Diary – 11 July 2009

The shadow chancellor George Osborne has been lunching privately with the textiles magnate Richard Caring, the Labour-supporting businessman who got caught up in the cash for peerages investigation. It is less than a year since Osborne demonstrated a catastrophic failure of judgment by being lured onto a yacht owned by the disreputable Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. After the Deripaska episode Osborne promised to have nothing more to do with political funding. Yet here he is consorting with another party donor. What on earth does the shadow chancellor think he is doing?

To Northamptonshire for cricket against my friend William Sitwell. I ask his mother for a guided tour of the house. In due course we reach the gloomy room which had been the study of Sacheverell, William’s grandfather, and Mrs Sitwell told us a story. ‘After the [first world] war,’ she said, ‘my father-in-law went to Paris and got to know some painters.