My ideal dinner guests? Bach would be best for a bite and Handel would open doors

There's a surfeit of grim news around so rather than another rant about the wicked quintet of Trump, Vance, Musk and joint Bimbos-in-Chief Kristi Noem and Karoline Leavitt, let's talk dinner parties. Last week I mentioned that David Attenborough would head my list of dream guests and, I assumed, most other people’s too. 

First my ideal guests; they don't all have to be still around, that would be too restricting but for these purposes they are alive for this one-off gathering. (I'm sure we have all had lunch or dinner at least once with someone who is so uninteresting they seem dead, certainly brain dead. In my case it was an encounter with former prime minister Ted Heath who insisted on informing me, in excruciating detail, about the South Korean Boot and Shoe Manufacturers' Federation of which he was an advisor, God help them).

The runners and riders: Attenborough, G F Handel, Lord Beaverbrook, Toto Koopman, Liz Truss, Paul Callan and that strange Welsh transsexual Helena Handcart. Helena because a) she made it clear in her ‘column’ that she was salivating for an invitation, b) we have a fine mutual friend (her so-called mentor) and c) I think she would be good for a noisy ding-dong without resorting to food fighting (strictly off limits).

David Attenborough is a shoo-in and, to use the term he hates, a national treasure, and probably the most admired chap in these islands and much further afield. A polymath, not just the world's greatest naturalist but the consummate tv performer probably because he never performs, he just informs with a voice that is slightly breathless with the wonder of it all. 

As a television executive he was a great success, commissioning Monty Python and The Old Grey Whistle Test while controller of BBC2 though he later regretted turning down an application by Terry Wogan for an announcer's job. His greatest failure in that role was allowing the wiping of an early TV series by Alan Bennett (who almost made my list). 

His older brother Richard insisted on calling him Dave which somehow doesn't suit but, well Dickie was Dickie. When I met him at a screening of his masterful Shadowlands, the moving account of the relationship between C S Lewis and Joy Davidman, he confessed to weeping loudly during the shooting of the scene where Joy died. "Yes", he said, "I was so noisy in my grief it had to be shot again." 

And George Frederic Handel? Well, I've been to his house in Brook Street, Mayfair, next door to Jimi Hendrix's as it happens, so the least I can do is to return the favour. The old boy has long fascinated me, born in Halle, Germany in the same year as Scarlatti and J S Bach who was another reserve for my little party.

He moved to London aged 25 and had a long list of aristocratic patrons. At school we performed Messiah at Christmas (I mimed merrily away in the back row of the chorus). A friend from those days, an organ scholar, specialises in his brilliant compositions, The premiere of Messiah, which he composed in less than a month, was first performed in Dublin’s Fishamble Street) and I'd like to think that while there he may have bumped into another musical hero of mine,  the blind harpist Turlough O'Carolan.   

And now Beaverbrook. How would I break it to him  him that his two great Express titles, which once not only sold more than any other but had influence across the globe, are now on their knees and run by a bunch of spivs who know little and care even less about the industry. 

The Beaver is there because he was the giant not just of our trade but of wartime politics. He was Churchill’s greatest ally from the moment they both served in Cabinet in WW1, in the intervening years and most notably when he agreed (at the third time of asking) to be Minister of Aircraft Production in May 1940. He did it on his terms, answerable only to Churchill, and refused to deal with the bureaucracy of the Air Ministry.

And that is how he got the Hurricanes and Spitfires up in the air in sufficient numbers just in time to win the Battle of Britain. Not so much by manufacturing more fighters but by rapidly repairing damaged ones. He did so by ingenuity, bullying, working 18 hours a day and by being Beaverbrook. He lasted 11 months in the job, leaving at his own request, but ask yourself this: would we have won the Battle of Britain without him and if we hadn’t would we really have emerged victorious in 1945?

I want him to tell us just what went on in those frantic months and how he had to reassure his greatest friend when Winston had his many moments of terrible doubt. And of course how he built up the Expresses by being the editor from afar because, although Arthur Christiansen was the real — and greatest — Express editor, it was the Beaver who pulled all the strings. Without him times would have been very different times for so many of us.

Most of all I’d want to know about his affair with my next guest, the beautiful bisexual Vogue model turned Allied spy, Toto  Koopman. And how he turned on her when she fell in love with his son Max in 1935. Shall we sit them together?

We shall indeed because although there was hell to pay for a while, cutting young Max off at the knees and threatening to send him to Glasgow to work on the Scottish DX (aargh!), the three were reconciled and Toto relayed all her messages while working with the Italian Resistance to the Beaver’s three radio masts at his home at Cherkley.

She was as brave as anyone fighting the Nazis, swapping a life of hedonism and luxury pre-war for an existence on the run, sleeping in caves and abandoned farm buildings in Italy, foraging for food, eating squirrels and constantly in fear of imminent death. Twice she escaped jail and her Fascist captors until she was finally arrested in Venice by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbrook where she was brutalised but survived thanks to her determination of spirit.

I wrote in my biography of her that she was the one person above all others I wished I had met. This is my chance to make that dream come true. And to witness her and her old lover together again.

And so from the sublime to the ridiculous; step forward Ms Truss. I would be tempted to make the menu very lettuce centric but no, that wouldn’t be very fair would it? Ok, you win! My real reason for inviting dear Elizabeth is to find out just how she fares in the company of real greatness. Will she be as brazen among them as she appears in her mercifully rare tv appearances or will she wilt like a, well you know what?

Most of all I want to know if she really has no self-awareness, does she honestly believe she should have survived as, I can hardly believe I’m writing this, as the First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister? And in the interests of the right to know, what is the truth about her relationship with her, er, chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng? Oh do tell Lizzie.

I am relying on my dear and much lamented friend Callan to do the heavy lifting in that respect. I never knew him to shy away from the difficult question and I suspect if anyone can charm this strange woman it is him. And he will be able to tell tall tales about the encounter to the circle of admirers (and some sceptics) who always surrounded him. How I miss him.

So finally we come to Ms Handcart. I have many questions for her: why does she hate the BBC so vehemently, what made her so right-wing, will she vote Reform, why do she and Hermione seem to be as one on so many subjects and what is the truth of her (and Hermione’s) relationship with her so-called mentor, a man I know and much admire? I think Helena will be very good value and maybe she will report on proceedings Chez Frambo though I should warn her that Lord Justice Walford with be on standby.

If this proved a success I would hold another with guests to include Mel Brooks, Alan Bennett, Victoria Wood, Peter Tory, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Cate Blanchett, probably the greatest living actress. I suspect that Brooks apart, the rest might be slow starters though Tory would soon warm up to be the great story teller he was. Oh and I nearly forgot, John Arlott would have to be there.

In which case an extra supply of claret will be on order.

*****

AND FINALLY

What is it about the Daily Mail? Not content with its relentless war on the current government which, were it not so clumsily done, might be fair enough, but last Saturday a report on the horrors of Iran from somebody called David Patrikarikos said the BBC “apart from a few brief clips had hardly mentioned it”. Needless to say the line was made into a sub-head.

The truth is the BBC has led on Iran on its news site, its news channels and its main radio and TV news programmes for days on end and rightly so. Could this be linked to Lord Rothermere’s great admiration for Nigel Farage, who wants an end to our public broadcaster, and Lady R’s £50,000 donation to Reform?

ALAN FRAME

13 January 2026