DIARY
ALASTAIR FORBES You can't win them all,' as they're always saying; and 'a prophet is not with- out honour save . . .' and all that. Save in his own family anyway. So while friends and fellow journalists, including editors past and present of this magazine, have spoken kindly to me about my first two Diaries, the only one of my seven sisters to live in London telephoned me specially to say how ghastly and shame-making they were. A favourite London niece was much of the same opinion. (Her schoolboy son, of whom I am nevertheless very fond, has been heard referring to me as 'Uncle Old Fart', an appellation I accepted in the same spirit as Owen Wister's famous 'Virginian' who warned an interlocutor 'When you call me a son-of-a-bitch, smile!') What they both seemed above all to be objecting to was my 'name dropping', clearly the worst sin in any inverted snob's book. However, my own understanding of the editor's suggestion that I should come to London for a stint on this page was along the lines of 'If you have names, prepare to drop them now!' A whole decade ago his prede- cessor rashly commissioned from A.N. Wilson an anonymous and in the event preposterously inaccurate profile of me as a 'Survivor', which I was subsequently permitted to correct at considerable but I hope entertaining length, as well as at my own very considerable expense in those pre-faxing telex days.) Already I had sensed that the editorial motive for exhum- ing me had been of the order of Browning's `And did you once see Shelley plain? And did he stop to speak to you? How strange and wonderful and true!'
Ihave been re-reading, after an interval of a score or more years, the fascinating Regency and Victoria! Reminiscences of that Name-Dropper-Royal-and-Extra- ordinary, Captain Gronow, which have just re-appeared in an excellent selection (Kyle Kathie, £17.99) by that most brilliant and readable of popular historians, Christ- opher Hibbert, upon whose wider-ranging expertise the world's most Stakhanovite manufacturer of best selling fiction, Dame Barbara Cartland, wisely relies for the background accuracy of her soft soap. Gronow was actually at Eton with Shelley who, barely a month before he drowned, was gossiping with him about the girl who had served in the school 'sock' (tuck) shop, `the loveliest I ever saw, and I loved her to distraction'. Another of their schoolfriends `was known at Eton by the name Ball only' though later he added another, a coinci- dence Old Etonian Douglas Hurd might even care to draw to the attention of the Prime Minister, perhaps during a pause in his tutorials on such subjects as the Sykes- Picot Agreements and After. Gronow once
caught Byron, whose egocentricity always depressed him, in bed with his hair in curlers, much to the embarrassment of the poet who confessed to being 'as vain of my curls as any girl of sixteen'.
Apropos vanity and curls, I was sorry to catch a glimpse, at a London book- launching party last week, of Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, whose own pretty locks appear to have been rather roughly raped by his twice-married middle-aged 'Bet- rothed', in a sort of half-botched Delilah job. Still, as his admirable and forthright French first wife informed me, in a con- versation shortly before her bravely accepted death in which, inter alia, she pityingly referred to her incurably vain husband's `sottisier hebdomadaire', (i.e. weekly dose of nonsense) he last year spent a cool £15,000 fitting himself up with a dazzling new set of teeth, just the sort of information Gronow would have delighted in, as I do myself.
With Ramadan under way I have been leafing through my yellowing cuttings from the Worsthorne opus over several years in which, while Iraq was still receiv- ing most favoured client nation status from the super and not-so-super powers of West and East alike, there long ago appeared the first of the incorrigibly ignorant and prejudiced, not to say Hitlerianly Herren- volkisch and racist, attacks on Muslims in general and Middle Eastern ones in par- ticular. These have since last summer earned him so much well deserved con- tempt from the Sunday Telegraph's better- educated readership that he was finally forced to publish some of their protests in the little comment section still left under his control. In the long months that admir- able coalition Commander-in-Chief, General Norman Schwarzkopf, demanded before mounting his brilliantly successful liberating Kuwait ground action, the bloodthirsty screams of Don Quixote Wor- sthorne and his Sancho Panza sidekick Johnson for an immediate August 'surgical strike' (modelled no doubt on the Tripoli one that missed Gaddafi but 'took out' the French embassy instead) managed to get forgotten but not by me. Neither of them so much as barked in the night when the Iraqis leaked Ambassador Glaspie's farewell July green light to Saddam which, even after her emergence last week from purdah to face polite Congressional inves- tigation, still looks to me like an impeach- able dereliction of duty by President Bush and his aspiring 1996 successor, Secretary Baker. That is not to say that, if the President had not been in such a trigger- happy hurry, the sudden welcome quasi- unity in the United Nations might not have made of his 'New World Order' something more than just an advertising slogan for a belated Pax Americana unlikely to be long sustained by an American electorate who must pay for it. As I overheard a Whig duke with an impeccable military record not long ago observing, 'Wars are like romances, easier to get into than to get out of'. Incidentally, I suppose it is apt that Mr Frank Johnson who has been the foremost critic of Mr Major for being 'nice' has never run the slightest risk of being called that himself.
Iam off home to the Alps, not, I hope `by way of Kensal Green', as in Chester- ton's poem, but all the same by way of the cardiac unit of a hospital, mindful of what the 98-year-old French Rothschild lady said to the doctor who had told her he couldn't make her young again, `No, I don't want to be that, but I want to continue to grow old'. Quite. All the same, if I should succeed in that, I shall remem- ber and echo what Fontenelle said on his 100th birthday, 'Oh, to be 70 again!'
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