Grant, the TMS hobbit, spent most of yesterday out of the office being wined and dined by The Ivy, the West End restaurant that marks its centenary this year. The actress Miranda Richardson was the star guest at the unveiling of a plaque and told Grant that her parents had first visited the restaurant just after the war with Raymond Postgate, founder of The Good Food Guide and a university friend of her father.
The wine list wasn’t much in those days of rationing and all they were offered was some dubious but potent Algerian rouge. “The result of which,” Richardson said proudly, “gave my mother the accolade of being the first person to be stretchered out of The Ivy drunk.” Since the hobbit went Awol soon after sending this dispatch, he may be the latest.
Some are drawn to poetry by the beauty of its language, some captivated by its rhythm. For Jacob Polley, winner this week of the TS Eliot prize for poetry, it was out of sheer sloth. Polley became interested in poetry at school because of how verse looked on the page. “I was lazy,” he said, “and the poems looked very tiny.”
THATCHER’S TUNNEL
Sir David Cannadine, editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, recently published his entry for that mighty reference work on the life of Margaret Thatcher. At 33,648 words, it is the third longest biography in the ODNB, behind only Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. In a talk at the Royal Institution, Cannadine was asked to name Thatcher’s most abiding legacy and suggested the Channel tunnel. “Thatcher has linked Britain to Europe more closely than any other prime minister,” he said, provocatively given Theresa May’s Brexit speech the next morning. How long before Mrs May bricks the tunnel up?
At the same event, Charles Moore, official biographer of Thatcher, said that the posher you are the more you apologise. “When Boris Johnson comes into a room the first thing he always says is ‘sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry’,” Moore said. “Often he doesn’t even have that much to apologise for.” Best to play it safe?
MP’S PM SOUBRIQUET
There was an amusing slip of the tongue yesterday from Anna Soubry, the Europhile Tory MP, who referred to “Her Majesty’s speech” in the morning before clarifying that she meant the prime minister’s. As Soubry reddened, David Davis, the Brexit secretary, sympathised. “I often make the same mistake,” he said. “That’s probably why I am where I am.”
Advertisement
SMOKY EYE ON A BIG JOB
In a debate on burial rights, Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda, recalled the disastrous funerals he witnessed in his former job as a clergyman. At his first, the undertaker dropped his glasses into the grave and had to clamber down on to the coffin to retrieve them. At the next, held at a crematorium, order broke down after the organist started to play Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Perhaps the most memorable was when the ex-husband of the deceased showed up in the middle of the service and shouted at the priest and congregation. The family, it turned out, had locked him in the bathroom but he had climbed out of the window. All useful practice for the job that Bryant is said to covet most: being the next Commons Speaker.
