Another busy day, led off by a phone interview with David Davis, a conservative member of Parliament who was shadow Home Secretary. For those who don’t understand the British system, the out-of-power party has a shadow cabinet, so that when an election is called, voters know who will hold post if that party is elected. The Home Secretary is similar to that of America’s Attorney-General, although he or she is also responsible for all of the other things the government does internally. As such, Davis was potentially a high-ranking member of the government, and one of those few people who would have to be recognized as a serious possiblity to become Prime Minister sometime in the next 10 or 20 years. However, when the Conservative Party refused to oppose the government’s proposal to extend from 28 days to 42 days the amount of time a suspected terrorist could be held without being charged, Davis resigned his seat–and his position in the shadow cabinet–in order to run in a by-election in a campaign focused on that single issue. A profile in courage, you might say.
Afterwards, I went up to Farringdon, which is kind of a funky factory area, to meet (get ready for a great name) Francesca Yarde-Buller (above left), who is one of the principals in Old Street Publishing, the company that brought out The Coup in the UK. She was very charming, and I certainly appreciate everything the company did for me. I also met her brother Ben, the driving spirit behind the firm, and he was going to join us in 10 or 15 minutes at the coffee shop, but he never arrived. I hope he’s not waiting for us now.
In the afternoon, I ventured into Notting Hill to meet Diane Wei Liang (above right). Today, Diane is a novelist and the mother of two as well as Ph.D. in economics, but 20 years ago, Diane was climbing on tanks in Tienamann Square. The novels she writes (The Eye of Jade, Painted Butterfly) are about a female private detective in Beijing, though Mei Wang is hardly a hard-boiled dame–more a philosophical detective, trying to understand what has happened to her country and the people she meets. Diane had a lot of interesting things to say about living in an authoritarian state and how it insinuates itself into the fibre of every contact. It was sad to hear her discuss the massacre at Tienamann Square; to hear her say “Nobody believed the government would do that,” was heart-rending. The point, of course, is that nobody ever believes the government is capable of such breaches until they are perpetrated. (Diane is also very funny. When I was taking her picture, I asked her to smile, and she replied, dryly, “I am not an actress who smiles on command.” And then she smiled.)
In the evening, Tim O’Toole invited me and his golfing friend from the Main Line, Jeff, who has just been transferred to London to become General Counsel of AstraZeneca (the little purple pill), to come to dinner. We went to The Reform Club, which is Tim’s dining club, which was founded by Edward Ellis and his fellow progressives in 1832. The place is amazing, upper crust through and through: enormously high ceilings, dark wood everywhere, busts and paintings and the original illustrations used in Punch of its most exalted members (William Gladstone and Winston Churchill, for two.) Other members of note? The title character of Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn, and another Phineas, Phineas Fogg, hero of Jules Verne‘s Around the World in Eighty Days. Also, the famous fencing scene in the James BondDie Another Day movie, the one featuring Madonna, was filmed there. The food wasn’t so bad, either. Above, the members’ library.