He was fascinated by the Welsh, whom he listed, along with walking and gardening, as one of his three recreations in Who’s Who, something that alarmed those few Welshmen he actually met. One of them, the political columnist Alan Watkins, who had been sturdily on the run from his race for most of his working life, said of him, ‘He’s mad, the man’s quite mad.’
The journalist Peter Simple, who wrote a column for almost 50 years in the Daily Telegraph and the centenary of whose birth is on 19 April, was almost as fascinated by the Tibetans, a people, he told me, who had forever solved the problems of political philosophy by reducing the subject to two propositions, ‘It is the custom’ or ‘It is not the custom’. That he managed to find himself loose, and employed, in the 20th century, which he survived by dying in 2006, is one of the mysteries of our time.
Kingsley Amis called him ‘The Master’ and kept his collected columns in his own holy of holies between books on drink and those on literary criticism. Anthony Howard thought him ‘one of the few original British eccentrics left to us’, and Frank Johnson, ‘the greatest living journalist’. It is just that all these are no longer with us, and who now remembers Peter Simple and the column in which fact mingled with fantasy, confusing even further those Telegraph readers who heroically tried to disentangle the two in the paper?
He provided them with glimpses of himself as his great car with outriders glided through the traffic, or paused to allow him to eat his seven meals a day every day, or answer telephones ‘embarrassingly inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli’.
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