Diary: Suffocated by a security blanket

ONE OF the drawbacks of being Home Secretary is the ever- present security that surrounds the holder of the office long after he has left the Home Office for a quieter life. Michael Howard's elevation from Environment Secretary means that he can no longer stroll unaccompanied round the lanes near his country residence in Kent.

Not that he would want to at the moment - the road drillers are out in force as they implement the new security measures, which is causing some irritation, I gather, among some of his neighbours.

To minimise his own inconvenience, Mr Howard has left Britain for his summer holidays, choosing the United States for one good reason: in recent years, I understand, the Howards have had a house- swapping arrangement with an American couple, and his new job has not changed this.

The temporary inhabitants of the Home Secretary's private house in Chelsea (he has an official, fortress-type flat elsewhere in London) are not surrounded by MI5 people at the moment. However, they may well be if they decide to spend a few days at the house in Kent, which, I'm told, is a possibility under the arrangement.

HUNGARY does not have a football-hooligan problem, says Superintendent Adrian Appleby, the man in charge of flushing out thugs in this country. But it does have horrendous problems with its water polo supporters.

NO PACKAGE DEALS

It's not just beards that United Parcels Services discriminates against (the US company sacked a lorry driver for wearing one, as I reported on Tuesday). Among the managerial staff in the European division are two 'couples' - one is about to marry and the other has lived together for two years. The duos must either separate, it seems, or two of them will lose their jobs.

'Our policy clearly states that 'fraternisation' among managers is not allowed,' explains the personnel director, Tom Walsh. 'This is to prevent claims of favouritism and sexual harassment. If we hear rumours of

romance, we set up a meeting with the individuals concerned and discuss the situation.'

Walsh insists these meetings are amicable. My sources whisper otherwise.

WHEN the television producer Harry Thompson replaced Roy Hattersley with a tub of lard after the politician failed for the third time to appear on his BBC 2 programme Have I Got News For You in June, Mr Thompson thought it all extremely amusing. But when he himself for the second time failed to appear, as promised, on Radio 4's The Radio Programme - the item was subsequently scrapped, causing the Beeb some embarrassment because it had billed Thompson as appearing - he apparently lost his sense of humour when Mary Sharp, a producer for BBC Radio magazine programmes, addressed him as 'tub of lard' while listening to his excuses.

NOT ALL ABOARD

British Rail, I thought, had been improving (all things being relative) but one reader, Margaret Alton, is not so sure. She tells how a disabled man wanted to travel from Crowle to Cleethorpes for the day. The man's wife and a friend of hers accompanied him and his wheelchair to Scunthorpe, where they tried to use a ramp to board the next train. Not possible, they were told, because they should have given 48 hours' notice. They had to wait for the next train home.

Mrs Alton tried to find out what procedures should have been followed. The Scunthorpe number was unobtainable. Doncaster station could not answer her query, and suggested Sheffield. Sheffield said the offices were closed at the weekend and suggested ringing on Monday. But too late for a wheelchair to travel on Tuesday. Too late for Sir Bob Reid to do something about it?

A DAY LIKE THIS

6 August 1896 Gabriel Faure writes to his wife from Bayreuth: 'You'd think I would find the people here dazzlingly clever because of the atmosphere of intelligence with which Wagner's work surrounds us. But it's the opposite] We are all finding one another even duller than usual. We can't talk about anything except the performances, and each is more inept than the other when we try to describe our feelings] We are stultified by all the splendours, and all our arguments lead to nothing. That's like The Ring, of course; it's packed with philosophy and symbolism that serves merely to demonstrate our poverty, our hopeless emptiness. At the end it leaves one slightly more convinced of universal misery, of eternal suffering and that's all] You can see how gay and stimulating it is] In fact, it is penitence in the noblest meaning of the word, almost contrition.'