Another Voice

Tuesday, 7th April 2009

The spirits of Spectator editors past battled within me as I embarked on a criminal act

What came over me? I’m not a natural lawbreaker and was never a rebel as a youth. I deplore poll-tax rioters, eco-rioters and every lawless protest against supposed injustice, and read with awe of Charles Moore’s defiant stand against the TV licence people, wondering at the desperado our one-time Spectator editor has in later years become.

But it was with two other editors of this magazine very present in my imagination, that my (to me) astonishing moment of criminal madness occurred.

I was coming back from dinner in Chelsea with Virginia Johnson, Frank Johnson’s widow. I loved Frank, the last-but-one editor of this magazine. It was he who wrote, early in 1979 after one of my more spectacular political misjudgments as a putative MP, that ‘one thing is certain: Matthew Parris will never be heard of again’; he who hired me 14 years ago to write these columns; and he who (though he would be irritated to hear me say so) had stood for me as a shining example in the craft of political sketchwriting into which I had followed him. In uneasy contention within Frank’s breast were a sometimes reactionary Conservatism, and a chippy subversiveness, and the tussle made for journalism of the sharpest and funniest sort.

I’d had a lovely evening with Virginia; time flew; and, later than I’d planned and after perhaps one glass of wine too many, set out by public transport for my London Docklands flat. Virginia and her guests had been talking about an anthology of Frank’s writing on which she’s working, to be published later this year, and I was thinking about him and his two-fingers-up to the insolence of public office, as my District Line tube train pulled into Monument station.

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David Short

April 8th, 2009 4:32pm Report this comment

Yes indeed there is CCTV there, as it is everywhere, plus lots of Transport for London (please, Borish, change the name back to London Transport) staff with nothing better to do than harangue MP.

They did it to me once when I was transporting my bike down some sort of stairway. I celebrated a sort of victory by simply folding it and carrying it. (They did not know it was a folder). So it occurred that I was put to inconvenience but to no other person's convenience (it was a Sunday evening and an empty station).

How glad we shall be that these jobsunworths will be out of work soon as public spending gets clamped.

Jabez Foodbotham

April 10th, 2009 11:57am Report this comment

Why didn't you just press the escalator emergency stop button?
No doubt it rings an alarm, but with the extra speed you'd be clear gone before anyone came.

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