Mr Wonderful Takes a Cruise - a review

Even for those with a passing interest in Westminster politics, John Nott is hardly the most evocative of names.

He's remembered as the defence secretary who resigned after Argentinian troops forcibly occupied the Falkland Islands, and for the interview with Robin Day in which he, quite reasonably, took exception to Day's pompous cynicism and walked out of the studio. And, er, that's about it, isn't it? A vague memory of an ascetic looking Thatcherite, perhaps?

Clearly I should have read his memoirs - Here Today, Gone Tomorrow - but I haven't. So I came to his book Mr Wonderful Takes a Cruise: The Adventures of an Old Age Pensioner (Ebury Press, 2004) with no real preconceptions. And it's an unadulterated joy.

Nott and his wife have decided to go on a cruise around the Norwegian fjords, so he resolves to brush up on his ballroom dancing and his bridge-playing, while simultaneously carrying out a study of the mores of modern Britain. He wanders around Shepherd's Bush Market, enjoys a lap dance in Spearmint Rhino and samples youthful enthusiasm in an evangelical church.

All of which is accompanied by a humane, tolerant commentary shot through with a level of ironic wit that I don't think I've ever encountered from a politician before. It's really very, very funny indeed. I particularly like his shocked response when told that if he takes Viagra and finds he has not reverted to a 'natural state' after four hours, he should go to his doctor: 'My God!' he replies. 'It would be highly embarrassing for a member of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council to walk to the surgery down Sloane Street in an engorged state.'

The cruise itself is something of a disappointment to Nott, but it does allow him to fantasise about his Viking roots (he insists that his surname derives from that of King Cnut) and about his forthcoming reclamation of the British throne. He'd like to stake his claim through peaceful mean, but is aware that force may yet be necessary, which provokes my favourite line in the book: 'With Erik Bloodaxe and Harald Hardrada in my pedigree, I have inherited a concealed talent for violence.'

And his conclusion, after two hundred pages of examining the state of the nation? 'The elderly must not become old Grundys, deploring the modern world, saying that the country is not what it was. It never has been. The world goes on its own way whether the old and critical approve of it or not.'

This is tremendous stuff. As entertaining and wise a book as I've read in a very long time.