Drink

Où sont les bouteilles d’antan? For that matter, où sont les amis with whom one consumed them? These autumnally melancholic musings arose because a young friend asked me about Alan Clark. He had been reading the Diaries. Were they truthful? Was Alan really such a remarkable character? The answer was simple. An emphatic yes, on both counts. I suspect that I speak for most of his muckers when I declare that I have never met anyone who was more fun. The 1967 Yquem tasted like a Greek temple melted down in honey. Alan served it as a house wine If Alan was of the company, the conversation might well have a whiff of sulphur. But one could rely on spice and scintillation. Alan’s very walk presaged mischief.

The English language has immense resources, but the odd weakness. What, for instance, is the translation for ‘Auld lang syne’? We were discussing that profound topic while telling stories about absent friends, recalling the occasional bottle and thinking about Britain. Nick Elliott’s response to grim news was to open a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’82 A fascinating fellow called Tim Spicer, who commanded a battalion of the Scots Guards, has written a book about an even more remarkable chap called Biffy Dunderdale. Biffy was the sort of man who helped to win our nation’s wars, including the (first) Cold War. In these pages a couple of weeks ago, Charles Moore brought a colleague of Biffy’s to memory.

What goes best with a broken rib? The answer, I think, is any drink you enjoy that will not make you laugh. I was strolling along to Richmond station after spending the night with old friends. (Very Jorrocksian: ‘Where I dines, I sleeps.’) I was carrying a scruffy overnight bag containing one shirt, one pair of socks, ditto underpants and sundry toiletries. Phone rings: put down bag – and suddenly a toerag appears from nowhere, grabs the luggage and scoots off. I yell ‘Stop thief’, run a few paces and trip. Passers-by prop me up and ask if I want an ambulance: would have saved a lot of trouble if I’d said yes. Instead, I went home hurting, then managed to fall over and could not get up. Unable to raise anyone on the phone, I contacted 111, and was told to ring 999.

Most Tory MPs enjoy leadership elections. There may be an element of what the trick-cyclists call ‘displacement activity’. Equally, it is tempting to employ the cliché about rearranging the furniture on the Titanic. The Brane-Cantenac 2000 was everything that a claret lover could wish for Until 1990, the process was brief. It took only four days to elect John Major, whose team used an underground ‘bunker’ in Alan Duncan’s house as their HQ. By 1997, when the party had been grievously wounded and the election procedure extended, there were lots of gatherings which required more spacious premises – including Jonathan Aitken’s garden.

An old friend phoned. Normally cheerful, he was fed up. One of his business partners was being more than usually incompetent. ‘I told him that I’d describe him as a halfwit, if I could find the half.’ We went on to discuss another couple of friends, both good men and true, who seem doomed to imminent parliamentary defenestration. By the end of lunch, we were thoroughly benign. I was persuaded I could endure a Labour government Then there was hunting: a passion. It survived for several years under the Blair government and it seemed clear Tony had no stomach for the ban, which was half-hearted. That witty and cynical fellow Charlie Falconer said he could not understand why anyone was complaining. The antis wanted a ban and got one. The hunters wanted to go on hunting and did.

Things could have been worse. My host was determined to lunch al fresco, and after all it was late June. Yet this is England and as everyone knows, even D-Day had to be postponed for 24 hours. In the event, we were fine. The elements were kindly. The temperature did not fall below 60, the rain held off, we more or less managed to forget about politics and it would have been hard to improve on the setting. Saint Jacques, a restaurant which I have often praised, always deservedly, has a courtyard and is next to Berry Bros: so this is a sophisticatedly bacchanalian quartier. The rain held off, we forgot about politics and it would have been hard to improve on the setting The sophistication may be recent.

There was a wonderful old boy called John – Sir John – Wordie, who was a quintessential member of the establishment. A barrister, he spent much of his time defusing controversies before they had boiled over. In that enterprise, he never sought publicity, finding it much easier to dispense wise advice if no one knew who he was. An accomplished sailor from his RNVR days during the war, he was always a stalwart of nautical good and goodery – and he knew a very great deal about wine, especially port. A Texan can extract five syllables from Goddam: Go-o-o-day-um. John could do as well with port. Po-o-o-o-rt. It was a deeply reassuring sound. Whatever was going wrong with the world, as long as John was in his place, saluting the port, nothing could be as bad as it seemed.