The night Lord Salisbury squirted a soda siphon down my

trousers

FRANK JOHNSON

Aa journalist all my working life, I was interested in what the gossip columns wrote about the way journalists behaved at the din- ner for the annual British Press Awards last week. Mr Kelvin MacKenzie, former Sun editor, in presenting the award for sportswriter of the year, introduced the not entirely related subject of a four-letter obscenity allegedly uttered about him by Miss Janet Street-Porter, Independent on Sunday editor, and enemy of Mr MacKen- zie. A bleeding man was found in the ladies lavatory, by which I mean a man suffering from bleeding, not a bleeding man in the sense of — as Miss Street-Porter might put it — 'that bleedin' man MacKenzie'. A Guardian journalist and a Sun journalist had an altercation about a taxi. A female tabloid executive intervened. A security guard was called. The female tabloid executive slapped him around the face. A Mirror man, having become columnist of the year, celebrated with enough exuberance to mislay his award. There was much else in a similar spirit.

How to explain this feebly decorous behaviour from a profession once renowned for drunken behaviour, lechery, hard swear- ing and violence? Standards have declined since I won a British Press Award. That was, if memory serves correctly, in 1900. On that occasion, having received the coveted plaque from that year's presenter of the awards, the prime minister Lord Salisbury, I tweaked his big black beard, uttered a stream of obscenities, the gist of which was that his isolation was not at all splendid, and cast doubt on the heterosexuality of his sen- sitive nephew, Arthur Balfour, whom he was nepotistically arranging to succeed him at No. 10. The prime minister entered into the spirit of the occasion by squirting a soda siphon down my trousers. He was a sport, old Salisbury; always the Cecil.

I proceeded on a tour of the VIP tables where I groped the admittedly aging, but still alluring, Lillie Langtry; shouted a series of bigoted, anti-Catholic remarks at G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc; assured George Bernard Shaw that his plays would not last; assured Lloyd George that he would never get Asquith's job; and informed the then Prince of Wales, later to be Edward VII, that Miss Langtry had confided to me that he was no longer up to it as an amorist. Like the man from the Mirror last week, I then mislaid my award, possibly down Marie Lloyd's cleavage. None of that lot thought

any the less of me, since by then they were all drunk, which on Shaw's part was a con- siderable feat since he was teetotal.

At the taxi rank, far from being content with an altercation with just one Guardian journalist, as that Sun man was last week, I kicked the Guardian's, in my view self-impor- tant, editor C.P. Scott right up his bottom and punched the noses of the entire leader- writing staff of the just-as-tediously liberal Pall Mall Gazette. The young Winston Churchill arrived, offering to pitch in on my side, but I told him I needed no help from a loser like him; adding, for further emphasis, that he was a competent peacetime politician but would be useless in a war. Not just one security guard but much of the Metropolitan Police was then called to restrain me. I spent the night contentedly in Bow Street, announcing myself, when answering charges of affray in court the following morning, as Kaiser Wilhelm II, which the magistrate said he had every reason to believe was an assumed name. The office paid my fine.

That is how journalists were expected to behave in my day. Those of my profession who did their best at this year's awards din- ner are to be commended for their efforts, but they must try harder next year.

Ihave never been able to think of Pinter plays, as so many of both his admirers and detractors do, as unrealistic. We read that Chekhov caught to perfection the speech of the minor Russian country gentry. Pinter is the Chekhov of the London proletariat. To me, as a Londoner from roughly the same part of the city as Pinter, the non sequiturs of the following passage from The Caretaker were what I heard all the time from rela- tives and neighbours:

You remind me of my uncle's brother ... Very much your build. Bit of an athlete. Long-jump specialist. He had a habit of demonstrating different run-ups in the draw- ing room round about Christmas time....

`You're out of luck — our leader's on paternity leave.' Why round about Christmas time? the logical middle-class mind might ask. But Londoners scorn such literalism. The char- acter does not elaborate on why that partic- ular season, but continues:

Had a penchant for nuts. That's what it was. Nothing else but a penchant. Couldn't eat enough of them. Peanuts, walnuts, Brazil nuts, monkey nuts, wouldn't touch a piece of fruitcake. Had a marvellous stopwatch. Picked it up in Hong Kong. The day after they chucked him out of the Salvation Army. Used to go in number four for Beckenham reserves . .. Had a funny habit of carrying his fiddle on his back.

The same character has another immor- tal passage:

You've got a funny kind of resemblance to a bloke I once knew in Shoreditch. Actually he lived in Aldgate . . . When I got to know him I found out he was brought up in Putney. That didn't make any difference to me.

Persons of an unimaginative, bourgeois cast of mind might object: why on earth would it make a difference to him? But the character presses on:

I know quite a few people who were born in Putney. The only trouble was, he wasn't born in Putney, he was only brought up in Putney. It turns out he was born in the Caledonian Road just before you get to the Nag's Head. His old mum was still living at the Angel. All the buses passed right by the door. She could get a 38, 581, 30 or a 38A, take her down the Essex Road to Dalston Junction in next to no time. Well, of course, if she got the 30 he'd take her up Upper Street way, round by Highbury Corner and down to St Paul's Church, but she'd get to Dalston Junction just the same in the end.

Passages like this can still be overheard on tubes and buses from a certain genera- tion. Pinter wrote The Caretaker at 30. At nearly 70, he has lost none of his gift for creating real Londoners. His new play, Celebration, captures the speech of those who have moved out to Essex and become rich: the self-made Thatcherite wealthy whom Mr Blair won over in 1997 by promising no higher taxes. It is to be doubted whether Pinter has met any of them, but he knows them. He is a genius of language as well as a genius in general. Would that there was a Pinter of the dis- tinctly non-cockney world in which Pinter now moves. Perhaps, in his next play, it will be Pinter.