DIARY
GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT Well before Ascot and the Lord's Test, this year's Silly Season seems to have been and gone in the shape of Mr Hesel- tine's bid for greatness. He can still be heard muttering about the environment and the European Club, but he has busted flush written all over him. At the time, I wondered whether the Heseltine Chal- lenge wasn't got up by a dirty tricks department at No. 10 on Charles II's principle: 'They'll never kill me, Jamie, to make you king.' The prospect of Mr Heseltine as prime minister was surely so appalling as to make the most hardened anti-Thatcherite hesitate. But that is to underestimate the fathomless stupidity of Tory MPs. Mr Heseltine himself isn't stupid, even if he does not have an interesting or original mind (how many politicians do?). He is good at getting things done if he is told what to do, and he possesses a certain low cunning. I was sorry that none of the more or less admiring profiles which appeared at the time of the Challenge mentioned those of my favourite Heseltine stories which illustrate this aspect of his personality: the butter and the margarine, say, or Nick Tomalin's ex- penses. His trouble is that he is, how shall we say, unconvincing. He is quite obvious- ly not what he seems — or, more to the point, what he would like to seem. He served rather briefly in the Welsh Guards and often wears a Brigade tie, maybe imagining that he looks the part. But he always makes me think of the scene where Mr Jorrocks screams at 'You 'air-dresser on the chestnut' who was thrusting over hounds. "Hairdresser," said the man turning in a fury. "I am an officer in the Ninety-first Regiment." "Then, you hoffic- er in the Ninety-first Regiment wot looks like an 'air-dresser, 'old 'ard." ' Calling dogmatic communists in Mos- cow 'conservatives', which enrages some Conservatives, isn't hard to explain. There is no very convenient way of distinguishing between Mr Gorbachev and his foes. 'Con- servatives' may not display much mental acuity, but I doubt whether it displays political prejudice either. All the same, some of the resulting turns of phrase deserve to be collected. BBC reporters are the best, not because they are all pinkoes but because they are ad-libbing without time to think. I liked the phrase 'hardline conservatives and opponents of free enter- prise' from a correspondent in Moscow on the radio the other day. Could they be what we call Wets? But the prize is still held by Mr Malcolm Haslett speaking on Today (where else?) when he described the opposition to Mr Gorbachev from 'a group of hard-line reactionaries, also sort of Russian nationalists, right-wing traditional communist sort of people'. Yes, of course, those sort of people.
ow very singular,' said Beecham when introduced to a violinist called Ball, one of his lines given a new airing on last Sunday's programme with Mr Timothy West playing the conductor. How very singular some people find the word 'media', and how this annoys other people. The word is of course the plural of 'medium', and should be treated as a plural if one were writing Latin. But one isn't, and here I am on the side of the permis- sives and progressives. English is a rough and ready language, and a magpie which picks up words from other languages and adapts them to its own rudimentary gram- mar. We already singularise other classical plurals. At least, you may say, `Salsabil's stamina are enough to win the St Leger if she runs in it', or, 'The agenda are ready for the meeting,' but I know I don't. 'Media' is an unlovely word but now indispensable, supplanting 'the press' for obvious reasons. On Saturday morning recently I bridled as I read in the paper that 'the media has reacted' to something or other. A few minutes later a critic talking on Record Review ended with the words, 'The recording is available in all three mediums' (meaning LP, cassette and CD), and bridled again. But if you think about it those forms are both natural and right. 'The media have reacted . . .' is unidioma- tic, and 'all three media' is pedantic. No, from now on the media is the message.
Returning from Italy recently I learned something I didn't know before about '/'m a drug EARL, actually.'
London taxis. This pleased me, as a keen student of our cabbies and their ways. Keen, and on the whole admiring: most of them are reasonably helpful and efficient, if not always such scintillating conversa- tionalists as they suppose, and they do at least know their way, a contrast to the monoglot (but not in English) New York taxi-driver who is unaware that 71st Street lies somewhere between 70th and 72nd. Anyway, rather than use the long-term car park at Heathrow — a splendiferous rip-off of its own — we had left the jamjar near Egham, which is about seven miles or 20 minutes from Terminal 2. When, intending to collect it, we reached the head of the queue at the cab rank, the first cabby who stopped said that our journey would cost £35: the address was outside the M25 (it isn't), and thus the metropolitan area anywhere in which taxis are obliged to take fares. We discussed the matter succinctly, and I asked the next cabby. He said the trip would cost £30, and produced a little printed sheet of recommended fares to prove his point. The third and most ami- able driver said £25, which I paid, although I could scarcely help noticing that he turned on his metre, and it said £15.60 when we arrived. At least there was the consolation of knowing that by bargaining among the three in the best traditions of the souk had saved the price of a more than decent bottle from the Wine Club. Of course cabbies can't be expected to take anyone who hails them to Durham or Exeter from St James's Street, nor from the airport either. But Heathrow is a good run for the lads' money, or rather someone else's, and it would not be unreasonable if taxis plying there were obliged to go up to ten miles, say, in any direction, on the clock.
Diarists on this page seem to have drink on the brain, which is better than water, I suppose. Soda and tonic which I mentioned last week are one problem, tomato juice another. Some time ago Mr Nicholas Coleridge complained here about the disappearance from the shops of Cirio, much the best brand of tomato juice, without which his Bloody Mary was a poor thing. For once I have some constructive advice. It is true that Cirio for some reason no longer sends tomato juice from Italy, but you can still buy the same firm's tinned tomatoes. What you do is to take a tin of whole or, easier, chopped tomatoes, and put the contents through a hand food mill (not an electric processor) to liquefy and de-pip. What you get is the richest and most succulent tomato juice — and then the best Bloody Mary — ever tasted. I pass on this discovery as what may be my only contribution to civilisation in the 1990s.
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