DIARY MAX HASTINGS
It is often suggested that newspapers are very good at abusing governments, but not so good at producing better ideas of their own. Prime Minister, I have a brainwave. Make Mr Nicholas Soames chairman of the Conservative Party. No, the silly season has not yet begun. I mean it. Many of the prob- lems of politicians, not to mention those of the royal family, stem from the fact that they have lost the art of making people feel good. Many ministers simply do not know how to please, to divert, to flatter an audi- ence. This may not be the principal criteri- on for running a department of state, but it is surely the essential characteristic needed in a party chairman. Soames sometimes used to be mistaken for a buffoon. In reali- ty, he is a shrewd and astute performer, both in the House of Commons and out of it. Most important of all in this context, however, is his ability to lift the mood in a room the moment he walks into it. His presence makes people happier, funnier, friendlier — even if they do need a rest after half an hour or so. Today, the govern- ment front bench is crammed with worthy functionaries, and its popularity is at an all- time low. Desperate situations call for des- perate measures. Mr Major would surprise and delight a host of Tories by doing some- thing as unexpected as elevating Soames. He would do wonders for the morale of the party faithful, out in the country. I have heard it suggested that Lord Hesketh is an alternative possibility for this role. The Lord, impressive though he is, looks a marginally less weighty figure than Soames, before luncheon at least. But either of them could give the Tories that ingredient sadly missing from the present government top team: a sense of fun, of enjoying their politics in the manner of bell-ringer Hogg almost 30 years ago. Showmanship — that is the word, and until the Tories can redis- cover it their councils will never shine.
An item on the agency wire caught my eye last week, about a British backpacker who was killed in crossfire between police and bandits in Brazil. One of the penalties Of being brought up in a fundamentally Peaceful bourgeois society is that most of our children are relatively ill-equipped, psy- chologically, for their early encounters with the world beyond the pale. When I hear of intrepid young voyagers setting off to drive across Africa, I always hope they under- stand that they are setting off not into an adventure park, but into a continent where fairness and reason play small part, if one strays even a few miles from the well-trod- den tourist trails. As a young and innocent foreign correspondent, for a while I wan- dered blithely among the host of teenagers clutching kalashnikovs in Africa and the Middle East, armoured by my middle-class conviction that if I had paid my taxes, drove on the right-hand side of the road and was polite to policemen, nothing very bad could happen to me. Gradually, like most people who ply my trade, I came to terms with the frightening reality, that in the right — or rather wrong — circumstances any one of those armed children could shoot me with impunity. It is not reporting wars alongside armies, as in Vietnam or the Falklands, that is really dangerous. It is working or even merely travelling alone in those vast areas of the globe where the foreigner is at the mercy of a whimsical, arbitrary local society in which sudden death is a com- monplace. When first one drives a car in the Third World, one imagines that although everybody seems to drive like maniacs, they know what they are doing. They do not, of course. I was in five or six bad smashes in 'my foreign corresponding days, mostly as a passenger. Several of my friends and colleagues died in unheroic pile-ups on assignment. When my own chil-
dren go travelling, as I hope they will, I shall be reassured by the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of the young voyage all over the world without anything unto- ward happening to them. But I shall drum into them again and again the message that abroad is another country.
Awhile ago, I was discussing with one of our best writers, himself a novelist, the unreadability of many best-selling modern novelists — Rushdie, Amis fits, Ackroyd etc. This was just the subject, I suggested, for a provocative Saturday weekend front in our organ. Readers of the Daily Tele- graph would enjoy a sharp personal guide to contemporary writing. It would be a good talking point, rather in the same way that it is salutary to compare what a buyer can get for £5,000 from any Christie's or Sotheby's sale of Victorian paintings, and what the same money will get you from the Summer Exhibition, God help us. My com- panion entirely agreed. He would be the perfect man to write it, I said. 'Oh gosh, no,' he said, fluttering dismissively. 'I couldn't possibly. I have to meet these peo- ple all the time.' There really is a London literary coterie, and it wields remarkable power, not by any kind of misbehaviour, but merely by creating a reluctance among aspiring literati to say an unkind word about the principal members of the club. I can think of one literary biography, in par- ticular, which I have heard many people declare privately that they found impossible to finish, but which was received with rap- turous reviews on its publication. I shall try to persuade our management that we should fund a new foreign posting. A dis- tinguished critic will be established incom- municado on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, where he or she will live very com- fortably, and review the books of specially popular London literary figures whom he or she will never be allowed to meet.
Anybody who supposes the Prime Min- ister is a man of wholly equable tempera- ment has obviously never heard him talk about the Right. The leak of his remarks to Michael Brunson about the legitimacy of three of his Cabinet may even do him a bit of good with those who welcome evidence of shades other than grey. A few years ago, I was chatting to a wartime officer of the Guards Tank Brigade about the Normandy campaign. He was running through the roll- call of his comrades in arms: 'Then there was that chap Runcie. Tough bugger. When he became Primate, I said to Willie Whitelaw, "Isn't it nice that at least we have an Archbishop of Canterbury who we know says f—?"'
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