The Spectator's Notes

22 November 2008

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.

A sinister aspect of BBC ‘edgy’ humour is that it delights in attacking old people. So, when I refuse to renew my television licence fee unless Jonathan Ross is sacked from the BBC, I shall give the £139.50 due to Help the Aged. It is therefore fitting that the Oldie magazine got on to Jonathan Ross before the storm about his telephone call to Andrew Sachs broke. In its October issue it published the results of a readers’ competition in which entrants had to write a clerihew beginning with the name of a television programme. David Rundle, of Cheltenham, contributed the following: Friday Night with Jonathan Ross/ Makes me exceptionally cross/ Since, having always shunned it,/ I help to fund it.’ Exactly.

A clergyman who owns a derelict cottage with no television sends me copies of two letters from TV Licensing. One thanks him for his letter explaining the situation and agrees that he does not need a television licence. The other says, in huge red letters: ‘your details are being passed to our enforcement officers’, and threatens him with a fine. The two letters arrived in the same post.

Waiting for my guest at lunch in the Wolseley last week, I thought I recognised the man at the next table, about three feet away from me. It was, I am almost certain, Oleg Deripaska, friend of Lord Mandelson of Hartlepool and Foy, yacht-owner, Russian oligarch. As is often true of very rich people nowadays, he was casually dressed, and armed with expensive, slim, small computer/telephone equipment, which he was jabbing. I was thinking about introducing myself and asking him a few questions about his holiday in Corfu; but when I looked up from the book I was pretending to read and stole a glance at him, I found that his cold blue eyes were boring right into me. Then I noticed that sitting opposite Mr Deripaska was a big man with a shaven head, dressed in a very dark suit which bulged alarmingly. From time to time, this man would get up, survey the room minutely and then sit down again. Now his gaze rested on me. It occurred to me that, since I was sitting so close, and alone, I was an object of suspicion. Not wanting to sleep with the sturgeons (our editor’s excellent phrase), or even, like poor Nat Rothschild, be forced to write a letter to the Times, I returned, in cowardly fashion, to my book.