Diary

To play the gamekeeper

ROYALISTS still trying to cope with the sour aftertaste left by Andrew Davies' adaption of Michael Dobbs' satire To Play the King will welcome this antidote. It is called the Hounding of John Thomas and the plot goes like this:

Lady Chatterley and Mellors have a son, John Thomas (D H Lawrence got it all wrong), who becomes a Conservative Cabinet minister, and in turn tries to kill Mellors - now the prosperous proprietor of a garden centre - and Lady C. As sexual mores change, the son of Lady Chatterley becomes first an outcast and then a hero of the new British classless society.

The book, to be published by Century, is the first novel by journalist and satirist Craig Brown. Although it is not due out until May, it has already whet the appetite of Paul Seed, director of To Play the King.

'It sounds quite amazing,' he told me yesterday without hesitation. 'I'd love to do it.'

Brown, who is still penning the manuscript at his home in the country, tells me that the inspiration for the political career of the protagonist came from his acquaintance with three fallen MPs: Jeremy Thorpe, John Stonehouse and Cecil Parkinson.

'I think it would work well in adaptation,' he says, 'since it is not written as straight narrative but as a series of letters, indexes and memos . . . after all, the worst books do tend to make the best screenplays.'

ALTHOUGH Tory Europhobe Teddy Taylor, MP for Southend East, may have considered his unsuccessful, last-minute application for yesterday's elections for the vice-chairmanship of the party backbench committee on European affairs 'a joke', others in his party did not necessarily see it that way.

Bluntest of all was Tim Renton, former Arts Minister and MP for Mid-Sussex: 'It's like Don Giovanni trying to spend the night in a nunnery,' he observed drily.

Scooped in Ulster

NO EDITOR was more livid with his own troops for not pipping the Observer over its disclosure of the Government's contacts with the IRA than Andrew Neil.

''I want excellence and you are not delivering,' he told Sunday Times staff sternly at the paper's start-the-week conference on Tuesday morning . . . and his words were delivered into the darkest corners of Wapping. Until, that is, they reached the ears of a senior hand, who asked: 'But where was Andrew for most of last week?'

The answer was in Northern Ireland - meeting the province's great and good; including, of course, Sir Patrick Mayhew.

CALL it coincidence, but the Metropolitan Police have just published a leaflet advising mobile phone owners to safeguard their machines. 'It only takes seconds for a thief to smash a window and steal your phone,' the leaflet warns . . . which is precisely how Chief Commisioner Paul Condon lost his.

Name that book IT SEEMS that best-selling American author John Grisham is struggling to keep up with the demands of success; in July, Universal Pictures bought the film rights of his next book for pounds 3.75m - before he had even begun writing it; now the same book is the only entry in Century's catalogue of next year's publications without a title.

''He hasn't yet made up his mind,' explains a spokesman, 'although it does look increasingly as though it might be The Chamber.'

FOLLOWING my note on Tuesday concerning the secret talking-to by Richard Ryder, Commons Chief Whip, to Teresa Gorman, MP for Billericay, over any post-Budget public hysteria, I received a telephone call from Mrs Gorman insisting that I assure Mr Ryder's office that it was not she 'who had leaked their meeting to the press'. Of course I did so - only to be informed by Mr Ryder's office: 'Well, she told everyone else.'

A DAY LIKE THIS

2 December 1796 Charles Lamb writes to Samuel Coleridge: 'Your sonnet, Coleridge, brings afresh to my mind the time, twas two Christmases ago, of that nice little smoky room at The Salutation, which is even now continually presenting itself to my recollection, with its associated train of pipes, tobacco, egg-hot, welsh- rabbit, metaphysics and poetry - are we never to meet again? How differently I am circumstanced now] I have no one to talk all these matters about to; I lack friends. I am starving at the India House - near seven o'clock without my dinner; and so it has been, and will be, almost all the week. I get home at night o'erwearied, quite faint, and then to cards with my father, who will not let me enjoy a meal in peace; but I must conform to my situation and I hope I am, for the most part, thankful.'