pressed a button. ‘Anyway, after we’ve eaten, we’ll go and inspect the natives.’
They ascended at a stately pace to the sixth floor and disembarked into a large, L-shaped dining room. ‘It might have been pleasanter to eat in my rooms, but I thought you might as well have the benefit of the full Wrangler hospitality.’
On cue, a frock-coated butler hove into view bearing a silver salver. He inclined his head. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’
‘Ah, thank you, Tozer. This is Mr Amiss. He is joining us here to help run things more smoothly, so you will, no doubt, be seeing something of him. Robert, please to help yourself to champagne.’
As they each took a glass, Lambie Crump lowered his voice confidingly. ‘One finds it wise to drink little at luncheon, but a pick-me-up does not go amiss in the middle of a taxing day. Now let me take you on a perambulation around our rogues’ gallery.’
This tour of the portraits on the dining room walls was clearly one that delighted Lambie Crump, for it enabled him to scatter into his speeches aphorisms, quotations and bon mots, the apparent spontaneity of which he had burnished to perfection. ‘Ah, me. My predecessors. How their intellectual distinction weighs upon me!’ He delivered himself of a particularly happy neigh. ‘Here we have Seymour Spragge, our founder. Not perhaps, exceptionally gifted intellectually, but one cannot fault what vulgarians would nowadays no doubt deem his “marketing skills”. It was Spragge, after all, who persuaded the third Earl of Papworth in 1805 that he should provide all the capital to set up The Wrangler , leave Spragge to run it as he thought fit and pay him fifty per cent of the gross income.’
‘I’ve heard of blank cheques,’ said Amiss, ‘but that’s pretty spectacular. Unless, of course, Papworth had some control over the outgoings.’
‘Nothing so coarse,’ said Lambie Crump. ‘Papworth was uninterested in commerce and was also in thrall to Spragge, whom he regarded as the greatest mind of his age.’ He neighed again. ‘Sadly, one must challenge that assessment, for, alas, Spragge’s was not an original mind.’
He took a sip of champagne and smiled in a superior manner. ‘One must hope standards have risen a touch since then. Still, one should not disparage one’s predecessors. Spragge did put The Wrangler on the map. At the very least, even though his mind was superficial, he had a feel for the fashion of the times. One cannot go far wrong being an intellectual slave of Edmund Burke and a hero-worshipper of the Duke of Wellington. And I grant you, he had an eye for talent.’ Lambie Crump raised his glass patronizingly to his founder’s portrait. ‘So all in all, not a bad editor.’ He smiled at Amiss. ‘As they went.’
Amiss quickly learned that there had never been an editor on an intellectual par with Lambie Crump. This one was pedestrian, that one a crook and though these two had enlivened things by shooting each other in the head, their heads hadn’t been worth much anyway.
About the inadequates, Lambie Crump was relatively benign: the heretics earned only excoriation. There was the one who went all the way with Disraeli on extending the franchise, the reprehensible flirter with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule and – above all – the apostate who failed to admit that the only respectable intellectual position on the American Civil War was to back the South.
When it came to America – which to Amiss’s surprise loomed large in the paper’s concerns – all popular heroes were villains and villains were heroes. Abraham Lincoln was a counter-jumper and militarist bully, Franklin Roosevelt a fiscal nihilist and John F. Kennedy a priapic and unprincipled plastic-Irish scoundrel. Inevitably, therefore, the heroes were Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the success of the century: Barry Goldwater was the best president America had never had.
‘President Clinton, Willie?’ Amiss said