Diary
W.G. Runciman
10 June 1993. Fellow-guests with Tony and Cherie Blair at a BBC dinner. Blair says immediately to my wife: ‘Weren’t you kind enough to ask me to a drinks party for Frank Field’s 50th birthday?’ She answers: ‘Yes, and you neither came nor replied.’ ‘Didn’t I?’ says Blair, and subsequently sends a charming letter of apology. The thought that this smiling young Scottish public schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of me Defence Staff that I’d met the first Duke of Wellington.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 12 · 18 June 1998
From Alan Bennett
I was pleased to see that in the latest issue of the LRB (4 June) the Diary section was indeed a diary (and a fascinating one at that); all too often the space is used to smuggle in yet another book review. Over several years I’ve urged the editor to devote the space to a proper diary, so I hope she may now have conceded the point. I’m slightly nettled, though, that she should defer to W.G. Runciman and not to me. What is it that he has that I don’t? A fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge? A shipping line? A peerage? If it were only these there would be hope, as who knows what fortune may still have in store? But I fear it was just dear old gravitas and there’s no hope of that.
Still, if Runciman’s piece does mark a breakthrough, those of us whose Nachlass is beginning to bulge will be much in his debt.
Alan Bennett
London NW1
From Marian Sugden
HELLO! and thanks for the invigorating account of the social whirl under New Labour. I look forward to a full page spread of photographs next time.
Marian Sugden
Elsworth, Cambridgeshire
From Peter Womack
Congratulations to whoever wrote the very funny diary of ‘W.G. Runciman ‘. One could object, I suppose, that combining hereditary political, financial and academic élites in a single in a single stock figure was too baldly a satiric device. But the resulting composite is beautifully done – the patrician complacency, the extravagant name-dropping, the unrevealing revelations and Pooterishly self-admiring anecdotes. You’ve located a real comic talent, worthy of more formidable targets.
Peter Womack
Norwich
Vol. 20 No. 14 · 16 July 1998
From Fred Inglis
It is surely inexcusable that Lord Runciman he should have permitted himself the entry under 9 February in his Diary (LRB, 4 June). Here is yet another luminary of the English ruling class expressing his admiration for that ‘remarkable man’ Enoch Powell. And smiling approvingly at the way in which that perhaps remarkable but undoubtedly horrible man ‘trounced his left-leaning discussants’. One wonders if ‘trouncing’ turned out to mean showing them how wrong they were in supposing the worthy Powell to be a repellent racist, and wrong also, it may be, in not seeing the irrefutable rightness of his proposed policy for the repatriation of black Britishers. That Powell was indeed such a racist is borne out within a couple of lines, when Runciman tells his strikingly unpleasant little tale about Powell’s rudeness to a black waitress. By this stage of the old buffer’s reminiscences, however, I had given him up for lost.
Fred Inglis
Sheffield University
Vol. 20 No. 15 · 30 July 1998
From W.G. Runciman
Why on earth does Fred Inglis (Letters, 16 July) suppose that because I publish my recollections of two meetings with the late Enoch Powell, and use the adjective ‘remarkable’ to describe him, I must therefore share his political views? In any case, on the occasion when I remember his scoring points to good effect against his discussants the issue wasn’t immigration policy but the National Health Service, about whose inescapable dilemmas he was (dare I say?) remarkably prescient.
W.G. Runciman
London NW8
