Were I Lady Nott — a position for which I am ineligible — I would be a bit miffed. Sir John’s new little book is unremitting about his mild longings for young women. This, to be sure, makes it more fun than his last publication, the ‘controversial’ memoirs of yet another ex-minister. But he does go on about the girls, and the free bus pass he now has giving him a top-deck view into the knicker-shop windows.
Nott was sent to parliament in the days before Mrs Thatcher and the marketing men, when the Conservative party put up gentlefolk as its candidates at elections, and therefore won them. Since he was cleverish they put him in the Cabinet, but he turned out to have inconvenient principles too, so resigned to become chairman of this and that. Whatever his fallings-out with the party he remained a staunch Tory, reluctant to modernise a country that had treated him so well as it was.
In retirement, with too little to do except write, he ventures upon a semi-comical exploration of what Britain has become since his day. Tiny chapters allow him just one grumble each, with a result that is, perhaps, a touch too self-consciously endearing — a rich old buffer’s notion of what is to be expected of a nice, randy old buffer. He visits a lap-dancer (a ‘very beautiful and lively’ student of cognitive therapy), Shepherd’s Bush market (‘like a bazaar in Bombay or Karachi . . . couldn’t be more friendly and relaxed’), and tea-dances in Battersea and Bromley (organised by ‘a charming middle-aged Indian’, the Mr Wonderful of his title). After a garden party at Buckingham Palace he sets out for the Countryside March but finds that the throng (half a million people!) prevents him from actually walking, so drops in for drinks at some of his many clubs.
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