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.
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