Lord Bonkers' Diary: The prime minister was having an affair with Stanley

The question of the Bonhams Carter* and their hyphens is not a simple one. Helena Bonham Carter doesn't have one, but her grandfather Sir Maurice 'Bongie' Bonham-Carter, Asquith's principal private secretary, did. I knew a member of the family when I lived in Kew in the Eighties, and he had one too.

* Lord Bonkers assures me this is the correct plural - cf. courts martial.

Thursday

To Bloomsbury for the launch party of Precipice – Robert Harris’s novel about those terrible days before the outbreak of the Great War. 

He proves chiefly interested in Mr Asquith’s dalliance with Venetia Stanley, but this tale is not new to those of us who were around at the time. Indeed, when I first heard that the prime minister was having an affair with Stanley, I feared things were worse than they turned out to be. 

I prick up my ears when Harris tells me he has drawn heavily upon papers held by the Bonham-Carter family. If Violent got his hands on juicy gossip, you can be sure he turned that knowledge into hard cash. 

Some correspondents, incidentally, ask why Violent Bonham Carter had no hyphen when the rest of the clan do. The answer is that his was stolen from him one evening at Esmeralda's Barn by Ronnie Kray, and this lack of respect led to the gang warfare that so disfigured our capital in the Sixties.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• ‘The Defenestration of Ming Campbell’
• Pimped with underglow lights and belting out Hildegard of Bingen at full volume
• I catch Jennie rolling her eyes and feel a little ashamed