The spooky "strategic advisory" firm Hakluyt that occasionally features in Private Eye.
That was me blogging the other day. And today I bought the new Eye and found that it has featured again:
One of Keir Starmer's first appointments as prime minister in July 2024 was that of Varun Chandra, head of the Hakluyt intelligence consultancy, as investment and trade adviser (while he retained a stake in the firm, as revealed in Eye 1629).
and:
As Mandelson's appointment worked its way through the clearance procedure, with everything hanging on the Foreign Office permanent secretary, who should arrive in this role? One Sir Oliver Robbins, fresh from a stint at... Hakluyt. He duly took the view that what he described last week as a "borderline case" could be confirmed, no questions asked.
and
After Mandelson's sacking last September, Chandra was, remarkably, on the shortlist of three to take on the ambassadorship. Starmer was then reportedly persuaded that recent events perhaps indicated that a professional diplomate might make on a better choice ... In January Chandra was nevertheless given the consolation prize of becoming the PM's "special envoy" to the US on trade and investment to go with his existing role.
After that, the news that I think Vaughan Wilkins' granddaughter, who has published under the names Laura Powell and Laura Vaughan, has also written as Rose Wilkins may fall a little flat.
But let's get on to what this post was going to be about: a splendid reply by Vaughan Wilkins to a critic of his first novel, And So – Victoria, that was published in The Queen (23 September 1937).
l have read with amusement the letter in your issue of September 2nd, in which a simple-minded American correspondent upbraids me for saying unpleasant things in my novel And So – Victoria about the very unpleasant sons of George III. He – or she – chides me too for imagining conversations between historical personages.
"Boston" obviously has merely a superficial knowledge of the family of George III, or he would not leap to the defence of a creature like the Duke of Cumberland. It is true that on that sinister person’s tomb the customary laudatory inscription is incised – but when he became King of Hanover, the first thing he did was to abolish the constitution.
The Duke of York was a nasty, muddleheaded old man, whose mistress sold commissions in the army he nominally. commanded. The Duke of Clarence was another muddle-head who unquestionably lived on the verge of mental derangement. The Duke of Kent was a pompous egoist and sadist. Let "Boston" read about the mock execution His Royal Highness staged in Canada; or in the Crevy Papers about his curious reactions to marriage.
"Boston" thinks (does he or she really mean it !) that George III was a nice kind fellow because he made an allowance to the last of the exiled Stuart Princes "out of his own private income". George IV could – and did – spend £300 on a single coat: he threw away hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pounds in building himself palaces that were both hideous and unnecessary. He raced; he gambled; he kept harems; he drank – not out of his income, but out of contributions which time and again had to be levied for him by the State, He intrigued against his father; he abominated his mother; he persecuted his wife; he tormented (and hated) his daughter; he betrayed his friends; he could not keep his word; he did not pay his bills. This is not a novelist’s imagination: it is a matter of record.
Of course, I don’t know "for a fact the conversations that took place in the homes of George III sons”. But if "Boston" will not allow me to imagine them then I and every other historical novelist will have to shut up shop. The giants of the past, Dumas, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, must all incur "Boston's" displeasure. Anyhow, it is very odd to find a champion of the Hanoverian from the city of "The Tea-party"!
I suppose that when set against the depredations of the Hanoverians even Peter Mandelson begins to seem palatable.
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