It must have been all the talk about - and sometimes attitudes to - Austria over the rise of Haider, and his Nazi-type approach to politics that brought to mind, for some reason, the books of a man who became first widely known through his Memoirs of a British Agent, Robert Bruce Lockhart, later Sir Robert, the last senior man in the British Service in Moscow during the Russian Revolution. He got to know Lenin and Trotsky. Got to know the inside of their jails. Finally, in October 1918, he and a trainload of British and French officials and refugees from Moscow steamed across the frontier to freedom. Then more diplomacy, this time in Czechoslovakia where he came to know Benes, Masaryk, makers of the new state, and in his book Retreat from Glory gives a picture of Europe patching itself together. The big landlords, remains of the Austrian nobility, the Czechs the former underdogs. He was personable, liked party-going, knew everybody. Then he moved to banking in Europe. During World War Two he was back in London in the Political Warfare Executive. In between, he was for a time a journalist, running Londoner's Diary for the Evening Standard. In a way he despised himself for this, writes the editor of his diaries. But he got to know, through it, The Prince of Wales (later Duke of Windsor), Amy Johnson, the aviatrix, and many more notables. But he was a man with a lust for life and a great spender. Luckily he had a well-off grandmother who bailed him out more than once or twice.
Now his brief sketch of a German Democratic Chancellor in 1929, a few years before Hitler took power. "If you," said Stresemann, meaning Britain and France, "had given us one concession I could have carried my people. I could still do it today, but you have given nothing, and the trifling concessions you have made have always come too late." He agreed that British Ministers were friendly and full of promises "but for the last ten years Europe has been suffering from gentlemen who mean well". Then the warning: Nothing remains now but brute force. The future is in the hands of the new generation, and the youth of Germany which we might have won for peace and for the new Europe, we both have lost. That is my tragedy and your crime." Six months later Stresemann was dead. No obvious connection with Haiderism, just an anecdote that has stuck in the mind for years.