Matthew Parris wrote yesterday that Boris Johnson was rumoured to be considering a chicken run from Uxbridge to stand in the safer seat of Derbyshire Dales at the next election. Johnson will find it harder to blend in than the Tory MP in the neighbouring constituency of High Peak, unless he pretends he is an especially shaggy sheepdog. The latest leaflet posted through doors by Robert Largan (majority 590) has lots of dark green text on a light green background with only the word “Conservatives” in small type on the back to indicate that he isn’t the Green party candidate. “It’s ironic, I suppose,” a constituent tells me. “If it looked more like a Tory leaflet I’d have recycled it faster.”
When Tony Robinson was knighted for services to cunning plans ten years ago, the Labour-supporting actor received abuse from people on the left, who called him a class traitor. He tells My Time Capsule that he got a slightly warmer response from friends. “We were surprised you were made a knight,” Miriam Margolyes told him. “Because you didn’t really deserve it, did you?”
Bottled fiction
The novelist William Boyd has a disdain for Dry January, telling the Moon Under Water podcast that alcohol “is the fuel that oils the wheels of creation”. He lubricates his daily labours with a glass or three of wine but says he is quite abstemious compared with some.
F Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, was told by his doctor that having two bottles of Scotch a day would kill him. “So he drank 40 bottles of beer a day instead,” Boyd says, “because he didn’t think it was alcoholic.”
Beckett’s swamp survivor
Seventy years ago today, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot opened in Paris to acclaim on the Left Bank. There was less optimism when it transferred to London. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what some of it means,” its director, Peter Hall, told the cast. “But if we stop and discuss every line we’ll never open.” The lord chamberlain’s examiner called it “two hours of angry boredom” but advised that, rather than ban it, his boss should “allow public opinion quietly to disperse this ugly little jet of marsh-gas”. Naturally it has been revived many times, even if it still is, as one reviewer said, “a play in which nothing happens — twice”.
After yesterday’s item on Kwasi Kwarteng’s tenure at the Treasury being omitted from his alma mater’s annual record, Chris Pelling emailed to say that the chronicle for 1970 at Balliol, Oxford, had the proud entry “ERG Heath: winner of Sydney to Hobart yacht race” but overlooked Ted’s result in the general election.
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Silky Nazi souvenir
Ian Lavender, the last man standing from Dad’s Army, was born after the war ended but as a child he had a treasured memento that was taken from the Nazis. Lavender, above, tells We Have Ways of Making You Talk that his father, a policeman, once captured a Luftwaffe pilot, whose parachute was divided between the officers. Lavender’s mother turned her share into pyjamas for her son’s teddy. “They were in beautiful silk,” Lavender recalls, “with little swastikas on.” Must have been in the Bearmacht.
