May 11, 2013

AROUND AND ABOUT: FINEST HOUR 142, SPRING 2009

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The 2009 Finest Hour Re-Rat Award (issued infrequently) goes to Senator Judd Gregg (R.-N.H.), who, after accepting nomination as President Obama’s Secretary of Commerce, withdrew, saying he could not balance “being in the Cabinet versus myself as an individual doing my job.” Gregg’s nomination had sewn fear among Republicans who learned that New Hampshire’s Democratic Governor, John Lynch, would appoint a (liberal) Republican in his place. Thus Judd re-rats. (WSC to private secretary John Colville, 26 January 1941: “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”)

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Alfred James of Churchill Centre Australia reports that (moving right along) the 1911 Census has just been released in England. No address was “private” in those days: Churchill is listed at 33 Eccleston Square (seventeen rooms) with Clementine, Diana and
eight servants (cook, nurse, lady’s maid, housemaid, parlourmaid, underparlourmaid, kitchen maid and hall boy). Ah for the days when help was cheap. I once tried Churchill’s method of getting two days out of one by copying his Chartwell routine: an hour of sound sleep in mid-afternoon, bath, dinner, cinema, work from 11pm to 3am, bed, breakfast at 8am, work in bed all morning, bath #2, lunch, afternoon amble and start over again. Works fine if you have a staff of fifteen. Mrs. Langworth was unamused.

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Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dismissed overtures to his country from President Obama, saying Teheran did not see any change in policy under the new U.S. administration. “They chant the slogan of change but no change is seen in practice,” Khamenei said in his speech, broadcast live on state television. “We haven’t seen any change.” In his video message, Obama said the U.S. wanted to engage Iran and improve decades of strained relations.

We hear echoes in this of Harold Nicolson’s note to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, 1 March 1938 (Nicolson Diaries, I, 328). Churchill, he said, “spoke of ‘this great country nosing from door to door like a cow that has lost its calf, mooing dolefully now in Berlin and now in Rome—when all the time the tiger and the alligator wait for its undoing.'”