A tale of treachery

When The Spectator recently said goodbye to 56 Doughty Street, we said goodbye to more than three decades of memories. Whatever else we were any good at under Alexander Chancellor’s editorship, we knew how to throw a party, from the great sesquicentennial ball in 1978 to the summer garden parties to the Thursday lunches. Among other happy moments in that dining room perched giddily at the top of the building I remember a ludicrous exchange on biblical topography between Enoch Powell and Auberon Waugh; or Richard Cobb, the great historian of France, waking from a post-prandial nap with the words that he must get the 3.25 back to Oxford, to be told that it was nearly six; or Barry Humphries leaving briefly and reappearing as Dame Edna, to the consternation of Spiro Agnew (who had seen a thing or two in his time). And then there was the Thursday when another famous American was brought to lunch by a London journalist.