Don’t cancel Diane Abbott

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.’