I shall tell you about a party I went to 14 years ago. Bear with me - it does touch on contemporary affairs
Proud and pleased as I am to be contributing a diary to the new New Statesman, I do wonder if I am the right man for the job. A few years ago I was a social butterfly of the most dedicated kind, sucking the nectar from every party in society's bright flower bed. Now I value white space in the diary more highly than once I valued white pasteboard invitations - or white powder, come to that. This week I have been mostly sequestered in rural Norfolk. Since I never read newspapers (an abstinence as healthy for my soul as the abandonment of partying has been for my body), I can't even contribute to whatever debates have been raging in the press. So I shall tell you instead about a party I went to 14 years ago. Bear with me, as the service industry likes to say these days: it does touch on contemporary affairs.
Haunt of footpads
In the May of 1992 I was invited, for reasons I cannot quite recall, to Chancellor Norman Lamont's 50th birthday party. It was held at a pleasant mansion in Dorneywood, near Burnham Beeches, Bucks, once the most notorious haunt of footpads in all England, but in recent times the ex officio residence for chancellors of the exchequer. So no change there then, ho ho. Mr Lamont was in a cheerful enough mood: Black Wednesday lay four months in the future and life was good. After a fine dinner the chancellor's exceptionally likeable wife, Rosemary, showed me the Dorneywood bagatelle board. You know the game, you pull back a sprung piston to shoot a steel ball into U-shaped raised pins of varying values. Attached to the board was an ancient school exercise book, filled with the scores of previous incumbents and their eminent visitors. The highest score was held by one William Waldegrave, aged 17, visiting from nearby Eton College, I suppose. Pasted into this venerable book was a letter from Clementine Churchill: "Winston thanks you so much for sending the bagatelle board along to Downing Street which we now gratefully return. He has asked me to let you know that his highest score was 320."
It was the date of the letter that caught my eye: June 1940. While Britain's destiny hung in the balance, during the hour that Churchill himself called our finest, what was the great man doing? Playing bagatelle, a game whose very name now denotes facile triviality of the most insubstantial kind. Do we think less of him for playing pinball while Messerschmitts and Spitfires screamed in the skies above? Far from it: such insouciance is yet another feather in the Old Man's cap.
On the other side of the French windows, just ten yards from the bagatelle board, lies the Dorneywood croquet lawn. As John Prescott clears the wardrobes and fills the packing cases in that same house this week, he must surely be casting the most baleful of eyes at the hoops on the lawn and thinking himself hard done by indeed. What one bulldog could once get away with - and another now can't. I cannot but think, too, of Tenniel's illustrations for Lewis Carroll's croquet-playing Queen of Hearts. Prezza to the life.
The Third Whey
I've spent a couple of days this week in Cambridge as part of the Prince of Wales's Educational Summer School. Not very New Statesman, I know. My contribution was to reflect on 1688 And All That: in other words, the Glorious Revolution. Not so very glorious for the Irish, of course. Those who fought the English were known by the Irish Gaelic word for robber and outlaw: tóraí. It is pleasing to reflect that these "Tories" somehow evolved into a party which now officially calls itself Conservative and Unionist, exactly opposed to those original principles. The Liberal Democrats, of course, can trace themselves back to the Whigs, a word derived from the Scottish Gaelic uig, which refers to the whey drunk by whiggamore cattle-drivers. I should imagine that Liberals today are more likely to drink whey than Tories are to support Irish nationalism. Organic, naturally. What you might call the Third Whey.
On Tuesday evening, on the very lawns where young Whig Walpole and young Tory Lamont once frolicked, I played a game of croquet. How pleasant it is not to be a politician, Whig or Tory.
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