Spectator peregrinations

A word of sympathy and encouragement .for Bill Grundy, understudy to Eamonn Andrews on the telly. For the last month or so he has been given the impossible assignment of trying to write, for Punch, a diary column as good as this one. He was originally described as -disrespectful, shameless, well-informed, opinionated and entertaining." But two weeks ago the word 'entertaining' was dropped. This is, I understand, a fiendish form of torture devised by the humourless German-born Punch editor Bill "I have ways of making you make me laugh" Davis. Each week a glistening adjective is removed until the hapless Grundy is fired. Or it could even be a German joke. Fortunately there are sounds of hearty Bavarian laughter emanating from the Greek island where Davis, in his capacity as editor of the British Airways in-flight magazine, is free-loading. He has even telephoned to say that he is amused by Grundy's column and 'entertaining' has been restored. With the silly season approaching diarists are not a happy lot.

Slip showing

Philip Kleinman, our advertising correspondent, has been writing in Campaign, the advertisers' weekly, about The Spectator's new management. He says the bit of the paper they ought to take seriously is the 'Society Today' section — which he helps to write. But, he says, they should "put more guts into tit." Is this a new formula or shoddy British workmanship?

In a sock

Havana Cigars have chosen Tom Hustler and Lord Lichfield, society photographers with the right kind of image, as two of the judges for their 'Press Picture of the Year' prize. As it happens, both of them own restaurants and so they are well-versed in the gourmet trade. So naturally they were asked at their press conference in the Savoy why restaurants mark up the price of cigars so prohibitively. Lichfield said he had very little sympathy with people who failed to carry their own cigars — after all it's not like lugging a bottle of wine around with you. At this point I noticed some pained expressions among Fleet Street's more experienced free-loaders who were looking about stiffly wondering whether the cigars which they had stuffed into their inside pockets and their underwear would survive the short walk back to the office. The thing is cigars break. Fortunately the Havana Cigar Information Centre was giving out tips (apparently the pompous practice of putting a cigar to your ear or nose or running a flame along its length is all rubbish) and the best bit of advice they gave me was to keep cigars in my sock. It's the only safe and socially acceptable place. I had never heard of this before. But next time I'm in Boodle's and I see blue smoke coming out from behind a newspaper Ill examine the protruding leg. Whether you wear clips or not this method is no good on a bicycle. It is as difficult to transport a cigar safely on a bicycle as it is to light one while the traffic lights are red.

Pro-Arab

Launching Christopher Mayhew's book, Publish it not . . . The Middle East Cover-up, the chairman of Longman's, Mr Chapple, was very anxious that I should know that they had had a letter-bomb scare that morning. There were police in the street outside. All very improbable, everyone said. This was a pro-Arab book and the Jews don't do that kind of thing. But who knows — after the recent glorification by Israel of the Stern Gang assassins of Lord Moyne — that this might not be the first fling in a new strategy of warfare against the Arabs.

1 was a little surprised that neither Mr Mayhew, or any other Arab sympathiser, has made any public comment about Lord Moyne s murderers being returned to Israel Morwenstow with a UN guard of honour. They were completely taken by surprise by this sudden gift of pro-Arab propaganda. Mayhew says he gets very tired of being rung up by the BBC before he has woken up in the morning and asked how an event he has not heard of is going to change the history of the world. I don't believe it. For one thing I think he'd quite like the BBC to ask him about his next book — a successor to Party Games, his account of the struggles inside the last Labour government. Now that he has left the Labour Party he is really going to take them apart.

Ducal occasion

-Who's that guy talking nOw?" the editor of The Spectator said rather loudly to me as the Duke of Wellington, obscured by a tent pole, started on a quiet speech in praise of the Historic Houses Association. The Duke's son, Lord Douro, standing between us, was able to answer the question and shouted at his father for good measure, in the best tradition of Islington hecklers, to "Speak up." The Duke was giving a party to raise money for country houses in a marquee outside his own stately home, Apsley House, Hyde Park Corner. The trouble with 'No 1 London,' as it's sometimes known, is that it's not a country house, situated as it is in the middle of London's biggest traffic jam. The Duke's speech was completely inaudible. 'And Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, himself no slouch when it comes to collecting noisy motorcars, suddenly abandoned his peroration saying, "I'm not competing with London airport, too." Now that all public-spirited Dukes, notably Grafton and Buccleuch, are opening their houses under pressure from Mr Healey, the Duke of Wellington looks like something of a pioneer.

