Lunch with the great Sir Michael Howard, 95 last week. During a conversation about BBC1’s Howards End, he said: ‘I met Forster once, at a lunch party in London in 1943, given by Arthur Koestler, just before I went to Italy. We spoke much about Richard Hillary, then just beginning to be canonised. Forster suddenly turned to me and asked: “What do you think about sardines?” I was confounded, and have often since wished that I had produced some appropriately witty riposte.’ Michael expresses ironic gratitude for the state of the world, saying that without its horrors, at his age he might be frightfully bored: ‘The distinction between war — a word that signifies the use of force — and warfare — clashes between states using every other means — has seldom seemed so significant.’
To the Berkshire Macmillan carol concert at St Nicolas Church in Newbury, an enchanting affair of which the star turn was the soloist, a teenager named Isabel Irvine, with the face and voice of an angel. I talked to Richard Benyon, whom locals applaud as a model constituency MP. It is Richard’s misfortune to be teased by foes as the richest member of the Commons. Of course the country should not be run by toffs — think Rees-Mogg — but it was one of David Cameron’s many sillinesses to sack Benyon as a junior minister. The government needs him back.
At Stratford for a preview of Imperium, the RSC’s six-play dramatisation of Robert Harris’s Cicero novels. We were enthralled, not least by the depiction of Pompey as Donald Trump. Like all Robert’s readers, we never stop being amazed by the originality and intelligence of his work. Greg Doran, who directs both Imperium Part I: Conspirator and Part II: Dictator, chatted during an interval.
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