Diary – 21 June 2018

At Chequers last week to interview the Prime Minister, I hear some sad news of Churchill’s mouse. The story goes that the rather fine painting there by Rubens and Frans Snyders, illustrating Aesop’s fable of the lion and the mouse, was ‘touched up’ by Winston himself. During the war, staring at the painting, Churchill decided that the mouse was hard to see properly. Never a man for whom self-doubt was a crippling disability, he promptly picked up his paints and improved the rodent. That, at least, was the story put about by Harold Wilson. As I was waiting for Mrs May and her NHS figures, I was told the painting had long since gone away for restoration and had come back ‘with that awful rat cleaned off’. Very sad — though Chequers also has a good original Churchill, a Constable and much else.

May’s NHS announcement was described by the Mail on Sunday as a ‘gamble’.