Kwasi Kwarteng’s internship at the Treasury last year may have been a brief one, but it surely deserved a mention among the achievements of alumni in the annual record of Trinity College, Cambridge.
While his (and my) alma mater proudly notes that Richard Osman published another novel in 2022, that Eddie Redmayne won an Olivier award, Vicky Ford was a foreign office minister and Charles Windsor become a monarch (the college’s second, after Ranjitsinhji, Maharajah of Nawanagar and England cricketer), Trinity’s first chancellor of the exchequer for a century is not named. The only nod to Kwarteng, pictured, is an oblique one in the introduction when, comparing The Marriage of Figaro to the chaos in Downing Street, the editor adds “(in which a Trinity alumnus played a cameo role)”. The first draft of history can be so cruel.
John O’Farrell is disappointed to learn that there won’t be a London book launch next week for Prince Harry’s big whinge, though not as peeved as Lackey Jack, my deputy, who was hoping for a higher class of tepid Chardonnay. The author, who has the same publisher as Harry, offers him this advice: “When they say there’s no budget for a launch, just invite the editor to the pub with all your mates and he’ll end up paying for loads of the drinks anyway.”
The truth about hot pants
On which subject, the film director Paul Feig has published a book on booze, called Cocktail Time! He tells Air Mail that the best martini is still made at Dukes hotel in St James’s, London, where Ian Fleming discovered the drink, though warns that its cosy ambience is “more Miss Marple than James Bond”. The worst drink Feig has had was a disco-era cocktail called Hot Pants, made from tequila, peppermint schnapps, grapefruit juice and powdered sugar with a salted rim. “It’s truly awful but a good number of people liked it in the Seventies,” he says. “My theory [is] everyone was so coked out of their minds they needed something to break through their haze.” He said it attacked tastebuds “like Drano through a clogged toilet pipe”.
Pen it like attlee
The 140th anniversary of the birth of Clement Attlee was marked in this paper yesterday with a column arguing that modern politicians should follow the postwar Labour prime minister’s example of quiet authority. They could also take a tip from him when it comes to writing their memoirs. Near the end of his life Attlee neatly, and pointedly, summed up his career in only five lines: “There were few who thought him a starter,/ Many who thought themselves smarter./ But he ended PM,/ CH and OM,/ An Earl and a Knight of the Garter.”
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Staying with doggerel (this column has taken a turn for the verse), 65 years ago today Sputnik 1 burnt up as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere. While some politicians said the Soviet satellite’s historic orbit was a disaster for humanity (by which they meant America), Mennen Williams, governor of Michigan, noted the occasion by writing this to a newspaper: “Oh little Sputnik, flying high/ With made-in-Moscow beep,/ You tell the world it’s a Commie sky/ and Uncle Sam’s asleep.”
