Diary – 19 December 2009

Forty-five Decembers ago this magazine was edited by Iain Macleod MP, later chancellor. Macleod died in July 1970, a month after the Tories took office. His daughter Diana, up in town for the Red Cross’s Christmas fair, shows me a stash of her father’s papers she recently found. They include detailed documents preparing for the Heath government’s first budget, and a 1962 note from Macleod to the foreign secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, advising him that young Diana had inadvertently admitted the Russian spy, Commander Ivanov, to her birthday party. Douglas-Home writes back: ‘As we have already had a word about this, I will put no more on paper.’ Diana has little memory of Ivanov but she does recall the night of her father’s death. Macleod had a heart attack at 11 Downing Street. ‘The duty doctor turned up four hours late and was drunk. Heath had come through from No. 10 and was in his dressing gown. He didn’t do anything useful like ringing for an ambulance. Just stood there, hopeless, helpless.’ A month later Heath dined at the grieving Macleod family’s new flat in Tufton Court (11 Downing Street had been relinquished within hours). Hoping to put the Prime Minister at his ease, someone made a casual enquiry about some matter in the news. Heath snapped: ‘I can’t tell you any important things like that.’ And they say that Gordon Brown is a ditherer who lacks the social touch.

Here in Herefordshire we have a new vicar who is married, delivers a sermon without notes (an art most MPs have lost) and has a vigorous voice. Male, too. That will please our friend Vernon who still holds out against female clergy with all the defiance of Noah. This otherwise admirable clergyman wears an earring. Harrumph. The ladies of the parish tell me not to be such an old poot and are no doubt right.