The Diary: Max Hastings

I write my books with elephants. Almost every winter for the past six years my wife and I have rented a farmhouse on Kenya’s Laikipia Plateau, where I scribble uninterrupted by telephones or fleshpot temptations. In between, we swim, play energetic tennis and ride somewhat apathetic horses among aforesaid ellies, giraffe and zebras.

In the saddle, I think a good deal about my family, several of whom were bush addicts. Great-uncle Lewis was a professional hunter in South Africa in Edwardian days. My father, Macdonald Hastings, crossed the Kalahari in 1954 to find some of the last wild bushmen and contrived several happy journalistic adventures in Kenya.

Because I adored father, it delights me to know how much it would have delighted him to see me cavorting about the African wilderness in one of his old bush jackets. Likewise in Scotland, whenever I net a salmon or shoot a grouse, I murmur a greeting skywards to the old boy, who died in 1982.

An unselfconscious eccentric, he almost ruined himself playing the man-about-town-and-country on a modest writer’s income, but I was sometimes a beneficiary of his delusions of grandeur. On the first day of each boarding-school term, he sought to assuage my parting tears over lunch at one of his favourite restaurants – the Caprice, Ivy, Savoy and suchlike. This teach-in provided useful motivation. I became determined to match father’s lifestyle, whatever exertions were required to achieve this.

Some people find ancestor-worship odd. I have just published a memoir of my family, Did You Really Shoot the Television?, about which I was interviewed by the famously challenging Lynn Barber. Almost her first question was: “Have you ever considered psychotherapy?” Bemused, I demanded: “What for?” Lynn said: “To get over your obsession with your father.” Me: “But I like being obsessed with my father! Lynn: “Judging from your book, your father was bonkers and your mother was wonderful.”

It was more complicated than that. My mother, journalist and gardening writer Anne Scott-James, was indeed remarkable, but somewhat alarming to live with. Six feet tall, she perceived herself as a shy, fawn-like little creature of the forest; others, including me, saw a resemblance to an impeccably dressed Sherman tank.

She lived to be 96, apparently indestructible until her death last spring. When, a mere stripling of 85, she remarked one day with her accustomed abruptness: “You still haven’t forgiven me for your childhood, have you?” I replied: “Not so. I am only grateful for how things turned out. But, “I added, “if you ask a different question: did I enjoy my childhood? the answer would be ‘no’. When I was three or four, you and I wouldn’t have recognised each other in an identity parade.” She was off editing magazines and suchlike, and I was reared by an adored old imperialist nanny.

Mother paused for a moment, brooding, then said: “Who did you ever hear of who did anything with their lives who had” – this next bit in tones of withering scorn – “a happy childhood?” There may be something in what she said, though I doubt that it should feature in any child-rearing manual.

. . .

I was asked last week to appear on a new BBC2 arts programme – yes please; recorded in Glasgow – no thanks. Mark Thompson has been a disastrous BBC director-general, and nothing in his strategic review this week seems likely to change that verdict. He has promoted the transfer of most of the corporation’s operations to Manchester and other regional centres, at enormous cost and greater absurdity. Like it or not, London is the national hub. In every walk of life, redeployment north is the equivalent of a French Foreign Legion posting to Fort Zinderneuf. Only people heavily bribed or desperate for screen exposure, mostly politicians, will travel halfway up Britain for a few minutes airtime. This luddite exercise is driven solely by willingness to appease Labour’s devolutionary ambitions.

Thompson also presides over grossly bloated senior executive pay, at a time when most of the media is hacking budgets. The chasm between the meagre rewards offered to BBC programme-makers, most of them freelances, and the security, salaries and pensions provided to indifferently talented bureaucrats, is indefensible.

Fantastically, one highly-paid executive draws additional fees for presenting programmes. In my own days as a newspaper editor, I would never have dared to invoice my own title for my writing contributions. The public sector is more indulgent, crazily so. If David Cameron’s culture secretary has courage, he will replace BBC chairman Sir Michael Lyons with a nominee ready to dump Thompson, slash executive pay and halt the mad march into northern exile.

. . .

There is a blissful serendipity about sitting in a little Kenyan farm office assembling my current book, about the second world war. The Anzio landings are interrupted by live wildlife appearances. One day elephants are in the garden, another a friendly cheetah is next door. A radio message last week reported an almost unheard-of midday sighting of promenading lions. I stopped in mid-paragraph, dragged our team from the pool, and drove the old Land Rover lickety-split across the bush until we met Nick Day, the farm owner, gazing fascinated at a pride of 15 lions less than 200 yards distant, striding in column across the open landscape. Nick was baffled by this leonine migration in broad daylight, just as he cannot understand the unseasonable rains that fell on us in February. Never mind British weather, anybody who notices what has happened to Africa’s weather lately knows climate-change sceptics are ostriches – and yes, we see lots of those, too.

. . .

Home to the usual range of London invitations. Social life is bipolar – the real kind with real friends, and the synthetic variety with people whom one meets only for professional reasons. Among the latter, I wish hosts would abandon the nonsense of inviting spouses and arranging seating plans that rigidly alternate men and women, or worse still place husbands beside their own wives.

If formal dinners are necessary, at least enable guests to learn something useful from them. If I reluctantly enter the pariah cage to eat with a banker, I want to listen to him or her, not their spouse. The armed forces chiefs often waste taxpayers’ money by giving formal dinners at which a guest may be placed beside the local mayor’s wife, thus learning nothing about the nation’s defences. The only justification for attending starched-shirt bun fights is to gain enlightenment about something.

Max Hastings is an FT contributing editor. ‘Did You Really Shoot the Television? A Family Fable’ is published on March 8 (HarperPress, £20)