‘My address? Field Marshal Montgomery, England’
June 17, 1980
STORY about Maurice Bowra [former vice-chancellor of Oxford University]. At a wedding, when asked if he was ‘bride’ or ‘bridegroom’, he replied: ‘I don’t know. I have slept with both.’
July 27, 1980
[TIMES editor] William Rees-Mogg tells me that his boy Jakie [Jacob Rees-Mogg, who went on to become a multi-millionaire hedge-fund owner, Conservative MP and now Leader of the House of Commons], aged 11, plays the stock market and is a very real holder of shares in GEC. He went to the annual meeting and voted against the accounts on the grounds that the dividend was not big enough. The boy has four bank accounts. When he went to open his fourth, at Lloyds, the manager patronisingly asked him why he had chosen that particular bank. Jakie replied: ‘Because I like your picture of a horse — and you give half a per cent more interest than the others.’ He will obviously end up as an extreme revolutionary Marxist!
November 1980
[LAWYER] Arnold Goodman tells me that when he was one of Laurence Olivier’s sponsors at his introduction into the House of Lords, the actor insisted on no fewer than three dress rehearsals!
March 29, 1982
GEOFFREY WARNOCK [Oxford vicechancellor] tells me that so loathed was [novelist] Evelyn Waugh at Hertford that when he died, the college passed a resolution that it should not be represented at his funeral.
June 23, 1982
[BROADCASTER] Robin Day comes to my summer party. He tells me, to my surprise, what a failure he thinks his life has been — ie not prime minister.
July 3, 1983
DINE with [lawyer] Arnold Goodman in Portland Place to meet [artist] Lucian Freud. He told us that when he received the insignia of the CH [Companion of Honour] from the Queen, he felt some resentment against the courtiers, who managed to be both patronising and irritating. The painter’s eye was amazed by the Queen’s complexion — ‘as if the lines had been drawn on her face’. Apparently he is a compulsive gambler, who loses literally tens of thousands of pounds a year. Arnold pleads with him: ‘I wish that whenever you sell a picture, you would send me half to put away for you.’ But Freud does not want any money in the bank. He tells me that he lives ‘like a snake’ — one large meal a day, if that.
September 22, 1983
LUNCH at the Beefsteak [London men-only club]. Bevis Hillier [art historian and author], who is writing [former poet laureate] John Betjeman’s life, tells me that not even in his cups will John Sparrow [Warden of All Souls, Oxford] part with his letters from Betjeman; probably because they shared a salacious interest in little boys’ muddy football shorts.
October 8, 1983
A DRINK with [former head of the diplomatic service] Denis Greenhill. Denis describes an AGM of BP, where he was a Government director. A shareholder got up to attack ‘do-gooders who are fighting to reduce the lead content in petrol’. He continued: ‘What we want are bigger dividends, not more expenses. I don’t care if the next generation does have two heads.’ Denis expected the man to be shouted down. Not at all. There was a roar of applause.
January 3, 1984
TO OXFORD to lunch at All Souls. Story of Lord Londonderry’s daughters, two of whom married Nazi sympathisers. Someone asked him when the third would marry. Londonderry: ‘I am saving her for the Chief Rabbi.’
January 8, 1990
RALPH CARR-ELLISON [Lord Lieutenant of Tyne and Wear] tells me that when Monty [Field Marshal Montgomery] visited St Aubyn’s prep school some years ago, one of the boys took photographs of him. He asked Monty where he should send them. Monty replied: ‘Field Marshal Montgomery, England, will do.’ Then he paused and added: ‘Better put Hampshire as well.’
March 21, 1990
MARIE-SYGNE NORTHBOURNE [chair of Kent Opera] tells me that the Pope [John Paul II], soon after his election, asked for a swimming pool to be built in the Vatican. He was politely told that it was too expensive. He replied: ‘Well, it will be cheaper than another Papal election.’
August 19, 1995
[FORMER ambassador to France] Edward Tomkins tells me that an English nanny said to one of the Rothschilds: ‘Drink up your Lafite or you will have no water.’
February 14, 1999
THE art critic Brian Sewell gave a talk at St Paul’s School. Afterwards the High Master asked him what he thought of the boys. Brian replied: ‘They make pederasty an incomprehensible vice.’
August 7, 2000
I READ a review by Raymond Carr [Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford] of a new biography of [historian] A.J.P. Taylor. At a celebratory dinner once, Raymond proposed his health and referred to him as ‘our great historian’. AJPT interrupted angrily, ‘our greatest historian’ — and never spoke to Raymond again. Deaths announced of Alec Guinness and Robin Day.