Diary – 25 February 2006

The story goes that my great-grandfather Murray Finch Hatton, MP for Lincolnshire in the 1880s and later 12th Earl of Winchilsea, shot an African tracker in the leg while big-game shooting in Kenya. Mortified by what he had done, he rushed forward and gave the tracker a golden guinea. The man limped off, but soon returned. He had consulted his wife, he said, and wondered if his lordship might kindly oblige by shooting him again. Dick Cheney didn’t need a golden guinea to buy the goodwill of Harry Whittington, 78, the multimillionaire Republican lawyer he shot two weeks ago while quail-shooting in south Texas. In fact, it is hard to imagine circumstances in which Whittington would allow any anger he might feel towards the Vice-President to become public. For Whittington is a Texas Republican loyalist, and the 50,000-acre Armstrong Ranch, where the shooting incident happened, is a sacred place for Republicans. To be asked to shoot there means being admitted into the Republican inner circle. Regular guests have included not only Cheney but the two Bush presidents, father and son, and George junior’s chief political strategist, Karl Rove. For a guest to publicise trouble or disharmony on the ranch would result in instant expulsion from this Republican elite. So Whittington, with up to 200 steel pellets from Cheney’s 28-bore shotgun buried in his face, neck and torso, and recovering from a minor heart attack caused by a pellet lodged in his heart, left hospital six days later declaring that ‘my family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice-President Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week’. It was, he said, ‘much more serious’ than anything that had happened to him. He would probably have said the same if he had lost an eye.

Still residing at the Armstrong Ranch is Anne Armstrong, widow of the last owner, who was appointed by President Gerald Ford to be America’s ambassador to Britain in the 1970s.