WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

SO MANY “IMPORTANT” THINGS HAVE HAPPENED this week that it is difficult to decide upon the “highlight”; the favourites include Education Secretary Michael Gove’s absurd decision to try to make young people in England and Wales write grammatically correct English, the wasteful NATO summit including Georgia and Russia, Prince Charles’ return to form in suggesting to an American journalist that he thought that Camilla should become queen of England and Scotland “when I become king” (sic), and a similar harking back to the good old days of predictable politics when a Conservative grandee put his foot in it over lunch.

LORD DAVID IVOR YOUNG, BARON YOUNG OF GRAFFHAM, Privy Counsellor and Deputy Lieutenant to the Crown, was generally thought to be the real person behind the imaginary figure known to readers of Private Eye magazine as “Lord Suit”, a Conservative millionaire who was completely out of touch with life in modern Britain.

THIS MAY HAVE BEEN MY OWN OPINION in the past, but Lord Young’s statement to the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday, in which he said that British people “have never had it so good”, shows that there is not a jot or scintilla of truth in the allegation that Lord Young is an outdated political figure who should retire to his country house and keep his mouth shut except when he is putting his Davidoff cigars in it.

PROOF THAT LORD YOUNG is one of us is his choice of restaurant for luncheon, a modest Georgian building a stone’s thrown from the Houses of Parliament. Young does not go for fancy foreign food, as many rich people do, but instead, like most of us, enjoyed simple, traditional British pub grub, on this occasion being a deeply flavoured starter of asparagus in a morel butter sauce, followed by a silky slice of confit salmon with samphire and zingy baby nasturtium flowers, quail with hazelnut, pomegranate and tiny pickled radishes, and a lemon tart. His only extravagance might have been the Bordeaux, but so many of us in England (and perhaps even some Celts) now drink foreign wine that it is hardly a luxury. And £12 a glass is cheap by anyone’s standards.