On 25 October last year, Thérèse Coffey became Defra Secretary. On 2 November, Sir James Dyson wrote to her. The famed inventor, who is the biggest owner and active farmer of agricultural land in Britain, outlined the problems of producing food sustainably and profitably, inviting her to visit one of his farms and meet him. No reply. A week later, Sir James’s office contacted Ms Coffey’s office and were assured her reply would be sought. None came. On 8 February this year, his office tried again. Two days later, her special adviser told the Dyson team that the original letter had been lost. Sir James re-sent it. On 24 February, having received no reply, his office checked once more. Ministers would review the draft reply next week, they were told. On 9 March, having still received nothing, his office contacted Defra and asked if they were being snubbed. Next day, they were told the draft reply was now in ministerial hands. Since then, no further communication. So nearly six months and ten interactions passed with no result. This Monday, however, a letter reciting government policy finally arrived from a junior minister, Mark Spencer, after Dyson’s company, in exasperation, had refused a request to visit its farms until they had received an answer to the 2 November letter. I think one can confidently say that there is almost no organisation other than British government (or its offshoots) which behaves in this way to bona fide requests by qualified people. The arrogance of ministers and officials is staggering, but perhaps the stupidity is even more so. ‘Having a Coffey’ would make quite a good phrase for trying, and failing, to meet a government minister. 

Diane Abbott has apologised for her letter in the Observer in which she seemed to say that only black people can be the victims of racism: others, such as Jews and redheads, are the victims merely of ‘prejudice’, she had opined. But no one paid much attention to her excuse – that ‘the errors arose in an initial draft being sent’. (This, by the way, is disputed, with some saying she sent the same letter twice.) How was it that this draft got written, was erroneous, and was nonetheless sent? What would Ms Abbott have said or not said if she had corrected the original draft? If you take out the point I have summarised above, there would not be much of her letter left.

At school in the 1970s, several of us were ardent fans of the Barry McKenzie strip in Private Eye. Barry, an uncouth Australian who arrives for adventures in Britain, was our role model. We even went on a special pilgrimage to a Hampstead pub which – uniquely, we thought – stocked Foster’s, Barry’s favourite ‘ice-cold tubes’. By the time I became editor of this paper in 1984, the strip had long ceased. It was my ambition to recreate it in The Spectator’s pages, in the harsher climate of Thatcher’s Britain, with an older but not, I hoped, wiser Barry, still trying and failing to ‘feature’ (defined in the McKenzie Australian glossary as ‘feature, see under naughty’) with girls. Nick Garland, who drew the original masterwork, was already available, drawing our brilliant covers. He willingly assisted my courtship of his co-author, Barry Humphries (who died last week). Barry was charming. Several discussions ensued and we became friends. But it was not to be: Barry McKenzie had been left behind by Edna Everage, who by that time had risen to the rank of Dame. Barry Humphries liked to explain that he could not control her. Nick once taxed him with the unkind things Edna had said in an interview about her producer, Michael White. ‘I know,’ Barry said, ‘I heard it. It wasn’t me. It was her.’ My wife once asked Barry how he chose which members of the audience Edna would fasten on to persecute. ‘Oh,’ he said, forgetting for a moment Edna’s separate existence, ‘I always go for the shy ones.’ He was lethal.

The genesis of the Barry McKenzie strip is interesting. The young Garland, trying to make a living by drawing, was struggling to create a comic strip. He brought the problem to Peter Cook, whom he knew through the Establishment Club, which he had managed. Cook’s fertile mind suggested a coarse young Australian male visiting England as the strip’s protagonist. Garland asked Cook, who was involved in Private Eye, to write the words. ‘I can’t,’ said Cook, ‘but I know the man who can.’ Garland and Barry Humphries were soon collaborating, each paid £13 a fortnight by the Eye. The anti-hero was named Barry after his co-creator and McKenzie after the Aussie cricketer Garth McKenzie. His jaw was modelled by Nick on that of Desperate Dan. Barry was always late with copy, often blaming ‘a freak gust of wind’ which had blown his work out of the window. The strip ran from 1964 to 1972, when the editor, Richard Ingrams, spiked, on grounds of taste, an episode involving, I think, Barry’s employment with a lesbian dental assistant and the administration of anaesthetic for unprofessional reasons. The strip was adapted to the screen in two films which fell below the level of the original.

In a memorable strip episode, Barry appears on the psychoanalyst’s couch. The therapist (who looks suspiciously like Humphries) asks him: ‘What exactly is your relationship with your mother?’ ‘I’m her son!’ Barry stoutly declares. His relationship with Edna Everage is more obscure. According to Garland, she was originally Barry’s aunt and not the housewife superstar she later became (the Everage, of course, being the Australian pronunciation of ‘average’). Edna does indeed feature, in the conventional sense of the word, in the first McKenzie film. But the strange thing is that I cannot find her in the strip. I have studied the Complete Barry McKenzie book, published in 1988 and dedicated to Peter Cook, its miglior fabbro. This is no easy task because the drawings teem and the long captions are in tiny print. I cannot find her and nor, as we go to print, can Nick. What is the answer?