Alexander Chancellor’s ‘Long Life’ is over; but it was not nearly long enough. I was feeling rather gloomy last Friday, having just had our old terrier put down, when I opened The Spectator and was immediately cheered up by the first paragraph of Alexander’s column.
It was so typical of the way that he often looked at the world, and of his delightfully quirky sense of humour, that he should relate a children’s song to the new President of the United States. Recalling Nellie the elephant and her trumpety-trump, he wrote: ‘I’m hoping against hope that Donald Trumpety-Trump will also say goodbye to the circus in Washington and return to the jungle whence he came.’ (A few weeks earlier, he had perceptively ridiculed Trump by comparing him to Liberace.)
One of the remarkable things about the last months of Alexander’s life was that, having had a brain haemorrhage, when he resumed his Spectator column it was as sparkling and readable as ever, and he never missed another week. At the same time he continued as the highly successful editor of the Oldie, but did not enjoy having to give up driving and drinking — though I was glad to hear from the magazine’s publisher, James Pembroke, that he had recently been enjoying an occasional glass of red wine.
It was thanks to Alexander’s endearing personality, his diffidence and his mastery of the art of gentle persuasion that he was able to attract so many outstanding writers to a magazine which, when he became editor in 1975, had a circulation of little more than 12,000. Several of them — Auberon Waugh, Murray Sayle, Christopher Hitchens, Richard West, Jeffrey Bernard — were seduced from the New Statesman, which then had a weekly sale of more than 40,000.
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