Human memory is a remarkable thing. Many years ago a considerable amount of my property was found in the possession of a chap who had briefly been my butler. Naturally, I resolved to press charges. When the case came to trial, an inventory of the property in question was passed to me, and it included the following: some Marconi share certificates; correspondence between your diarist and Miss Clara Honeybow, the noted actress of the electric kinema; a photograph of said diarist with Violent Bonham-Carter, the East End gangster. After reading it, I suddenly recalled saying to the accused: “I say, old chap, why don’t you take some of my papers for safekeeping, what?” and informed the judge that there was therefore no need for this schedule to be read out in open court. Sadly, this thoroughly Liberal concern with justice and fair play was mocked in the following day’s newspapers. People can be so unfair.
I expect that, like me, you were impressed by Menzies Campbell’s speech at Brighton – there are few retail newsagents who can play the role of international statesman with such conviction. Perhaps my younger readers were surprised to hear Ming the Merciless (as he is affectionately known by his many friends) refer to himself as “a child of the sixties”, but I was not. Attired in headband and velvet loon pants, “Wild Ming Campbell” was a well-known session musician in those days and can be heard playing on many 78s by the leading “beat combos” of the decade. He worked particularly closely with Alan Price – one thinks of the prescient “Simon Hughes and his Amazing Dancing Bear” and of “We gotta get out of third place” – and Susan J. Kramer and the Dakotas. There was even talk of his joining the Led Zeppelin, although in the even the gig was given to John Bonham-Carter. The impressive thing was that Campbell managed to combine this music making with a career as an Olympic sprinter. Indeed, respected commentators have opined that, had he first removed his loon pants, he might well have broken the world record.
It is disappointing that the public remains obsessed with certain “scandals” long after they have been explained to the satisfaction of all fair-minded observers. Would you believe that I am still the butt of pointed remarks about Marconi shares, even though that was all looked into long ago? My old friend Jeremy Thorpe is similarly afflicted: only the other day there were again stories in the Press about his perfectly innocent friendship with Sir Peter Scott. I did note, however, that these stories involved our current Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, which may solve a mystery that has long puzzled me. I was walking along the shores of Rutland Water with Thorpe and Sir Peter many years ago, when there came a loud quacking form a clump of reeds. Eventually a bespectacled figure with field glasses, notebook and home-knitted scarf was ejected and pursued across the fields by a particularly aggressive mallard. Of course, in those days Straw (if, indeed, it was Straw) was merely the Chairman of Labour Students for an Early Bedtime, but it did look suspiciously like him.
As the Revd Hughes and his congregation well know, I am no miser when it comes to organ donation. The current instrument at St Asquith’s is widely admired as a particularly fine erection, even if it does take two people to pump it. However, let me at once make it clear that Evan Harris is not having my spleen (or my pancreas either, for that matter). No doubt you saw the motion he pushed through at Brighton: the gist of it was that as soon as a chap croaks it, the doctors will be free to help themselves to any of his bits they fancy. We all know what will happen next: those bits will be shipped of to Harris’s castle in the mountainous country between Oxford and Abingdon; there he will pass several thousand volts through them and attempt to build the world’s first artificial research assistant. Well, it won’t do. As far as I am concerned, the sooner the local peasantry seizes flaming brands and rushes to burn his laboratory down, the better.
It has been a quiet week at the Hall. Nancy, my elephant, has gone to Burma for a short holiday (apparently the head of the herd was calling far, far away) while Ruttie, as her intimate friends may call the Rutland Water Monster, learned of the discovery of a fossilised dinosaur on the cliffs near Lyme Regis and felt obliged to go to the funeral. Thus I have passed much of my time in the library. I was pleased to read of the result of the Irish referendum; it shows how wise we Liberals are to trust the people: ask them the same question often enough and they will invariably come up with the right answer.
Life is considerably enlivened by the arrival of Earl Russell for dinner – his Big Band is entertained in the servants’ hall. Earl’s father Bertrand was a frequent house guest in earlier days, and I always judged him Terribly Clever. I recall one dinner in particular: over a particularly fine goose, Russell senior and I discussed our concerns for our old friend Ludwig Wittgenstein (also Terribly Clever but Rather Hard Work). At this point in his career Wittgenstein, believing that he had solved all of philosophy’s problems, was spending some time as a larch tree in an Austrian forest; we were rather worried that he would be cut down at Christmas and sent off to market in Linz. I could not help noticing that Russell was accepting rather more than his share of the fowl, and at the end of this conversation I said to Russell: “A short while ago the goose was full of sage. Now, the sage is full of goose.” He did not speak to me for weeks afterwards.
Did you see in the newspapers that Saddam Hussein had achieved 100 per cent of the vote in his recent election? Some commentators cast aspersions on the conduct of the poll, but one should not rush to judgement. I used to run courses on political campaigning and the care of the moustache here at the Hall, and the aforementioned Saddam was one of my first and most attentive students. Could it not be that he learned so much from me that he was able to post this impressive score by entirely fair means? After all, I regularly receive 100 per cent of the vote in the Bonkers Hall ward, and no one would call me a tyrant.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10