DIARY
Harrogate
waswas in a neighbouring seat to Mr Clive Jenkins, the new president of the TUC, as we both travelled first class back to Lon- don from Blackpool in a rhymthically swaying 125 train. For the first half of the four-hour journey Mr Jenkins complained at the top of his shrill, whiney, excessively Welsh voice that there was no champagne on board. 'It's a disgrace, a complete disgrace,' he repeated, time and time again. Eventually he settled for white wine, which he drank in sufficient quanti- ties to ensure that for the rest of the trip his fellow passengers were disturbed only by the purr of his slumbers. I can see nothing wrong or paradoxical about champagne socialism. In fact, it comes pretty close to my own meagre political beliefs. But there is something rather unpleasant about peo- ple who drink champagne (or eat oysters, or smoke cigars) primarily for the feeling of grandeur it affords them over those who cannot. Elsewhere on the train, sitting in second class (or 'Standard Class' as it has been curiously renamed) were a great many badly-off trades unionists, some of whose subscriptions were now buying Mr Jenkins his means to lord it over them. It was a gaudy little scene.
Now that I have escaped from it safely, I can announce that my hotel in Blackpool, the Norbreck Castle, was quite awful. A member of the Prison Officers' Union declared it worse than many prisons he had served in. I was particularly surprised to be woken at 1.30 in the morning by a tele- phonist with the news that someone had left a message for me at eight o'clock. The Majestic Hotel in Harrogate is altogether more efficient. In common with most Trusthouse Forte hotels which made their name long before they were taken over, the Majestic keeps its present ownership very much to itself: how nice to see matchboxes that don't have the dread THE logo. Perhaps these few rules, formulated over four years of hotel reviewing, might be of help to Conference goers.
1) Avoid all hotels with jacuzzis, solaria and 'leisure clubs', also hotels with brochures that include the words 'Pre- stige', 'Exclusive' or 'Executive'.
2) Never trust an hotel that hangs a photograph of the manager shaking hands with a Conservative MP in its foyer.
3) A random ten per cent is added to every bill that comes encased in a padded leather folder, 15 per cent if the hotel's name is embossed in gold on its cover. 4) The more flagpoles outside an hotel, the more pompous and frosty the reception that awaits you inside. 5) Hotels that don't trust guests sufficiently to take a booking without a credit card number are themselves not to be trusted. CRAIG BROWN 6) Hotel radios never work.
7) The longer the description on a menu ('a melange of baby carrots picked in the morning dew by the noblest of young aristocrats' etc), the more disgusting the dish when it comes.
Whenever I comment that one politi- cian or another seems rather nice, more seasoned political journalists look know- ingly at one another and then correct me. Anyone in the SDP or Liberal parties who smiles a lot is in fact devious. Charles Kennedy? 'Oh, devious.' Des Wilson? 'Oh, very, very devious.' Those who are obviously too simple to be devious — Cyril Smith, for instance — are always mon- strously vain. But journalists are constantly able to justify their own deviousness with sound professional reasons. Following Arthur Scargill's battle with the man with the billiard cue in Blackpool last week, a handful of tabloid journalists were rushing about trying to locate his assailant. When they managed to find a publican who knew the man's name and address and was willing to give his side of things, they began to offer him £50, £100, £150. But the publican kept holding out for more. In minutes, he managed to get them up to £3,000, payable on publication but only on condition he spoke to no other newspap- ers. When I heard this, I thought it an awful lot of money for a name, address and quotation, and I told the ringleader of the journalists so. 'Oh, we won't pay him,' said the journalist. 'But you promised!' I blurted naively. 'Oh, yes,' said the journal- ist. 'But that was on condition that he didn't speak to any other newspapers and we've leaked part of his quote to one of the 'Thank God the silly season's over!' heavy papers, so now he doesn't have a leg to stand on.' Wasn't that devious, even very devious? 'Not at all. He shouldn't have been so greedy.'
The Harrogate Turkish Baths, deco- rated in Victorian Ali Baba baroque, are a few minutes' walk from the Conference Centre. I had never been to a turkish bath before, and a sheltered life has meant that I've also never been in a room /full of naked men, so I had various reservations about paying a visit. Chance encounters with Liberal MPs are bad enough in the confer- ence hall, but to find, looming through the steam, the naked figure of Mr Cyril Smith, or, frolicking in the plunge-pool, an un- clothed Michael Meadowcroft, would sure- ly be too grotesque a prospect for any human being to bear. Both of these gentle- men were elsewhere, however, and Liberal delegates seemed few and far between, though obviously it is hard to be sure, once they have jettisoned their beloved indentity-tags. I never quite got over wor- rying about being naked in front of so many strangers to be able to enjoy fully the baking process, and was constantly having to stop myself looking at the sizes and shapes of other men's penises. Even the fact that some of them had one at all seemed quite surprising to me. The eti- quette of looking straight ahead and pre- tending that nothing unsusual is happening seemed de rigueur, as it is in stand-up loos, but even this cannot prevent the wilfully paranoid from taking offence. My friend Ian Jack was once peeing in an American stand-up when the burly Texan on his right turned and shouted at him: `So do you wanna photograph of it or somethin'?'
Last week I complained that there were very few anecdotes about Murdoch com- pared with the mountain of anecdotes about Maxwell. I have since been told a few, some of which offer little more than the information that the teller of the tale was once in the same room at the same time as the great man. But two are quite good. During the Wapping dispute, Mur- doch looked out of the window to see a little group of six women carrying a placard saying 'Lesbians against Murdoch'. 'Does that mean that the rest of them are all for me?' he asked. A year or two before Wapping, after the Murdoch papers had been running a series of phoney royal scandals, Prince Philip, who loathes him, saw Murdoch standing in a corner at a reception for the Queen in a large London building and stormed over. 'What the hell are you doing here?' he bellowed. 'I own the place,' replied Murdoch.
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