On David Hart in Alexandria

From an excellent obituary in Saturday's Financial Times, purchased a day late in Alexandria in a process going back to before the internet age, I discover that my old friend, David Hart, has died. I look forward to comparing other obits of the man whom the FT headlines as 'the flamboyant libertarian who helped Thatcher defeat the miners'. I particularly liked the line by Brian Groom that David was 'an extrovert ex-hippy who lived the life of the English establishment too extravagantly to be part of it'.  He was assuredly a man who saw nuance and bias in newspapers as an artform of especially exquisite sensibility, whether it was practised for or against the causes in which he believed. It will be hard in reading the accounts of his life to avoid imagining him reading them too, or imagining that in some way he wrote some of them.

I cannot find it in me to reminisce too much now (maybe later) except to recall a strange Suffolk garden afternoon in the early eighties with Edward Teller of the H-bomb, Ronnie Millar the playwright who wrote speeches for Thatcher, a Russian dissident recently freed from the Gulag and a local farmer or two. The conversation on what he always called 'soul politics'  went around and round for hours, just as my daughter did on one of the Hart family bicycles.

And then to remember the smudgy letter on a bathroom wall which 'showed', in Russian, that Mr Gorbachev was funding Arthur Scargill

And the early morning that Diana died when I woke in his house in Scotland and had to scurry back to london to edit The Times and write our leading article on a British Airways breakfast menu.

And the squares of Cadbury's dairy Milk which came in silver bowls after dinner, exactly the same each time like every other dining and drinking tradition which he kept alive in his life long after his form of Motor Neurone Disease would have destroyed the impetus for niceties in most.

His series of Christmas cards, showing himself in surreal guises, ended in one with a crooked smile that arived, as usual, three weeks ago,

'Single-mindedness in a cause' does not begin to do justice to his attitude to living.

All fondest thoughts from here to the extended family, of mothers, children and idealists, of which he was so proud to be a part.