Apsley House was given to the nation in the 1940s. The Iron Duke was himself something of a pioneer. Snooping around the private apartments, I noticed that he had the first bathroom in London, and a secret loo hidden behind a mock bookshelf. I noticed two future Dukes, Lord Hamilton (Abercorn) and Lord March (Richmond) snooping around too. So was Michael Heseltine and Betty Kenward (Jennifer's diary) who expressed surprise that my diary had survived for four months. And Doris Langley-Moore of the costumes museum in Bath. She said that when she tried to get a taxi to Apsley House, the driver, who must round Hyde Park Corner at least twice a day, had never heard of the place.

Ratings

I was impressed by a Daily Telegraph headline the other day which said "Ailing Mao firmly believes Nixon is a 'good man'." It shows that the Telegraph has a serious grasp of Asian political dialogue and reminds me of a conversation I once had with an Oriental potentate in a much-disputed part of Kashmir. Gul Waly Khan, a Moslem princeling of the Aga Khan, whose people were so isolated 12,000 feet up in the mountains and a week's walk beyond the last Jeep track, that he really didn't care whether he was under Indian or Pakistani Jurisdiction, was giving me a little of his philosophy — which he had learned from his transistor radio. "Heath good man, Wilson bad man, Nixon very good man, Nasser good man, Stalin very bad man, Mao very very bad man, Hitler very very very very good man," he said, collapsing in hysterics on his wicker-work bed.

Near miss

My condolences to the Mayor of Bognor Regis — Britain's contribution to the American-Soviet space effort. You will remember that by a split second the astronauts and cosmonauts failed to shake hands, as planned, as they hurtled over the quiet, famous, sunny, old twee seaside town in Sussex. How often I have narrowly missed my tryst with destiny.

French connections

Monday morning last week being the fourteenth of July, Bastille Day seemed worth celebrating. Not to me (to me it was an ordinary uncelebrated Monday morning) but to the six frogs who were on my doorstep at 7 a.m., having come over on the boat from Calais on a bank holiday day trip. "Excuse me, sir," they said as I crawled out onto the balcony in my pyjamas, "we are extremely desolated to have deranged you." It was Claude and Arnaud, the Paris musicians I met while I was over there a fortnight ago. Unknown to me they had left an enormous quantity of amplifying equipment in my basement on a previous visit with the message "I think and I hope that all these things are not too big for your house. Ouff!!"

It all seemed a good enough excuse to go to the Bastille Day dinner given by the Steak Nicole, a French restaurant in Pimlico, for people with French connections. Two detectives who went to France after Lord Lucan were there and their French connections are, to say the least, tenuous. Guests were expected to get up and speak about their illustrious French ancestry. The lady with the most illustrious ancestor, Cardinal Richelieu, said she was generally too embarrassed to talk about it. Cardinals are not supposed to breed — but she said she didn't mind mentioning it among friends. More surprisingly we were introduced to .a descendant of Joan of Arc but this was quickly corrected to "her brother Jack d'Arc." One person, apparently, had really aristocratic connections but she would only tell us about an Irish ancestor, Daniel O'Connell. A Guardian reporter, Martin Walker, bored us briefly with the history of his own family who, far from being French, had fought for England at Agincourt.

Literary life

The big-hatted ladies who pay £4 each to have a Foyle's literary lunch at the Dorchester really

got their money's worth last week — big-hearted Arthur Askey and all his playmates. They also bought his book and filled it with the signatures of Harry Secombe, Eric Morecambe, Richard Murdoch, Vera Lynn, Jimmy Jewel, Alan Melville, Jimmy Tarbuck, Derek Nimmo, Dora Bryan, Alfred Marks, Jack Warner and so on. It was a much better cast list than you would ever get at the Palladium. Jack de Manio was the chairman and straight man of this uncontrollable gathering and would have been wiser to have left the jokes to the pros. I thought that Arthur Askey, at seventy-five the oldest pro, was a lot quicker than young Morecambe, Secombe and Tarbuck. In any case it was thebld jokes that went down best. When Secombe apologised to an elderly autograph hunter afterwards for not having a copy of his own autobiography, saying, "I couldn't get the wood, you know," she muttered seriously to her friend, "Do you know it's years since I last heard that one.''' 1.Peregrine