Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The curse of riches

When the second half of the 19th century began, South Africa was barely even a geographical expression, as Metternich had contemptuously called Italy. It certainly wasn’t a country, but merely an ill-defined area which included two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, two British colonies, the Cape and Natal, and a number of African principalities. The British had acquired the Cape from the Dutch during the Napoleonic wars not quite in a fit of absence of mind, but with little enthusiasm, and although the Cape of Good Hope itself was of great strategic importance, commanding the passage to India and the Far East, James Stephen of the Colonial Office unpresciently called the lands of the interior ‘the most sterile and worthless in the whole Empire’.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Dropping himself in the soup

One of Richard Nixon’s salient characteristics was his clumsiness. No one ever called him a man of the Left politically, but in the other figurative sense he was quite unusually gauche or linkisch. By the last grim days of his presidency that might have been explained by the martinis he was downing as if they were mineral water, but even sober he was always accident-prone. He bloodily cracked his forehead getting into a motor-car, he stopped serving soup at White House dinners after spilling it down his shirtfront, and, when asked to look in on a Cabinet meeting by Harold Wilson, President Nixon upset an inkwell on the hallowed table at No. 10. This gaucherie was not merely physical.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A tale of treachery

When The Spectator recently said goodbye to 56 Doughty Street, we said goodbye to more than three decades of memories. Whatever else we were any good at under Alexander Chancellor’s editorship, we knew how to throw a party, from the great sesquicentennial ball in 1978 to the summer garden parties to the Thursday lunches. Among other happy moments in that dining room perched giddily at the top of the building I remember a ludicrous exchange on biblical topography between Enoch Powell and Auberon Waugh; or Richard Cobb, the great historian of France, waking from a post-prandial nap with the words that he must get the 3.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’

When the library of V. S. Pritchett was sold off after his death some years ago, I bought a few books as a mark of homage, among them H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I’d possessed other copies, but this was a first edition, and while I was thumbing it idly one day I noticed that it was published in 1926. I then also noticed that The King’s English, which he wrote with his brother F. W. Fowler, was published in 1906, and these anniversaries seem to have passed unnoticed. A hundred years on, and eighty years on, have there been more useful and influential books of their kind in our time?

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A lesson still worth learning

Late in 1951, shortly after Winston Churchill had returned to Down- ing Street, with Sir Anthony Eden back at the Foreign Office also, there was an animated conversation, recorded by Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh of the Foreign Office, who was present. At the end of a bibulous evening, Prime Minister told Foreign Secretary how to deal with the Arabs, beginning with the troublesome Egyptians: Rising from his chair, the old man advanced on Anthony with clenched fists, saying with the inimitable Churchill growl, ‘Tell them that if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should never have emerged.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary – 28 January 2006

‘To my knowledge, in my lifetime three prime ministers have been adulterers,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1963, ‘and almost every Cabinet has had an addict of almost every sexual vice.’ Another pious Christian put it statistically higher: of the 11 prime ministers he had known, Gladstone said, seven had been adulterers. Mark Oaten’s addiction might have seemed a little outré to the GOM and Waugh, but neither of them was suggesting that private irregularity was a disqualification from public life, and it was Gladstone who had the last word at the time Parnell’s career was ended by the divorce scandal in 1890: ‘What, because a man is called leader of a party, does that constitute him a censor and a judge of faith and morals? I will not accept it.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The perils of peace

In 1945, Europe lay prostrate after the greatest and most terrible war in history. More than 35 million people had been killed, Tony Judt says (other estimates are even higher), with combatant deaths easily outnumbered by civilian; whole countries were starving, scores of cities were razed. That was not what optimistic souls — or maybe anyone — had foreseen in the first decade of the century, when Europe seemed to be living through an age of peace, rising prosperity and increasing freedom which promised to last for ever. That happy century from Waterloo to the Marne had ended literally with a bang in August 1914.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Sardonic genius

On the morning of 13 August 1985 I was at my desk at the London Evening Standard when Mary Kenny rang; she had left a message the previous evening on my answering machine at home which I had failed to pick up. Shiva Naipaul had held his 40th birthday party in the spring. Less than a week earlier, he had rung and suggested lunch, which I couldn’t make. Now Mary told me that he had died the day before. Shiva had always been afraid of death. In that respect alone it had come to him mercifully, when he was struck by a coronary thrombosis while sitting alone in his flat in Belsize Park. But what was merciful for him was awful for his wife Jenny, his son Tarun, and a group of friends who were more devoted to him than he may ever have quite known.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Driven cyclist

Pau, France Until 1981 no American even so much as rode in the Tour de France. Since then an invading fleet has crossed the Atlantic to dominate what was once a European sport, and a race whose very name is its country’s proud standard. First of the Yanks was Greg LeMond, who won the Tour in 1986, then Bobby Julich, and more recently Tyler Hamilton. After his Olympic triumph last year he is now in disgrace, charged with the faintly ghoulish offence of ‘blood-doping’, transfusing someone else’s blood, although nothing can erase his heroism in the great centennial Tour of two years ago, riding for three weeks in agony from a cracked collarbone. But Lance Armstrong is in special case — among cyclists, or sportsmen, or heroes.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The man who knew ‘everyone’

