Diary - 29 January 2005 | The Spectator

The Telegraph Group, for which I work, happens to use the same taxi firm as the BBC, and in the days when I was lucky enough to be driven to my office at Canary Wharf, I made friends with several of the firm’s regular drivers. In the course of our chats I couldn’t help learning something about the habits of some BBC executives — though these discreet drivers never, unfortunately, named names. Shopping trips, taking children to school, theatre outings and drives to the country were among the services provided. The drivers also spent many hours waiting for their passengers. So I wasn’t all that surprised by the recent revelations of hair-raising sums — £33,000 a day, £12 million a year — spent by the BBC on taxis at taxpayers’ or, in this case, taxi-payers’ expense.

I often get letters from readers of the Sunday Telegraph literary pages complaining about misleading book reviews. Usually they say that a book they’ve bought on the strength of a favourable review was nothing like as good as our critic had made out. I have some sympathy for this, as reviewers on the whole want to be loved, like everyone else, and are rarely as harsh in print as they could be. A few days ago I received such a letter, all the way from Austria, from a man who had bought Patricia Cornwell’s thriller Blow Fly because, he explained, he had trusted the words printed on the book’s cover, ‘A TREMENDOUS READ, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH.’ Having read a few pages, however, he threw the book away: ‘How can you recommend such a disgusting book? Reading it is tantamount to licking a festering sore.’ Oh dear. Who had reviewed the book for us? I couldn’t remember, so I looked it up. Ah yes, Antonia Fraser. She had written, ‘While not for the squeamish, it is a tremendous read.’