Drink

Forty years ago this Christmas I visited Hong Kong for the first time – a few days after the signing in Beijing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration that sealed the former colony’s transfer to mainland rule in 1997. It was a moment of apprehension, but at least the timetable had been set. And how lucky I was to have experienced that extraordinary outpost as it was then, in such contrast to what China’s masters have made it now. The Christmas Day service in St John’s Cathedral, overhead fans stirring the turbid air, was a poignant glimpse of Hong Kong’s past. Norman Foster’s Hongkong Bank building, the most expensive in the

Crime. Fear not: none of us was planning to break the law, with the possible exception of hate speech. Where that is concerned, how would one start? But we were more concerned with crime and literature, and a fascinating perennial question. What is the distinction between crime fiction and novels? In the 1990s, I introduced one of the loveliest girls of the age to the delights of proper wine Crime and Punishment: no problem. So what about The Moonstone? There are very many supposed novels which I would rather read. Moving nearer our own day, we have Dorothy Sayers or P.D. James. More recently, Reginald Hill, Susan Hill and Ian

We were assembled to taste Chilean wines assisted by magnificent Scottish food, courtesy of the Scottish embassy in London, otherwise known as Boisdale. But there was a problem of etiquette. As we were dealing with Chilean matters, I thought that we should propose a toast to a great Chilean and a staunch ally of this country, General Pinochet, who saved his own nation from becoming another Cuba or a mess like the current Venezuela. The left will never forgive Pinochet or Kissinger for frustrating Marxist ruin My neighbour expressed doubt. Surely the general committed atrocities? I conceded that the overthrow of Allende was not bloodless. But the sort of men

‘Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!’ If that phrase means anything to you, you’re likely of a vintage that remembers pre-Clarkson Top Gear. Growing up in the 1980s, you couldn’t miss adverts for the Beaujolais Run – an annual race to be the first to bring the new wine back to England. People would rush over to Burgundy in their Aston Martins and Jaguars, fill up with Beaujolais and roar back home. The idea for a race across France was cooked up by Clement Freud and wine merchant Joseph Berkmann in 1970. It really took off in 1974 when the Sunday Times offered a prize to the first person to bring

The whirligig of time brings in his… astonishments. Who would have thought it? Even a couple of decades ago, the notion that the Tory party could be led by a black woman would have seemed incredible. I remember 1975, and the doubts that were expressed about Margaret Thatcher: much louder than any adverse comment about Kemi Badenoch now. There seemed to be a widespread belief that the country was simply not ready for a female PM. When she was PM, she had to be dissuaded from serving English wine in No. 10 I recall a lunch with Barbara Castle not long after the 1979 election. A former street-fighting termagant, she

The medics would have one believe that alcohol is a depressant. That may be their conclusion drawn from test tubes in laboratories. Fortunately, however, it bears little relation to real life, which is just as well. The world has rarely been in greater need of antidepressants, in every form. One tries to tease American friends out of their gloom, reproaching them for taking their independence too early. Last time I attempted that, it did not work. ‘If Washington and Jefferson had foreseen Trump vs Harris, they would have asked George III for forgiveness.’ The 2014 Hommage à Jacques Perrin was just about the finest Rhône I have ever tasted In

Où sont les bouteilles d’antan? For that matter, où sont les amis with whom one consumed them? These autumnally melancholic musings arose because a young friend asked me about Alan Clark. He had been reading the Diaries. Were they truthful? Was Alan really such a remarkable character? The answer was simple. An emphatic yes, on both counts. I suspect that I speak for most of his muckers when I declare that I have never met anyone who was more fun. The 1967 Yquem tasted like a Greek temple melted down in honey. Alan served it as a house wine If Alan was of the company, the conversation might well have a

The English language has immense resources, but the odd weakness. What, for instance, is the translation for ‘Auld lang syne’? We were discussing that profound topic while telling stories about absent friends, recalling the occasional bottle and thinking about Britain. Nick Elliott’s response to grim news was to open a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’82 A fascinating fellow called Tim Spicer, who commanded a battalion of the Scots Guards, has written a book about an even more remarkable chap called Biffy Dunderdale. Biffy was the sort of man who helped to win our nation’s wars, including the (first) Cold War. In these pages a couple of weeks ago, Charles Moore

Conservatives used to be good at inspiring a mass membership, underpinned by organisations. Before the first world war, the Primrose League had a million members. Shortly after the second war, the party’s membership, including the Young Conservatives, reached three million. This is partly explained by the social mores of the day. The range of available leisure activities was much smaller, there was no television, and parents were happy for their daughters to join the YCs, the assumption being that the girl would meet a nice type of young man. It is easy to understand why German oenophiles insist Riesling is the greatest grape of all All that is redolent of

