DIARY ALAN WATKINS
Were you there when they crucified the Lord?' they used to sing in the Mission Hall. No, but I was when they brought down Mrs Margaret Thatcher; just as I had been when she did the same to Mr Edward Heath 15 years before. I saw her in, and I saw her out, and I do not repine. Mr John Major was almost certainly the nicest of the candidates to replace her. Of him it may truly be said that he has risen without trace. He may prove sounder on libertarian questions than Mrs Thatcher was or both his rivals seemed likely to be. Mr Michael Heseltine was none too scrupulous in his methods when dealing with Mr Clive Pont- ing and the Belgrano and with CND. Over broadcasting and official secrecy alike Mr Douglas Hurd shocked those who had curiously considered him a liberal rather than a traditional Tory. Mr Major has no known form, no previous convictions, in this as in other areas. But a man who loves cricket and whose hero was Iain Macleod cannot be wholly bad.
Few things about the Conservative elec- tion were more predictable, and more depressing, than the obsession of my col- leagues with the precise social class to which each of the candidates belonged. They could have replied that it did not matter. Or they could have chosen to provide a candid account of their origins. Instead of taking either of these courses, all three elected to play the game of lowlier-than-thou. It was perhaps played most shamelessly by Mr Hurd. He was educated at Eton and Trinity, Cambridge. He is the grandson of a knighted Conserva- tive MP. His father was one likewise, who became a life peer in 1964 and was agri- cultural correspondent of the Times from 1932 to 1958. On television Mr Hurd described his father as a 'tenant farmer' who farmed 'poor land' and was also horrors — 'a journalist'. He would not, he told us, have been able to go to his school if he had not 'won a scholarship'. Now where had I heard something very much on those lines before? It was at the Royal Courts of Justice, during a libel action of 1988 where the unsuccessful plaintiff was a front-bench Labour MP.
Iclaim paternity of 'the men in suits' from an Observer column of the mid-1980s. Not, you may notice, the men in dark suits, still less those in grey ones, which gives quite the wrong idea. As Lord Whitelaw with Lord Carrington, one of the few surviving specimens — said in mid-contest, emerging from his car the better to demon- strate his assertion, he happened to be wearing a blue suit. Just so. They can equally well or better be striped suits, the kind that chaps in White's affect. The point is that they should be Platonic suits not in the sense that they have no real existence but that they embody the essence of suits. That disposes of the objection taken by certain unphilosophical spirits: that the phrase is valueless because all Conserva- tive politicians wear suits. The more sub- stantial objection, made after my original column by Mr Bruce Anderson (who is, I hear, off to the Mail on Sunday), is that historically they have played little or no part in the removal of Conservative lead- ers. On this occasion, certainly, the suits came from within the Cabinet.
Llew Gardner, who has died at 60, was one of the pioneers of disrespectful by- election reporting when he was with the Sunday Express before 1964. He was an equally unaccommodating political inter- viewer with various television companies afterwards. His career, however, did not flourish as it should have done following his departure from Thames over a decade ago. Part of the reason lay in Llew's approach to people. As Winston Churchill remarked of F. E. Smith, he would as soon 'Man's a bit disappointing — next year I think I'll put in some petunias.' keep a live coal in his mouth as a witty saying. One Saturday night I was in a Fleet Street pub, the Falstaff, with Llew and a few colleagues. With one of them I was having what one might call a Cambridge conversation. `No, no, Bloggs wasn't at Jesus. He was at Christ's.' That sort of thing. Mr Peter Paterson, who was of our group, became restive at the turn the talk was taking and volunteered: 'I was edu- cated at the University of Life myself.' Gardner: 'Failed, I assume.' On another occasion a colleague who had served gal- lantly throughout the war was about to re-embark on a description of his experi- ences. Gardner: 'I'm sorry, Wilfred, I haven't got time to cross the Rhine tonight.' I was talking of cricket grounds: `I'm not really an Oval man.' Gardner: 'I should have thought that described you pretty accurately.'
0 ddly enough, I have come to like the Oval — I refuse to call it the Foster's Oval — much more since that exchange of long ago. It is a characteristic I share with Mr Major. At the beginning of last season I first caught a glimpse of a Pakistani bowler who looked so young that I assumed he must be qualified to play for England. After his first over I said to my neighbour: `That is faster than anything I have seen since Michael Holding in 1976.' The bow- ler was of course Wagar Younis, currently terrorising the West Indies. How do I know when a bowler is really fast? One test is that a good-length ball causes trouble not only to the batsman but to the wicket- keeper. The other is that I myself feel threatened, seated just behind the fence on a line between keeper and first slip. Wagar Younis had this effect of me.
The Surrey supporter to whom I spoke had responded non-committally. Though Surrey and Middlesex members differ per- ceptibly — it is the difference between north and south London — what they have in common is a disinclination to enter into conversation with strangers. At St Helen's, Swansea, by contrast, everyone talks all the time when Glamorgan are playing. It is the same in buses. The bottom deck of a stationary bus at Llanelli, waiting to depart for the villages, used to send up a greater level of chatter than the Garrick bar at lunchtime. My father used to regard a long train journey as an opportunity to have a general conversation in the compartment. `Now what do you do for a living?' he would inquire of fellow passengers to start the ball rolling. They would look alarmed if they were English, resigned if they were Welsh. I am sure there must be a middle way.
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