The day I denounced poor Graham Greene

WHEN I look back at the millions of words of instant comment which, over the years, I must have written in newspapers, there are not many articles which make me blush. This is because I have no sooner written something than I tend to forget it. But there is one article which I wrote which I do remember and of which I feel bitterly ashamed.

A newspaper rang me up to write a denunciation of Graham Greene, the distinguished novelist. He was visiting his friend, the spy Kim Philby, in Moscow at the time. Wasn't it a disgrace that so public a figure should appear to be endorsing Philby's crimes? Could the editor have 1,000 words on the subject by lunchtime?

I delivered the article, which duly appeared the next day. I felt queasy writing it, and actually sick reading it. The words were not sincere. I did not think that Greene had done wrong in visiting his friend. I had just said so in order to earn a quick buck.

As a matter of fact, I think he had done the right thing not to desert his friend, just because he was in disgrace.

At the time, someone likened my unpleasant article to the denunciations of PGWodehouse during the war, when such figures as Duff Cooper and AA Milne, egged on by the Cassandra column in the Daily Mirror, called for Wodehouse to be hanged. This was because the genial humourist had given some broadcasts from Nazi Germany and was supposedly, therefore, a traitor.

Now we learn from MI5 files that Wodehouse did receive some money from the Germans. They paid his travel and hotel expenses, and enabled him to be reunited with his beloved wife Ethel after his arrest and imprisonment as an alien.

No doubt there are some who think that those who defended Wodehouse during the war - most notably Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Muggeridge - were mistaken. These fair-minded men claimed that Wodehouse was an innocent, essentially unpolitical, who had been foolish but not wicked.

Aha! say the self-righteous today, 60 years later. Look at the money Wode-house took from the Third Reich! Does this not prove he was a monster?

Not to my mind. Louis MacNeice's line about the ancient Greeks applies forcefully to the generation who were alive during the era of the Great Dictators: "They were all so unimaginably different, and it was all so long ago".

Why can't people understand this, rather than leaping to judge and condemn essentially benign figures like Wodehouse or Pius XII - another wholly virtuous figure who has been getting it in the neck lately?

Far from thinking the worse of Wode-house, I actually think the better of him for doing the best for his wife, and providing some necessary security for himself to enable him to get on with his work. The war was an irrelevance to him. His work - as it happens, I'm not an ardent fan of Jeeves, etc - has given pleasure to millions. That is the enduring fact about him.

They're next to godliness HAVE you noticed how anyone who actually performs sexual acts, as opposed to just writing about them in newspapers, is described as a sexual "predator"? Rupert Brooke, the dishiest man of his generation, adored by both sexes, had a number of lovers before his death at the age of 28.

I met a couple of them when they were in extreme old age (one man, one woman).

They spoke of him as if he was a god. They had loved every minute spent in his company.

Yesterday, the Sunday Times described Brooke as "a sexual predator" - simply, so far as I could see, because he had had consensual sex with grownups who were besotted with his quite amazing good looks. Yes, he was a self-absorbed, narcissistic sort of person - how could he fail to be, looking as he did?

Is any sex nowadays by definition predatory? I suspect that it is. That admittedly caddish fellow Major James Hewitt was described yesterday in another paper as a "predator". The evidence? That he had spent a weekend with some woman (allegedly a Lady Di lookalike - in fact, nothing like) who had quite clearly gone away with him for the weekend with positive eagerness and then sold her "story" to the papers.

Hewitt can be called many unkind names, but he is surely not a predator.

Like Rupert Brooke, he is a beautiful man whom women adore. n THERE'S still time for any of us who would like to occupy a safe Tory seat to submit our names as the candidate for Kensington and Chelsea - in whose parish this newspaper is produced. I'm only a small "c" conservative - I deplore most of the things the actual Tory Party has done. Otherwise, I might stand myself. So far, the list of possible candidates includes journalists Peter Hitchens and Boris Johnson, and the disgracefully feeble former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind. If this is their idea of a "stop Portillo" campaign then Miguel is as good as elected.

I hear that to boost Portillo's support in some parts of Chelsea, the Gay Rights activists plan to reveal yet more details of his youthful exploits.

Many of us who have now got the general idea about Miguel's prowess - would prefer to imagine these things rather than have them spelled out in pornographic detail.

He'll make a more amusing Prime Minister than Tony. Why not just elect him now and get it over with.

Shovelling more snow onto the Palace's boots

IRA or CIA? Mountbatten SHOCK horror! Spies At The Palace was the headline in yesterday's Sunday Mirror. It appears that the KGB tried to infiltrate the Royal Family, even offering money to Prince Michael for some mysterious purpose.

We always used to believe that the late Lord Mountbatten was a Soviet agent. Enoch Powell, convinced of this theory, once explained to me that this was why Mountbatten had been murdered - not by the IRA but by the CIA.

Probably Mountbatten who caused a civil war in India and did much to undermine the Royal Family by his ridiculous suggestions that they should modernise themselves - was not an agent of a foreign power but just a conceited old poofter.

No doubt some hard-up KGB agent will soon tell us. But it is amusing to read popular newspapers expressing horror at the idea of "spies" trying to find out damaging secrets about the Royal Family and publish them.

Isn't this precisely what the so-called tabloid newspapers have been doing for the past 30 years?

My bread and butter has depended very largely on unscrupulous people spying on the Royal Family - not for the KGB but for the newspapers. It's a bit ripe if the Mirror complains because a few Russian agents want a share of the filthy loot.

Copyright 1999
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