Browsing my local Oxfam, my eye was drawn to a faded hardcover with the title The Merry Wives of Westminster. As some readers may know, my Twitter handle is @WestminsterWAG, so I bought it for the princely sum of £2.99. It wasn’t until I got home and started reading it that I realised who the author was: Marie Belloc, sister of Hilaire, a successful novelist in her own right. Married to the Times journalist Frederick Lowndes, she died in 1947; this little book was published in 1946. She writes with clarity and confidence on the SW1 of her day, but what’s fascinating are the parallels with modern life: the money worries, the snobberies and snubbings, the late-night working practices of Fleet Street’s finest, the professional rivalries. She even talks about being ‘ghosted’ by her husband, a term I had thought solely the preserve of the modern millennial. At the front of the book I find an Ex-Libris: ‘Hugh Et Antonia Fraser.’ A quick check confirms it: before Harold Pinter, the historian Lady Antonia was married to Hugh. Two great women writers for £2.99. Not bad going at all.
I relay this to my old colleague and screenwriter friend in LA, Sean Macaulay (he wrote the Eddie the Eagle movie and like me also has a political past, being the brother of Sarah Macaulay, wife of Gordon Brown), with whom I am cooking up a small project. He laughs. ‘I met Lady Antonia once,’ he says. ‘I said to her: “I have a Harold Pinter remote control for my TV.” “Oh?” she replied. “Yes. It has a pause button… and a menacing pause button.” She did not appreciate my joke.’ Sorry Lady A, I’m afraid I laughed like a drain.
I was in Oxfam in the first place by way of killing half an hour before lunch with my new TV boyfriend, Kevin Maguire of the Daily Mirror.
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