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harmless, perfectly puerile piece of fun. Unfortunately the British newspaper the
Sun
, whose adoptive offspring Ian Botham had been banned from making a TV appearance, decided that Edmonds should not be allowed to indulge in such flagrant rule-twisting with impunity, and the
Sun
solids hit the fan. Phil was summoned to Lord’s to see out-going TCCB secretary, Donald Carr, and incoming TCCB secretary A. C. Smith.
    Phil did his unconvincing best to explain that being a multifaceted little person, his Frost interview might well have gone along completely non-cricketing lines. He had, for example, recently been involved in a takeover bid for a public company, Blacks Leisure, which had created no mean interest in the financial pages of the press.
    ‘Don’t be silly,’ argued Smith, irritated. ‘The reason they wanted you on the show was because you are a cricketer. They wouldn’t have wanted you if you’d been a plumber!’
    ‘No,’ agreed Phil. ‘If they’d wanted a plumber they’d have asked Gatt . . .’. In a previous incarnation, Mike ‘Gatt’ Gatting had been an apprenticed plumber.
    Phil made a full, exhaustive and totally insincere apology, had his wrist slapped, and after detention was allowed home with a bad mark and a reprimand. The schoolroom is no place to be when you are thirty-five years old. I fear Phil is going to find this press and media gag very difficult to countenance over the next four months.
    Waiting to meet me at Melbourne airport was Carol Bennetto, of William Heinemann (Australia), the publishers whose occasional aberrations result in the production of books such as this. There is currently plenty of excitement in Heinemann (Australia). Not only do they have Jackie Collins and me to deal with, but managing director Sandy Grant is up to his neck in the MI5 25,000-part miniseries.
    Everyone, by now, must have heard of former MI5 officer, Peter Wright, and the attempts to publish his controversial memoirs in Australia. Her Britannic Majesty’s government is currently resisting such attempts in the Australian courts, defending the principle that intelligence officers do not publish
unauthorised
memoirs. Since no one in their right civil service mind is going to authorise memoirs the main import of which is that the British intelligence service leaks like a sieve and that former MI5 chief, the late Sir Roger Hollis, was a Soviet mole, this means that the Peter Wrights of this life shall publish no memoirs
at all.
Wright, at present living in Tasmania and in fear of his life, and indeed, presumably, of anything subterranean, grey, pro-Russian and furry, is clearly a significant test case. The issue is causing a furore in Whitehall, in Parliament, where Mrs Thatcher has been subjected to some fierce opposition questioning, and also here in Australia, at the New South Wales Supreme Court in Sydney.
    The British government has fielded the hitherto inscrutable mandarin, Sir Robert Armstrong, to be its main witness. Sir Robert, Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary and Security Adviser, is also the United Kingdom’s most senior and powerful civil servant, and I have had the odd opportunity to study him from relatively close quarters in the past.
    I first became aware of the
éminence grise
behind the governmental throne whilst working as a conference interpreter at the 1984 World Economic Summit, held at Lancaster House in London. He seemed to epitomise that quiet, yet probably ruthless, intelligence and efficiency which so hallmarks the real high-flyers in Whitehall’s corridors of power. Two years later, in May 1986, I took the same flight as Sir Robert, and British Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe, to the World Economic Summit in Tokyo. Unfortunately, I could not quite establish whether the real-life Sir Humphrey Appleby and the real-life Jim Hacker saw the irony of the British Airways choice of in-flight movie. It was
Yes, Minister.
    For the purposes of a tour diary, it may well be that Sir