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Queen. (This comparatively rare honor is given to much-favored nonnatives: recipients have included Bob Geldof, Ronald Reagan, Caspar Weinberger, and Magnus Magnusson, theIcelandic TV star.) But then, after Gorbachev, Romania changed its status from Plucky Bulwark Against Soviet Imperialism to Filthy Little Balkan Dictatorship. (It was always both, of course, but countries rarely attain a complex, dual labeling in the eyes of others.) And in the brief hiatus between Ceauşescu’s fall and his execution, the Queen managed to strip the Romanian leader of his embarrassing knighthood.
    Ron Brown, as his recent legal entanglement disclosed, is a flouter of even more traditions than had been supposed. Over the last thirty years or so, it has become almost a Parliamentary rule that disgrace visits the two main parties in different ways. Tories are busted for sex, and Labourites are busted for graft. This doesn’t mean that Labour MPs are tight-buttoned spouses and Tories financially impeccable, but merely that they are discreet—or wily—in different areas of life. With Ron Brown, though, it was sex, and the erotic angle ensured that the imbroglio which came to court in Lewes, Sussex, became known as the Case of Nonna’s Knickers.
    For three years, Mr. Brown had his life well worked out. He kept his wife and his constituency in Scotland, his mistress and his Commons seat in England. Nonna Longden, the woman in the case, even managed to accompany him as his “secretary” on the visit to Colonel Qaddafi. There was the occasional hiccup—like a report in the tabloid press that Ron and Nonna had had sex in a shower within the precincts of the House of Commons—but nothing too unusual, nothing that wasn’t deniable. When the couple broke up, however, Mrs. Longden took a new lover—one Dermot Redmond, a carpet salesman in a tweed deerstalker—who happened to have a criminal record as a con man, and things got livelier. One day, Brown visited Nonna’s apartment near Hastings, and here versions of what ensued differ. According to the prosecution, the MP, in a state of inebriation and jealousy, went berserk, and smashed all the windows in the flat with a bottle of Liebfraumilch; when the quailing Nonna summoned Dermot the carpet salesman for assistance, the MP stole a tape recorder, two pairs of knickers, a photograph of Mrs. Longden, a gold bar brooch, and a pair of china earrings, then decamped. According tothe defense. Mr. Brown was merely having a quiet drink with Mrs. Longden when the carpet salesman erupted into the household, and it was
his
jealous rage that caused all the damage to the apartment. Moreover, the MP had no intention of permanently depriving Nonna of her valuables; he had taken them merely as bargaining counters against the return of some “politically sensitive” tapes in her possession—over which, incidentally, she was trying to blackmail him for twenty thousand pounds. As for the two pairs of knickers, it was Mrs. Longden herself who, ironically, had wrapped them round the tape recorder, and that explained their presence in the MP’s pocket when he was arrested by police at the local railway station.
    The Case of Nonna’s Knickers enlivened the Crown Court at Lewes (and the surrounding Tory constituency) for a week. The bottle of Liebfraumilch, with a plume of grass waving from its neck, was displayed to the jury; so were the two pairs of knickers (one white and one black, for the record). Mrs. Ron Brown sat in court all week “silently supporting her husband”—or perhaps silently cursing his very name. Mr. Brown himself declined to take the witness stand, a decision from which nothing may be legally inferred but from which observers usually choose to infer plenty—in the present case, the probable view of the MP’s lawyers that if their client were allowed to get up on his hind legs he would make a spectacular ass of himself and be eaten alive by the prosecution. The jury was faced with two