Paterson’s pranks
Sir: Could I, as the person who unwittingly provoked Jennifer Paterson’s outburst in the Spectator kitchen, say exactly what happened? I was not, as Simon Courtauld writes (‘Who wants to buy our old office?’, 10 March), ‘a junior member of staff’, but the magazine’s advertising director.
The kitchen was opposite my office and the nearest other kettle four floors down in the basement. Since Paterson only used the kitchen on Thursdays and I used to lug up all her vegetables in between flogging space, I would in her absence make the odd cup of coffee there. Finding an offending unwashed spoon, Paterson threw not plates but the entire cutlery drawer out of the window, for which she was dismissed and later reinstated. From memory, Charles Moore was reading proofs in the garden when the clatter descended.
Paterson was always snooty with us advertising types and would no doubt be dismayed that the publisher James Knox, the marketing director Philip Marsden and even myself went on to write some pretty good books. On her reinstatement I continued my role as her vegetable porter.
Rory Knight Bruce
Crediton, Devon
High Table hauteur
Sir: As the wife of a Cheviot farmer, I read with interest Charles Moore’s ‘Notes’ of 10 March. Hugh Trevor-Roper taught me history at Oxford. After I married and settled in Roxburghshire, he and Xandra sometimes asked us to dinner at their house near Melrose. On one occasion a fellow guest, a Borders farmer called John Scott, persistently addressed his host as ‘Roper’. The Regius Professor was not amused.
‘My name is Trevor-Roper,’ he insisted. ‘Well,’ replied the farmer, ‘my name is Montagu-Douglas-Scott, but Scott has always been good enough for me.’
The Voltaire of St Aldate’s was silenced.
Emma Tennant
Newcastleton, Roxburghshire
Chávez v. Livingstone
Sir: Anthony Browne (Politics, 3 March) says Chávez is a ‘dictator’ four times, and a ‘socialist dictator’ twice. Really? Browne is referring to a man who has just won the latest of a whole string of elections with a massive majority, in an election to which all international monitors gave a clean bill of health.
Browne has Chávez being given ‘powers to rule by absolute decree’ by a ‘cowed parliament’. But this doesn’t strike me as fair either. The opposition parties aren’t even represented in the National Assembly, as they foolishly withdrew (rather than be beaten) the last time that body was elected. And the constitution gives the President the right to issue executive orders, a right his immediate predecessors also exercised. Browne’s article uses equally overheated language when it comes to Ken Livingstone, but what I am really unclear about is this: is Browne using Chávez as a stick to beat Livingstone with, or is it the other way round?
Jonathan Rosenhead
London N1
Weasel words
Sir: I am sorry to see a writer as generally well-informed as Frederic Raphael (Books, 10 March) trotting out the absurd legend that ‘Hep hep’, as an insult to Jews, derives from ‘Hierosolyma est perdita’ (if I may be allowed also to correct his Latin). Nor did this cry arise, as he claims, in Vienna. The Hep Hep riots against Jews took place throughout Germany in 1819 in a number of towns, including Frankfurt, Leipzig and Dresden, and were named for the shout used by the rioters, ‘hep hep’ being a call used by animal herders in driving their charges. There seem no instances of the cry being used in Austria. Interestingly, the nationalistic Heidelberg academic Jacob Fries, accused of encouraging the riots, defended himself with weasel words presaging those used by many of today’s ‘anti-Zionists’: ‘We declare war not against the Jews, our brothers, but against Judaism.’
David Conway
London N21
Use your remote, Rod
Sir: Rod Liddle, in his excoriation of Red Nose Day last week (was there ever a subject easier to lambast, or one less in need of it?), tells us that, without the input of Billy Connolly and Ant and Dec, inter alia, much less money would be raised. He then asks the question ‘Why do we need Billy Connolly to tell us that people are in need? Why should Ant and Dec’s presence make us dig deeper into our pockets?’ Because without them much less money would be raised. It’s the way Red Nose Day works. If he doesn’t like it, then maybe he could try ITV or Channels 4/5 for a day.
Edward Collier
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
Sir: Rod Liddle is spot-on with his diatribe on Red Nose Day, surely the most vomit-inducing programme ever aired on TV. Sure, the cause is good but the fund-raising methods employed are so ghastly and the humour so abysmal that no normal person could watch for more than a few minutes without wishing to put a boot through the screen.
Terence F.E. Lane
Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire
Evil ‘I’
Sir: Allan Massie (Books, 3 March) missed a chance to bring up again the story of the most (in)famous use of the first person singular in English literature, i.e. the case of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926), in which novel she made the ‘I’ of her story also the murderer. Readers and critics felt truly deceived at the time and I think there were even established firm rules against such ‘dirty tricks’ in the future. (‘No twins’ was another one.)
Paul Jacobs
Mortsel, Belgium
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