Gyles Brandreth's Diary
Father Jonathan Aitken stars in my version of Anthony Powell’s classic
There is a danger in the rereading of a favourite book. Like a childhood sweetheart re-encountered, a book may disappoint on second acquaintance.
Incredibly, my wife has just finished rereading Pride and Prejudice and, to her deep dismay, she found that Jane Austen’s masterpiece didn’t deliver as once it had done. ‘Insipid and predictable’ was Mrs B’s verdict on the novel we all fondly regard as one of the wisest and wittiest works of fiction in all literature. As my summer holiday treat I was thinking of revisiting Anthony Powell’s 12-volume cycle of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time – just reissued by Arrow – but now I’m having second thoughts. I could not bear to find that it isn’t as wonderful as I remember it being.
Powell published his celebrated novels between 1951 and 1975 and they provide a glorious comic portrait of the upper echelons of English society from the Twenties to the Seventies. The series is narrated by Nick Jenkins (who is Powell, though we don’t learn much about him) and peopled with an array of memorable characters (many of them based on Powell’s own friends and acquaintances), the most notable being Kenneth Widmerpool, played, you may remember, in the 1997 television adaptation by Simon Russell Beale.
Over the years, my wife has said to me, quite often, ‘Instead of writing murder mysteries, you should be writing your equivalent of A Dance to the Music of Time. Of course, it wouldn’t be as good as Powell’s, anything like, but you’ve known some rum characters for a very long time, haven’t you.’
I suppose I have. In Powell’s novel sequence, Nick Jenkins first meets Widmerpool at school. When I was at my prep school in 1960, our headmaster announced that he had just engaged the services of ‘the most extraordinary young man I have ever met and the most remarkable running coach you boys are ever likely to encounter – you can learn a lot from him’. The young man in question was a 19-year-old Jeffrey Archer. Happily, 60 years on, Lord Archer of Weston-super-mare and I are still firm friends – and I have learnt a lot from him.
A few years later, when I went back to the same prep school (to give out the prizes on Founder’s Day), I met another friend who has cropped up in unlikely places throughout my life and who would be a fascinating character to feature in any sequence of novels: Jonathan Aitken.
Jonathan was at the prep school on Founder’s Day as the local MP. I next encountered him in the Eighties when I worked at Tv-am, Britain’s first commercial breakfast television station – where Aitken was a director and Anna Ford famously threw a glass of wine over him. When I became an MP in the Nineties, there was Jonathan again, kindly inviting me to his place to have dinner with his friend Mr Watergate himself, former US President Richard Nixon.
I was a friend of Carol Thatcher (the Prime Minister’s daughter and for a time Jonathan’s girlfriend) and Stephen Milligan (Jonathan’s parliamentary private secretary when Jonathan was a Defence Minister). Stephen died in stockings and suspenders with a black bin liner over his head and an orange in his mouth, apparently self-strangled during an act of autoerotic asphyxiation. I recall how at his funeral Jonathan and I stood together, both profoundly moved by the grace and courage of Stephen’s parents as they spoke of their son with pride and affection. It would make a touching scene in any novel.
Journalist, biographer, philanderer, statesman, bankrupt … Jonathan’s rollercoaster story is stranger than fiction. Following a failed libel action at the end of the Nineties, he was jailed for perjury. Last month I saw him again, at St Matthew’s Church in Westminster, where, at a votive Mass, the celebrant was Father Jonathan Aitken. As the choir sang Agnus Dei, my wife and I took Holy Communion from our newly-ordained friend.
You couldn’t make it up.
If you read it in the Daily Telegraph, it must be so. In that paper the other day, alongside a photograph of Dame Helen Mirren was a caption telling us that the actress was pictured ‘reading quotes from Karl Lagerfeld’. It has come to this. Women may now wear jump suits at Royal Ascot, and Telegraph sub-editors now give us ‘quotes’ where once they would have allowed only ‘quotations’. I am sorry to say I have even seen the word ‘invites’ (in place of ‘invitations’) in the pages of The Oldie. Before long we will read that Boris is ‘sat at his desk’ in Downing Street.
Of course, I know that language evolves, and I should do as the Queen does and go with the flow. (I am told that, as a concession to her grandchildren, Her Majesty has been heard to refer to the lavatory as the toilet.) In words, as in everything else, change is inevitable. As it says on the poster on my granddaughter’s wall, ‘Without change there wouldn’t be butterflies.’ That conceded, I do wish she wouldn’t say, ‘Can I get?’ when what she means is ‘May I have?’
The new edition of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (Arrow, £8.99 each for the 12 novels)