DIARY
ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR Ihave been sent the summer newsletter of the Bath Preservation Trust, which reveals (among many other interesting things) that one of the Trust's proudest achievements in recent months has been to stop the construction of a ski slope in Horsecombe Vale on the outskirts of the city. What an absurd thing for anybody to want to do, to build a ski slope in Bath! But perhaps this is not untypical of the sort of threats that conservationists have to face nowadays. We are told by the Government that we should not mock the leisure and tourism industries or consider them in any way inferior to the manufacturing indus- tries for which Britain was once famous. But if a bit of landscape is going to be desecrated, I would personally much rather it were done by a new factory than by some ridiculous ski slope. The idea of clever, public-spirited people like Michael Briggs, the Trust's chairman, having to devote much time and energy to stopping Bath being ruined by a ski slope is too depressing to contemplate. But that is the way things have become. Great new roads are gouged through beautiful countryside for no better purpose than to speed the progress of weekend trippers towards the sea. It is destruction wrought for the most frivolous of purposes.
0 ne has to forgive poor old Lord Denning for his dotty remarks to The Spectator about Sir Leon Brittan, but what is one to make of the following defence of him? 'Lord Denning was in fact trying to make a perfectly sensible point about Leon Brittan "telling us what to do with our English law". If someone is of foreign origin, he is unlikely to have the same feeling for our history and institutions as we have, is he? When it comes to their abandonment, it follows that Sir Leon's views — and that of others of foreign origin, like Nigel Lawson — should be appropriately discounted.' It is a long time since I have read anything quite so creepy and awful. Taking these words at face value (and I would not dare to delve any deeper), I find their meaning either un- clear or, where it is not, in direct contradic- tion of one's own everyday experience. What does the author mean by 'someone of foreign origin'? Sir Leon was born in Britain. So was Nigel Lawson and, before him, his father, who was educated at Westminster. Is Nigel's son Dominic, the editor of this journal, also a person 'of foreign origin'? Will his children be 'of foreign origin' too? When will all this foreignness finally be expurgated? But quite apart from that, it is an observable fact that people of genuinely foreign origin — that is, people who were born abroad but have made Britain their home — are
often the stoutest defenders of this coun- try's identity and traditions, far more so than most of the natives. (One need only consider the example of Sir Claus Moser, born in Berlin but as patriotic an English- man as one could hope to find). I will resist following these words to what seem to me to be their logical conclusion, but I was shocked to find them published in so respectable a paper as the Daily Mail and under so prestigious a byline as that of its City Editor, Andrew Alexander.
Last week I was walking down Frith Street in Soho and practically bumped into someone who, for a moment, struck me as looking just what Jeffrey Bernard might look like if only his health were a little better but who then turned out to be the well-known actor Frank Finlay. Another thing that struck me about him was the fact that, although it was very hot and he wasn't wearing a jacket, he did have on a pink- and-green-striped Garrick Club tie. Now there's a funny thing for you! Whereas the wearing of old school ties and the like has never been more out of fashion (it came as a real shock, for example, to see Lord Hanson wearing an Old Etonian tie on television the other day), the great excep- tion appears to be the Garrick Club tie which is worn by many of the club's most fashionable members. Wherever you go, you see people proudly wearing it among them such distinguished figures as Sir Robin Day, Melvyn Bragg, Peter Jenk- ins, and Andreas Whittam Smith, to name a few that spring instantly to mind. Frank Muir wore a Garrick Club bow-tie at his daughter's wedding in Tuscany last June, while his new son-in-law, the writer and journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft, had a Gar- rick Club ribbon in his Panama hat. The Sunday Telegraph's deputy editor, Frank Johnson, was wearing one in the photo- graph taken for the Observer Magazine to mark his nomination as the diarists' favourite diarist. What is the explanation • 'I had no idea you were an Old Etonian.'
of the tie's popularity? Maybe its salmon and cucumber colours have a Spring-in- Park-Lane, Burlington Bertie feel about them and appeal to people with flam- boyant tendencies. Maybe the tie is thought to add a touch of raffishness to the wearer while at the same time emphasising his respectability. I really do not know. But I find the whole thing very strange. After all, London clubs pride themselves on their discretion, and it seems to go against this tradition for members to parade the fact of their membership in public. One thing the tie certainly does is to undermine the notion, advanced by Andrew Neill during his notorious libel action against Peregrine Worsthorne, that there is such a thing as a 'Garrick Club mafia', for one important characteristic of the mafia is that its mem- bers like to deny that their club even exists.
Amost peculiar article appeared in the last issue of the Sunday Telegraph — so peculiar that, had it been published at the appropriate time, I would automatically have assumed it to be an April Fool's Day hoax. Its theme was the interesting fact that all the major salmon-fishing records are held by women rather than men. But that was not the peculiar aspect of the article. The peculiar bit was the theory of a Glasgow University professor, discussed with great respect and seriousness by that distinguished expert on country matters, Duff Hart-Davis, that the reason for women's triumphs in this field could be that salmon find them sexually attractive. According to Professor Peter Behan, quoted approvingly by Mr Hart-Davis, 'It seems quite possible that they [salmon] could sense the sex hormones of women and be attracted to them.' Can this really
• be true? Nowadays one must be prepared to believe almost anything, but this stretch- es one's credulity a bit. In any case, the article (which, I have to admit, was com- pulsive reading) should encourage more women to follow the examples of the Queen Mother and Diana Rigg and take up fishing seriously, knowing that they have a built-in advantage over members of the opposite sex. Talking of whom, I was surprised to hear from Max Hastings, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, the other day that he has become addicted to fishing and now prefers it to shooting. As some- body who knows nothing about fishing at all, I had always associated it with people of a patient and reflective disposition rather than with someone as notoriously restless and short-fused as Max. When I asked him what the attraction of it was, he replied that every time he cast his line he was convinced that a fish would take it. Taking all these things into consideration, I think it unlikely I will ever take up fishing.
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