Not long after Alexander Chancellor had been appointed editor of The Spectator in 1975, and had then lightheartedly or pluckily taken me on to his small crew at Doughty Street, we had lunch at Bertorelli’s with David McEwen and a great friend of his: a man once met not easily forgotten. He was imposing or even overbearing; loud, handsome in a rather blatant way, charming in intermittent flashes, much given to malicious anecdote and reminiscence. This was my first encounter with Alastair Forbes, who has died at 87, and is still remembered by staff as well as readers of The Spectator with a mixture of amusement, irritation and awe. In his late fifties at the time, Ali was kicking his heels; and although I might not have met him before, almost everyone else apparently had.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Defeat and betrayal

When Paul Foot died last July, he was more widely and deeply mourned than any other journalist for years past, apart perhaps from his great friend Auberon Waugh. Born in 1937, he was a contemporary of the gang who founded Private Eye (and whose mortality rate has been frightening: few of the original group made it to 70, and many not even to 60). Although he wrote over the years for many papers, he always returned as if by instinct to Private Eye. He occupied a special place there, the proverbial piano player in the brothel. When anyone complained about the spiteful tittle-tattle or mean-spirited jokes (which is of course what people buy the magazine for), ‘Footnotes’ could be held up in reply.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Poor Jack is dead

Somebody once said that the English don’t really like animals, they just dislike children. It was a good line, better than Cyril Connolly’s characteristically over-elaborate ‘Animal-love is the honey of the misanthrope’: our attitude to animals is illogical, deeply hypocritical and too often emotionally false. We ban (or they do) the hunting of wild foxes, while we breed 20 million pheasants artificially every year to be shot, and inevitably sometimes winged and left to die. We pass laws (or they do) making cruelty to goldfish a criminal offence, while the loathsomeness of fish farming is added to the horrors of factory farming.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Death to Iraqis, not to foxes

In the scheme of things, it may not greatly matter whether fox-hunting survives in England. We live in a world of woe and suffering, of pestilence, poverty and war, where millions die each year from hunger or violence, where a vast crisis in western Asia threatens to erupt catastrophically. A sense of proportion should tell us that the future of a traditional country sport enjoyed by barely a quarter of a million people in a damp little island off the north-western corner of Europe cannot be of the highest importance. And yet the hunting controversy is also like a great sheet of lightning which has lit up the whole political landscape in all its horrible detail.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The end of the Etonians

Forty years ago today, The Spectator published perhaps the most important and influential article ever to appear in its pages. That is a high standard. R.W. Seton-Watson’s reports before 1914 condemning ethnic oppression may well have led indirectly to the postwar dismemberment of Hungary, for better or worse. And in a leader, headed ‘On the side of liberty’, to mark this magazine’s hemiocentenary in 1978, the Times was flattering enough to say that The Spectator was then in the vanguard of a new libertarian spirit, which would (in the event) help Margaret Thatcher to her victory the following year.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary – 10 January 2004

Six months can be an awfully long time in politics. When I wrote here only last July that the Tories knew in their hearts they could never win an election under Iain Duncan Smith, few of them cared to admit that publicly. Even now, when the Tory coup has an eerie inevitability about it with hindsight, how many people can honestly say they guessed a year ago that Michael Howard would become leader by the year’s end? He has been compared with Disraeli; I don’t suppose many Tories remember John Bright’s words at the time of Dizzy’s accession to the Tory leadership. It was ‘a triumph of intellect and courage and patience and unscrupulousness in the service of a party full of prejudices and selfishness and wanting in brains’.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A ruthless ally

One of the paradoxes of our age is that the hereditary principle is in eclipse everywhere except the first great republican democracy. With all our faults, we love our house of peers no more, and there are no longer any political dynasties in England (unless you count Benn) or elsewhere in Europe. But the last American presidential election was contested between the son of a former president and the son of a former senator; while the most famous American president of what one of his vice- presidents called the century of the common man was a rich patrician who grew up as far as could be imagined from the proverbial log cabin.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary – 5 July 2003

On Saturday, I shall be beside the Eiffel Tower, hoping to see David Millar win the Prologue of the centennial Tour de France. Until last year, I'd long followed the Tour at a distance, but never in person. Then I was asked to write a history of the race, and to cover it for the Daily Mail, subsequently transferring to the Financial Times on not quite Beckhamical terms. My reinvention as a sportswriter – FT columnist, Tour historian, not to say lecturer on sport in English history at the University of Texas – has surprised me as much as anyone, but very enjoyable it is. The Tour in particular is the most extraordinary of all sporting events, and anyway, if one is going to cover any such event, France is the country to do it in.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary – 18 January 2003

When the Crimean war began in 1854, the prime minister was Lord Aberdeen, who carried a deep burden of guilt. Years later he was asked to pay for the rebuilding of a church on his estate, and pleaded King David's unworthiness: 'But the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Thou hast shed blood abundantly and has made great war: thou shalt not build an house unto my name.' When the Boer war began in 1899, the prime minister was Lord Salisbury, who felt intense misgivings: 'We have to act upon a moral field prepared for us by Milner and his Jingo supporters ...and all for people whom we despise and for territory that will bring no profit and no power to England.' And when the Iraq war begins in 2003?