Ten years ago I moved to Staines and my mate Kwasi Kwarteng took me on a pub crawl. Kwasi was then the local MP, and as we drank our way around town he taught me a useful political heuristic. ‘If you want to predict an election, don’t listen to the BBC,’ he said. ‘Go to your local and listen to real people.’ Say what you like about Kwasi, but he had that right. My local is a backstreet boozer called the Beehive, which in decor and ambience is a portal back to the later 20th century. I go there for conversation, drinking, to play crib, to do a quiz on a Friday night and for political intelligence. For any pollsters looking to know what England really thinks, it isn’t complicated. Fund the NHS, stop the boats, get the scroungers off the welfare. Andy Burnham’s an even bigger wanker than Keir Starmer. The only ones who seem to get it are Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage. Like history, politics is mostly just the art of listening.
Staines is, of course, where the barons camped in 1215 before they went to squeeze Magna Carta out of King John. Now it’s about to become famous again, thanks to Sacha Baron Cohen, whose new film, Ali G: Who Iz I?, reprises the adventures of the titular would-be gangster, who claims membership of ‘Da West Staines Massiv’. The original sense of the gag was that Staines is an unlikely place for a gangster to come from. It is a pretty stretch of the Thames between Windsor and Hampton Court; the high street has a Waterstones and a Pret. But the joke has been lost and people now assume visiting Staines is dicey, like going to Feltham or – lock your car doors – Hounslow. So Ali G is resented here. Years ago the council changed the town’s name to Staines-upon-Thames, to suggest a bit of class. They recently nixed a petition to erect an Ali G statue. Irish Dennis from the Beehive says if he sees Baron Cohen around here, he is going to ‘push that c*** in the river’. Sacha: you’ve been warned.
So much for Staines. I put on a jacket and tie and head to Lord’s for a day of Test cricket, hosted by the Marylebone Cricket Club’s Ed and Rebecca Smith. At lunch I sit with Sir John Major, and thereby complete a set: I have now met all the living Conservative prime ministers. But my daughter can go one better. When she was two, her nanny brought her home from Battersea Park. ‘The funny old lady with the helpers picked Violet up again.’ It was Mrs Thatcher. I hope Violet lives to tell her own great-grandchildren that she was dandled as a toddler by the Iron Lady. It will seem as exotic as if someone today said they were once coochie-cooed by Proust or Lenin or Sarah Bernhardt.
To Los Angeles with Paul Greengrass and Andrew Garfield for the world premiere of The Uprising, Paul’s new film about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Years ago, when I published my book on the rebellion, I met Peter Mandelson in passing at a party. ‘I’ve written a popular history of the peasants’ revolt,’ said fresh-faced me. ‘A popular history?’ sneered Mandelson as he turned on his heel and walked off. I was crestfallen. Well. Now the peasants have gone to Hollywood. And so the wheel of fortune turns.
I stay in L’Ermitage in Beverly Hills. James Ellroy, the writer of the LA Quartet of crime novels, calls me at breakfast. ‘Where are ya?’ he growls. I tell him. He recalls a bellhop at the hotel in the 1960s who could get you anything you liked. I say I think it’s where P Diddy filled paddling pools full of baby oil and models. ‘Who the fuck is P Diddy?’ barks the Demon Dog. It doesn’t seem worth the effort to explain.
Years ago I made a TV show called Secrets of Great British Castles. After watching a (very) rough cut of the first episode, the commissioning editor rang and said very gravely: ‘I’m afraid this is career-ending for everyone involved.’ In fact the show was a hit. Netflix picked it up and to date it has aired in 160 countries. Parents started dressing their kids as me for World Book Day. (Easy costume: leather jacket and fake tattoo sleeves.) Fans turned up at my book signings wearing masks of my face. The drag queen Ru Paul told an interviewer he watches me to lull himself off to sleep. Now I’ve written a book called Castles: A Fortified History of the World. I didn’t get into history for the impersonators or the drag queens, but the attention is addictive.
Next stop, therefore: book tour. But a break at the end of the month to go to Windsor Castle with my wife, who is picking up her MBE. The old girl is a self-described do-gooder, and her charity, Beauty Banks, has been quietly changing lives for a decade. Writing books and gadding around the world with movie stars is groovy. But she’s the one who holds it all together. Behind every regular in the Beehive stands a brilliant, usually long-suffering, woman. Thanks Jo Jones MBE. You’re a keeper.
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