Happiness is a convivial bottle

January really is the cruellest month. No wonder some fortunate friends have dodged the column of dreary weather and short days, seeking asylum in the Southern Hemisphere, or at least the Southern Mediterranean. Not that the British winter climate is all bad. Brisk clear days promote mental rigour. Barry Smith, a historian from New Zealand and an early evangelist for that nation’s serious wine, once wrote that Prime Minister Lord Salisbury had a mind like a clear blue winter day. That is not indispensable for statecraft; it could never be said of either Churchill or Thatcher. But it helps to promote an unillusioned realpolitik: the wisest approach to human affairs.

Some readers might be surprised when I cite another statesman who lived up to the Smith description: Alec Douglas-Home. I am ashamed to admit that until I met him, I had assumed that the adolescent satirists of the early 1960s had been right; Bernard Levin notoriously described him as a cretin (Bernard later grew up).