost the only British commentator who is anti-Maastricht because he is pro-German, but at least I have the strength of knowing that both the Bundesbank and German public opinion are on the same side.
have all had the sad experience of We losing friends because of a marriage sepa- ration or divorce. One seldom remains equally close to both sides of a separated couple. I think the British public want more than anything else to avoid this choice in the case of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Prince Charles will, in the course of providence, become king and in his two sons he has two further heirs to the throne. In constitutional terms that is all there is to it. Princess Diana is a much-loved royal fig- ure, whose personality has won her an exceptional following. The British know the marriage is unhappy, but we want to go on admiring them and behaving decently to both of them. Not only do we not want to make a choice, we are determined not to make a choice. That is something the press — and some of the so-called friends on whom the press relies — need to remem- ber.
Paul Johnson is unwell.
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