Dining with the Devil

IN the mid-1980s, a group of us - among them the notorious thief and fascist hypocrite, Roberto Fiore, as well as the BNP's chief-in-waiting, Nick Griffin - used to spend our Sunday afternoons at a small Italian restaurant directly behind Victoria Station in central London. On one occasion I arrived early and, given his centre-left proclivities, was surprised to see the former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson (1916-1995), eating a meal at an adjacent table.

A close friend of mine thought it would be amusing to ask Wilson for his autograph, but despite being in possession of a biro the only item available for him to sign was a copy of a book on the Anti-Christ that we had just picked up from a Catholic bookstall in North London. Wilson, who was suffering from the initial stages of Alzheimer's disease and who had therefore become a pale and delicate shadow of his old tub-thumping self, was accompanied by his wife and she examined my friend's book very closely to see if her husband was about to add his name to anything remotely incriminating. Remarkably, she seemed oblivious to the subject-matter and, being from the West Riding of Yorkshire, the former Labour leader and recently-appointed baron took the pen and scrawled "Wilson of Rievaulx" on the inside cover. I'm not sure how significant this little incident is, and thankfully the couple left before our weekly pasta and politics began, but if you ever see a beast with two horns smoking a pipe and muttering about the "Winter of Discontent" then you will know who to blame.