What goes best with a broken rib? The answer, I think, is any drink you enjoy that will not make you laugh. I was strolling along to Richmond station after spending the night with old friends. (Very Jorrocksian: ‘Where I dines, I sleeps.’) I was carrying a scruffy overnight bag containing one shirt, one pair of socks, ditto underpants and sundry toiletries. Phone rings: put down bag – and suddenly a toerag appears from nowhere, grabs the luggage and scoots off. I yell ‘Stop thief’, run a few paces and trip. Passers-by prop me up and ask if I want an ambulance: would have saved a lot of trouble if I’d

Most Tory MPs enjoy leadership elections. There may be an element of what the trick-cyclists call ‘displacement activity’. Equally, it is tempting to employ the cliché about rearranging the furniture on the Titanic. The Brane-Cantenac 2000 was everything that a claret lover could wish for Until 1990, the process was brief. It took only four days to elect John Major, whose team used an underground ‘bunker’ in Alan Duncan’s house as their HQ. By 1997, when the party had been grievously wounded and the election procedure extended, there were lots of gatherings which required more spacious premises – including Jonathan Aitken’s garden. Now, even more stricken, the Tories will need

Age. At the Spectator party last week, the editor asked me how long I had been attending the festivity. I could not remember whether it had been since the late 1970s or not until the early 1980s. But change is not always for the worse. During the 1980s, dearly beloved Bron Waugh was in charge of the wine. Talk about plonk. I do not know whether cats or horses were responsible, but there should have been no question of calling in a vet. The beasts ought to have been sent straight to a laboratory, to hunt down the toxicity. The Blairites had no shame about drinking champagne in public These

An old friend phoned. Normally cheerful, he was fed up. One of his business partners was being more than usually incompetent. ‘I told him that I’d describe him as a halfwit, if I could find the half.’ We went on to discuss another couple of friends, both good men and true, who seem doomed to imminent parliamentary defenestration. By the end of lunch, we were thoroughly benign. I was persuaded I could endure a Labour government Then there was hunting: a passion. It survived for several years under the Blair government and it seemed clear Tony had no stomach for the ban, which was half-hearted. That witty and cynical fellow

Things could have been worse. My host was determined to lunch al fresco, and after all it was late June. Yet this is England and as everyone knows, even D-Day had to be postponed for 24 hours. In the event, we were fine. The elements were kindly. The temperature did not fall below 60, the rain held off, we more or less managed to forget about politics and it would have been hard to improve on the setting. Saint Jacques, a restaurant which I have often praised, always deservedly, has a courtyard and is next to Berry Bros: so this is a sophisticatedly bacchanalian quartier. The rain held off, we

There was a wonderful old boy called John – Sir John – Wordie, who was a quintessential member of the establishment. A barrister, he spent much of his time defusing controversies before they had boiled over. In that enterprise, he never sought publicity, finding it much easier to dispense wise advice if no one knew who he was. An accomplished sailor from his RNVR days during the war, he was always a stalwart of nautical good and goodery – and he knew a very great deal about wine, especially port. A Texan can extract five syllables from Goddam: Go-o-o-day-um. John could do as well with port. Po-o-o-o-rt. It was a

One needs wine more than ever, yet when imbibing, it can be hard to concentrate. So much is going on. We were at table and the news came through about Slovakia. Was this an obscure incident, regrettable but below the level of geopolitics? Or would it become a second Sarajevo? Fortunately, that seems unlikely. In Mitteleuropa, there are always ancestral voices prophesying war and there is usually plenty of dry timber. But it does not seem that this assassination attempt will be the spark. The Barruols have a reputation for delightful eccentricity but they are committed to their bottles When we had come to that conclusion, there was an obvious

Drink and longevity: there seems to have been a successful counter-attack against the puritans, prohibitionists and other health faddists. Indeed, there is virtually a consensus that red wine has almost medicinal properties. That said, a confusion about so-called units remains. When the measurement was explained to me, I said that it sounded adequate. ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, that ought to be more or less enough.’ Then the cross-purposes were unscrambled. The 98 units or whatever – a figure clearly designed to give a bogus authority to the calculation – was a weekly total, not a daily one. There’s no reason whya normal wine-drinker should not live to be an old soak  There

Churchill. No disrespect to Andrew Roberts’s more recent work, but I set out to look up a point about drink in Roy Jenkins’s biography and ended up rereading it. I think that it is Roy’s best book and extremely well written. There are also passages where he slips in points from his own experience of high office: never excessive, always illuminating. Although Churchill was rarely drunk, he was equally rarely sober I did not need to be reminded what an extraordinary figure Churchill was: the drama was so vivid. After the ‘fight on the beaches’ oration, Josiah Wedgwood, a Labour MP, said that it was the speech of a thousand