Waugh's Racy Diary Titillates Britain

LONDON The racy U diaries of the late novelist Evelyn Waugh are raising British eyebrows with recollections of kinky sex in high places and new accusations that Churchill's son was a "flabby bully" who drank his way through the war.

The latest extract, published yesterday in the Observer newspaper, seems certain to add to the growing controversy. It is a prolonged attack on the character, abilities and drinking habits of Randolph Churchill, son of Britain's revered wartime leader.

The diaries cover 50 years. The focus so far has beer on orgies, drunken parties, naked parties, homosexual parties, lesbian parties and sundry combinations thereof, often with famous people participating.

John Gordon, editor-inchief of the Sunday Ex-

press, called it "a shocking picture, even lifting the veil from Waugh's own exploits in a male brothel in Paris where young children were avilable for rich monsters from England.'

Gordon added: "Evelyn Waugh is dead. But think of the distress the publication of this diary must be caus¬ ing his children.”

Randolph Churchill is dead too. His son Winston, a Parliament, was out sailing conservative member of for the weekend and out of reach of newsmen.

Waugh and Randolph Churchill served together in World War II in Yugoslavia. They were part of an intelligence unit attached to Tito's partisans in 1944.

As Waugh tells it, Randolph's war was more bottle than battle.

The diaries report bout after bout: "Randolph blind

drunk Randolph drunk

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and rhetorical... Randolph half drunk Randolph

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already drunk and got drunker."

No mention is made of the bravery to which others who fought alongside Churchill have testified. Waugh sums him up as "a flabby bully... a bore with no intellectual invention or agility."

Waugh, who began his diaries at the age of 12, died in 1966, at the dawn of the current permissive age. But the hottest pages in his diaries come from the 1920s, when many personages of Britain's current establishment were his youthful peers. To protect the innocent and avoid libel suits, the Observer has edited out the names of many of the players in Waugh's spicy accounts.

An entry for April 1925, for example, recounts "a most depraved scene" at a house party Waugh attended:

"Everyone was drunk or pretending drunkenness except (blank), who was sitting in the middle of it all. (Blank), almost naked, was bbeing slapped on the buttocks by (blank) and enjoying herself ecstatically."