DIARY
Undoubtedly the rummest twist to the Gordievsky affair has been the allegation by Mr Ron 'Afghan' Brown, MP for Leith, that Mrs Thatcher had been using the KGB's London boss to spy on Britain's left-wing politicians. He was recalling va- rious meetings with Mr Gordievsky in a London pub and elsewhere, where the KGB chief had 'pumped' him about Labour Party affairs. In general, in fact, the Gordievsky furore might serve to reopen the unspoken question which emerged again last week from the Labour Party Treasurer Sam McCluskie's story of how the KGB had tried to recruit him in Moscow as a 'mole'. How many times have the KGB actually been successful in such efforts? For years we have been told by Soviet exiles that the KGB has a host of top-level 'moles' in public life in the West, politicians, trade union leaders, journal- ists. Yet somehow they never seem to be identified, so that if such creatures exist, it becomes a kind of private game to guess who some of them might be. I have long had my suspicions about certain journal- ists. Perhaps Mr Gordievsky can help us with a few clues?
In a quite different sense, it was hard not to conclude that the Soviet Union scored something of an own goal in kicking out one or two of the British journalists who have lived and worked for years in Mos- cow. In its news report on the expulsions last Saturday, even ITN characterised the Observer's Mark Frankland as a journalist Who had often been 'sympathetic' in 'ex- plaining the Soviet Union's point of view' and had in this sense 'served its interests'. It would be nice to think that, as a result of these sad events, our coverage of Soviet affairs may become a shade more rigorous.
The surreal spectacle of councillors from Lambeth and Liverpool being threatened by district auditors with 'per- sonal surcharge' to the tune of a quarter of a million pounds brings to mind a strange interview I had in 1975 with the district auditor for London. I had just spent several months investigating the aston- ishing explosion in housing expenditure by the London Borough of Camden, which in those days was way out in front as 'the worst of the big spenders'. Some of the instances of profligacy and inefficiency I had unearthed were so hair-raising that I had little doubt that there were ample grounds for intervention by the district auditor, on exactly the same grounds which had led him to curb a much more insignifi- cant case of Camden overspending only ten years previously. But it became clear from our interview that, in the unreal atmos- phere of the mid-1970s, the district auditor CHRISTOPHER BOOKER no longer had any stomach for such a fight. In fact it was the breakdown of this traditional safeguard against local author- ity extravagance which eventually led by various increasingly unsatisfactory twists and turns to the present Government's clumsy `ratecapping' exercise and the sight of Messrs Ted Knight and Derek Hatton being threatened with bankruptcy. The present leaders of Lambeth and Liverpool may have travelled even further down the road of lunacy than their pioneering prede- cessors in Camden in the 1970s but this is a case of trying to bolt the stable door ten years after the horses began to escape.
After Aids, the great phylloxera scare? There has been a good deal of excitement on the vine-covered hillsides of our part of Somerset at the discovery that two vineyards have the dreaded phylloxera aphid (possibly through untreated vines imported earlier this year from Germany). Local growers whose vines are grafted onto American root stocks, like Major Gillespie of North Wootton, whose wine won a European prize against top French and German growers a year or two back, are confident that Britain's burgeoning wine industry does not face a repeat of the disaster which virtually destroyed Euro- pean wine-making for two or three decades in the 19th century. But this week it has been reported from California that phyl- loxera is now spreading in vineyards sup- posedly immune, because the resistance of American vines to the plague seems to be diminishing. I trust that the Spectator's wine correspondent at the less fashionable end of Somerset is keeping a close eye on the situation.
Irecently had occasion, in the space of four days, to visit three of Britain's great cathedrals — York, Salisbury and Wells. Each of these mighty buildings presented a striking scene of bustling activity. In Wells we enjoyed an excellent lunch in the new restaurant in the cloisters, and found the nave filled with the sounds of a tuner preparing a grand piano for that night's concert. In Salisbury the colourful scene included a visiting choir practising for Evensong. At York we had the chance to visit the workshop where Peter Gibson and one of the world's leading teams of stained glass experts are painstakingly reassemb- ling the thousands of pieces of mediaeval glass cracked and splintered in the fire; while in the Minster itself, at the sound of St Peter's great bell at midday, the throng- ing crowds of tourists were momentarily silenced for a short informative speech of welcome and prayers from the pulpit. Not all the changes which have come over Britain's cathedrals in recent years may be to everyone's taste, such as the shops selling tea towels and the plastic boxes demanding entrance fees. But in the past decade or so many of these incomparable buildings have again become centres of spiritual and cultural life, in a way which would have once seemed unimaginable.
For the second weekend running, Essex tested the nerves of millions by snatching a cricket title on the last ball or two of the match — and obviously not the least factor in their superb performance has been the captaincy of that shrewd old gnome Keith Fletcher. He has again shown, as Mike Brearley did, how under the right captain a side can perform 50 per cent above its paper potential, under a poor captain 50 per cent below. Down in Somerset we are sadly aware of this in 1985. Now the Spectator cricket quiz is over I can com- ment on one of the most remarkable features of this season which has been the unprecedented spectacle of a county lying at the bottom of the county championship with two of its individual players, Viv Richards and Ian Botham, at the top of the national averages. Botham may have rein- forced his image as the larger-than-life superstar of English cricket, with his record-breaking number of sixes, his light- ning centuries and shades of McEnroe in his general behaviour (not to mention a plaque recording his feat of carrying straight to the green at the 'water jump' on the Ryder Cup golf course, equalled only by Ballesteros). But as a county captain, with two other world class players and much the same side that only a year or two back was favoured to win everything, he has been a disaster.
Fixing me with a grave look at the breakfast table, my five-year-old son Nicholas observed: 'You know, Daddy, there are lots of very terrifying things in the world.' I braced myself for whatever new horror he might have learned about from John Craven's Newsround — Aids, Star Wars, air crashes, the government reshuf- fle — and asked cautiously what he had in mind. 'The Abominable Snowman', he replied.
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