The following letter was published in The Daily Telegraph on 18 February.
SIR - Mary Biggs, whose father, Sir Freddie Bishop, was Harold Macmillan’s favourite private secretary, mentions that great Tory leader’s love of the Gilbert and Sullivan line from The Gondoliers: “Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot” (Letter, February 11).
At the start of his premiership Macmillan wrote out the words on a sheet of No 10 paper, which he pinned on the door of the Cabinet Room. After a time, Bishop recalled: “he took it down and gave it to me.”
Later it reached the offices of The Spectator; when Alexander Chancellor became its editor in 1975, he found it “pinned to my office mantelpiece”, having been “purloined from the prime minister’s office.”
If it was still there when Boris Johnson became the magazine’s editor in 1999, it did not do him much good. But it would be worth a second try. If the sheet of paper survives, it should be returned to No 10 at once, and pinned on the Cabinet Room door once again. Mr and Mrs Johnson could burst into merry song: “Let us grasp the situation /Solve the complicated plot/Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot.”
Lord Lexden
London SW1
