Diary

6 June 2009

Andrew Roberts opens his diary

News flash: the Hay-on-Wye Litfest is safe for Tories again. Once almost the private preserve of the New Labour intelligentsia, this year’s festival was full of Conservative MPs, and in the course of my plugging my new book, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, I bumped into John Whittingdale, Greg Barker, David Davis, Peter Luff and Patrick Mercer. The Festival’s organising genius, Peter Florence, says that George Osborne and William Hague were coming down too, and Niall Ferguson was there debating against Eric Hobsbawm. Yet another sign of the Conservatives reclaiming the intellectual high ground, as they did in the second half of the 1970s?

The Storm of War is dedicated to the late Frank Johnson, the last-but-one editor of this magazine. I can’t help thinking how much he would have revelled in the expenses scandal, and of all the brilliant jokes he would have made about the MPs caught up in it, Tory as much as Labour or Liberal. (My favourite so far: ‘The Duck Stops Here’.) Frank’s capacity for teasing was unparalleled, and the greed and ambition of some MPs would have been mercilessly exposed by him, to the hilarity of the rest of us. Duck houses, moats, moss removal, tampons, 5 p.m. Ikea bags, brother’s cleaners: fair or unfair, they would have all been perfect grist to Frank’s superbly well-calibrated sense of humour. His friends miss him all the time, but never more so than in this perfectly Frank-shaped crisis.

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David Short

June 4th, 2009 5:51pm Report this comment

'To Les Invalides in Paris for a two-hour high Mass to commemorate the Emperor Napoleon (I’m writing his biography)..Off to New York to try to plug my latest book, Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West....in the course of my plugging my new book, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, I bumped into John Whittingdale, Greg Barker, David Davis, Peter Luff and Patrick Mercer....The Storm of War is dedicated to the late Frank Johnson, the last-but-one editor of this magazine...'

How nice of The Spectator to let Andrew Roberts use his 'Diary' as a free advertisement for his books, and to suck up to the worst kind of right-wing corporate and political America in an unashamed way....But then again, Roberts' inherited money (he'll never need to fiddle expenses...) comes from his family having the UK Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Very tasteful.

Lydia P Troyer

June 5th, 2009 9:22pm Report this comment

For David, short of name and short of amity, whose letter is equally tasteful, the sour and bitter cud of resentment masquerading as righteous indignation - why the ad hominem? if you could have cited how some of the dropped names were paying this guy's bill, perhaps it would have been more useful, but apparently, he pays his own bills, so what, then?

Jimbo

June 6th, 2009 6:05am Report this comment

Bless! It's like reading the diary of Diana Mosley's poodle. What a pity darling Andrew was born too late to scribble "As always, the dear Fuhrer was absolutely charming at lunch!"

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