Good relations
Sir: Timothy Garton Ash writes (‘I was the man from Spekta’, 7 November) that Britain had a good name in central Europe. Perhaps the British Council played some small part in that. Uniquely in communist countries, the Council in Poland worked independently of the embassy, and with the encouragement of many Polish academics and others and — for all the compromises that had to be made — helped to keep alight the flame of independent cultural relations which are intolerable to totalitarian government. Poles were also grateful to Margaret Thatcher for creating the Know-How Fund. The Council was well placed to help quick and widespread progress to be made with that.
Charles Chadwick
(Director of the British Council, Poland 1989-1992), London NW3
Short circuit
Sir: Ted Short? I mean, we all know that there was a large pro-Soviet faction within Labour (‘Labour’s Soviet secrets’, 7 November). And some of us know that it, with the Communist party itself and with the Trots, created New Labour, having followed academic Marxism’s transition from economic to social, cultural and constitutional means.
But Ted Short was decorated by Franco, is a Companion of Honour (in the personal gift of the monarch), and is or was a vice-president of the Prayer Book Society. Just ask any hard leftists who go back to the Wilson era what they think of Short. Please do not spoil a good and important story with something as silly as this.
David Lindsay
Lanchester, County Durham
Flights of Churchill
Sir: I am pleased that James Delingpole enjoyed Into the Storm and that even the reluctant Mrs D was moved by it; the drama was certainly compelling and mostly very well done. Leaving aside the permanent grumpiness of both Winston and Clementine, who could not possibly have spent five years without smiling, there were a number of fairly obvious solecisms, such as the apparent VC investiture (which would have been carried out by the King himself), the Tehran dinner which was held at the British embassy (not the Russian) and ‘Some chicken, some neck’, which was proclaimed in Ottawa (not Washington), I was particularly pleased by the attempts to convey the horror of Churchill’s early wartime flights. But even these did not manage to convey the half of how uncomfortable — and hazardous — they were.
Churchill did not usually fly to the United States as shown, but often went by sea, though he did sometimes return by air in a comfortable machine. His earliest flight to the Middle East in 1942 was entirely different. Not only was there no heating, as correctly and effectively depicted, but there were no seats and only minimal lighting; the 67-year-old Prime Minister had to lie on a shelf in the back of a dark, draughty, unpressurised Liberator bomber for some eight hours to reach Gibraltar by flying at night a long way out into the Atlantic before turning south; after refuelling, it was another 13 hours across the Sahara to Cairo. Then, after continuing to Moscow and back in slightly better conditions, he had to endure the same horrific treatment on the way home — always with the chance of encountering a stray enemy fighter. Referring to this journey, General MacArthur said that if disposal of all Allied decorations were placed by providence in his hands, his first act ‘would be to award the Victoria Cross to Winston Churchill; a flight of 10,000 miles through hostile and foreign skies may be the duty of young pilots, but for a Statesman burdened with the world’s cares, it is an act of inspiring gallantry and valour.’
Paul Courtenay
Chairman, The Churchill Centre, Andover
Battle of the scumbags
Sir: I am proud to be one of those ‘scumbag journalists’ deplored by Taki for going after his hero the late Sir James Goldsmith (Life, 7 November). But he is wrong to suggest that we went for Goldsmith because we ‘had to face our grubby wives each evening’. We went for him because we thought he was a ruthless and unscrupulous crook. In my own long-running dispute with him he did not hesitate to resort to blackmail to achieve his ends. He was lucky to avoid being prosecuted.
Richard Ingrams
The Oldie, London W1
A British disease
Sir: Melissa Kite’s parking warden story (Life, 24 October) will strike a chord with almost everyone. It is all part of a remorseless development which is reducing us to mindless, over-regulated, risk-averse auto-matons, forbidden to go paddling in Frinton lest a tsunami strikes or give a neighbour’s child a lift to a swimming pool without a CRB check (better get in quick before they are all closed on health and safety grounds anyway). But what will is there to reverse this lamentable trend, which has flourished under governments of all persuasions? We can’t just blame Brussels. Euroregulation doubtless doesn’t help, but this is a British disease which affects this country more than almost any other European country I know.
Timothy Blake
London W4
Plum lines
Sir: P.G. Wodehouse’s youthful output began long before 1904 (Books, 7 November). As his devoted step-grandson Sir Edward Cazalet explained in our recent exhibition Plum Pie, his earliest recorded story, ‘The Thrush’, was written in 1888 when Plum was just seven years old. You can find it, along with numerous Wodehouse quotes posted to our website (www.heywoodhill.com), where your own Toby Young is competing with Deborah Devonshire and Stephen Fry for supremacy in a popular contest to try to identify Wodehouse’s funniest line. Her Grace is currently seeing off all-comers.
Jeffrey Kerr
Managing director, Heywood Hill, London W1
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