September makes serious demands of your Best life columnist, what with book launches, birthdays and the birth of Mona Leda, daughter of my darling niece Lara (which means Boris beats me to grandparenthood and bumps our father, Stanley – who is off-grid in Tibet researching his 30th book – up to great-grandfather).
Significant launches included my sister Julia Gray’s excellent Kitty and Mary, an epistolary extension of Pride and Prejudice (the launch was in Highgate, Mrs Gray wore a Regency muslin and there was a communal bonnet); Victoria Hislop’s The Wine-Dark Sea in Marylebone (slinky gold slip); and Marina Hyde’s What A Time to Be Alive! in Victoria (stunning white cut-out revenge dress to celebrate leaving the Graun after 26 years). But I want to tarry at Simon Sebag Montefiore’s party, as it was there I saw Niall Ferguson for the first time since we were at university together, when we had such a calamitous contretemps it made headlines (well, the splash in the Oxford Mail).
He was standing in front of a ziggurat of Sebag’s new bestseller, The Cauldron, a history of the Middle East. There was nothing for it.
‘Hello Niall,’ I said, reaching past him and plucking a copy for the author, holding court behind me, to sign. Seeing Niall again was a bit like returning to your old prep school or childhood bedroom for the first time as an adult. He seemed smaller than I remembered. ‘Are we friends?’ I continued, which was bold.
At this point, I suppose I should explain the casus belli. I’d once commissioned the illustrious Niall to contribute a chapter to a book I was putting together. I thought it would be a doddle. I’d just ask all my clever student friends to write 8,000-word essays for beer money, pocket the small advance for The Oxford Myth from Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and wait for the admiring reviews and royalties to roll in.
I’d asked my fellow undergrads Toby Young to write on class, Boris Johnson to do student politics, Allegra Mostyn-Owen to do drugs, Aidan Hartley to tackle town and gown, Sebastian Shakespeare on Oxford eccentrics, Niall Ferguson on ambition… ten chapters in all.
Niall’s essay came in first, via pigeon post. It was typewritten, and as lucid as you would expect from the top scholar (a demyship from Magdalen) but to my untutored eye it didn’t have quite enough snap, crackle and pop, so I returned it with some editing marks. This did not go down well. That was 1986.
Fast forward to Sebag’s. I’ve just asked Niall if we’re friends. ‘Well, you’re the only person I’ve ever sent a note to that just says,’ he began, and then we chanted the contents of his note to me: ‘Dear Rachel Johnson, Fuck off, Yours, Niall Ferguson’, and how we laughed.
Writing that list of contributors today, by the way, I feel quiet pride that I was a precocious spotter of such journalistic talent. The reviewers of The Oxford Myth, however, were not so indulgent. It was the worst reviewed book of the year. I got a royal flush of vicious notices from grandees you’d have thought were far too busy and self-important to bother with such a sophomoric debut.
Chippy Welsh screenwriter Andrew Davies (it made him ‘want to throw up’), loved and lauded novelist William Boyd (it was ‘routine and uninspired’) et al couldn’t wait to pan the book. What stuck in my craw, though, was the nasty big piece in the Mail, bylined ‘Campbell Ferguson’ and headlined, ‘Just a banal degree of snobbery!’
Seeing Niall again was a bit like returning to your old prep school or childhood bedroom as an adult
As you might have guessed, that was Niall. Instead of turning the other cheek, I escalated, and snouted to the Oxford Mail the fact that he, an erstwhile contributor to the book, had semi-anonymously trashed it (a ‘singularly worthless volume’).
And here we both were, nice as pie, chatting about how Ayaan (Hirsi Ali, his wife) replies to neither of our texts, as if none of the Oxford blue on blue had ever happened.
And then a voice: ‘Are you going to pay for that?’ It was Penguin supremo Venetia Butterfield, next to Sebag. I’d been standing with the copy of The Cauldron without moving straight to the bookseller table while I parleyed with Niall.
Such was my deep pleasure in settling the ancient feud that I felt no flare of annoyance at the insinuation that I was a thief who’d come to Nobu for the canapés, and to walk off without paying for The Book; nor indeed when Emily Maitlis, resplendent in white, told me she was nipping off to the Venice Film Festival to interview George Clooney on stage; and not even when Cliveden’s glam blonde châtelaine Natalie Livingstone buzzed over to embrace Maitlis as if I weren’t there. All I could do was smile, benign as a Buddha, trying to manifest my grandchildren, as yet unborn, with no wish to start a 40 years’ war with anyone ever again.
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