Tile Questing Voila S t Stephen's Club, the venerable sluicing hole
in Queen Anne's Gate, lately auctioned off a number of its art works to its members. Among the lots on offer were photographs of recent Tory leaders, which allowed, as it were, a freemarket valuation of their relative standing among the club's traditionally Toryish membership. According to one present, 'There was lively bidding for Lady Thatcher; Churchill fetched £200 or so; William Hague fetched around 20 quid; and John Major a bit less. Nobody at all bid for lain Duncan Smith.' The club's Lance Mawby assures me, however, that 'all the political pictures were hotly contested', but says it would be 'inappropriate' to discuss specific prices. Did an eleventh-hour bidder intervene to save the club from having to leave IDS hanging on the wall?
The very first round of War Cant Bingo has produced a housey-housey. This week's featured phrase: 'first casualty'. Many newspapers have warned their readers that the first casualty of war is 'truth', but others have been more imaginative. Their suggestions have included: the United Nations (Daily Mail); the Fire Brigades Union (Andy Gilchrist); the film director Jawed Wessel (Esquire); Tina Brown (Evening Standard having another stab); Robin Cook (Daily Telegraph and Daily Star); good television (Sunday Telegraph); accurate, meaningful accounting (Evening Standard yet again); the stock market (Scotland on Sunday); debut novels and literary fiction
(Observer); bare flesh (a rueful Daily Express); ITN News Channel's viewing figures (Daily Star tries again); RI:SE (People columnist Marina Hyde); and my wee telly show (Tam Cowan, a Scottish pundit whining about the cancellation of his weekly football programme). Well done to all, and a special commendation to the Independent, which identified five different first casualties of war in little over a week. For the record, they were: truth (at least twice), common sense, UN Resolution 687, and Andy Reed, former parliamentary aide to Margaret Beckett. Oh, and imaginative English prose.
At a time when we are rehearsing .terrorist attacks in the capital, stocking up on smallpox vaccine, and fretting that a supervirus will wipe out one person in ten, it's reassuring to hear of a
government agency with its eye on the ball. The FSA has issued a communique warning us against eating raw oysters — a practice which is responsible, according to the FSA's own figures, for as many as three cases of food-poisoning a year. In these circumstances it's customary to consult an expert on whether this is the Nanny State Gone Mad. The acknowledged authority in the field is the Labour MP, Sion Simon, who boasts of having eaten 52 native oysters in a single lunchtime session at Wiltons. 'It's nonsense, is his judgment. 'I won't be put off eating oysters at all.' A brave stand on principle, and a sure vote-winner in his Birmingham constituency, to boot.
What manner of man is General Sir Mike Jackson? A gossip columnist who once claimed that the Chief of the General Staff insisted on 'Mike' because of a traumatic early television interview in which his hosts had hired a Michael Jackson impersonator to moonwalk around his chair received a highly galvanising personal phone call on the morning of publication. But he is capable of self-mockery. Old messmates remember a long and bibulous regimental dinner, some years ago, at which Sir Mike was informed at a late hour that his wife was waiting outside in the car to take him home. He said goodnight to the assembled company, and left the mess. A few moments later, the door slammed open and Sir Mike marched at the double back into the middle of the room and stood rigid to attention. A hush. He saluted and barked, 'Confined to spare bedroom! Two weeks!' With which he turned on his polished heel and marched out into the night.
The war between Jack Straw and Leeds University student union is over. The
students — who banned Mr Straw from their union building two years ago for being too liberal, or too illiberal. or some such — have climbed down. The Foreign Secretary, a former NUS president, will be welcomed again to drink at the student bar. He, in turn, has given an exclusive eve-of-war interview to the Leeds Student. It's great stuff. Mr Straw nails the Leftist Lie that Britain is 'America's poodle' — 'Don't you know about poodles? They're quite wilful animals with brains of their own' — before moving on to his duties as honorary vice-president of Blackburn Rovers, a role previously held by Lady Thatcher. Could their elimination from the FA Cup be the legacy of Years of Tory Misrule? 'I remember being cheered up one blustery evening canvassing, the first time I stood in Blackburn,' he says, 'by a man who said there was a Curse of Thatcher that had been put on the town. Ever since she had become honorary vice-president the team had lost every game. It was our worst period.'
The rapid-response squad dispatched to Harold Pinter's residence to wash the poor old boy's mouth out with carbolic soap may soon be seeing action again, in the west London eyrie of the art critic Brian Sewell. 'I recall hunger, winters of deep cold, clothes outgrown and
patched. . . . 'he wrote last week in a moving article about the second world war, before wandering off the point a little. 'The discovery and development of the various sexual pleasures of the boy — and a certain urgency shared with many of my peers at school — in satisfying them. . . . Only paragraphs later, he's at it again: 'We sabotaged almost all attempts to teach us during air raids by removing the light bulbs from the shelters, and in the dark we spent countless hours engaged in mutual masturbation, occasionally whole days of it, infinitely preferable to mathematics.' Remember, Brian, an art critic's eyesight is his livelihood.
Arecent gathering of 15 diplomats, one from each EU country, considered the postwar fate of the Prime Minister, once the darling of European diplomacy. Had he blown it? Did he have any hope of succeeding to some plush EU president job, after standing up for Bush and America? Silence. Then the Greek delegate slowly dragged his forefinger across his throat, and made a sound. I'm not sure if it was Greek, but it was horrible.
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