The invitation came from Ewan Venters, a Scot who currently steers the Paul Smith brand, and the venue was Angela Hartnett’s Cafe Murano in Marylebone. Would I like to come to a ‘small, intimate’ dinner (which usually means a small multitude) to meet Anas Sarwar, the leader of the Labour party in Scotland, who obviously has his sights on Bute House come May? The aim was to understand more about the issues which affect the Union and the evening was reasonably subject to the Chatham House rule, although the meal was basically just to reassure us all that Sarwar thinks our unbeloved Prime Minister is a blithering idiot. Sarwar knows that if the Scottish election becomes a referendum on Sir Keir, he loses. He was pushing at an open door, and as he made his way around the table we each in turn told him that while he might want to distance himself from Keir Starmer, we were mainly occupied with finding ways in which to distance Keir Starmer from his job.
I’ve just set up a new all-male book club. Membership includes a profane film director, a Solomonic farmer, a wily documentarian and four extremely grumpy authors. Last month’s book was David Szalay’s Booker-winning Flesh, which my wife recommended and which is supposedly about male alienation and the hollow inner life of the contemporary man. I enjoyed it immensely, but I thought the protagonist just sounded like every man I’ve ever met.
It’s well-known that Nigel Farage has no time for Kemi Badenoch. He finds her strident, bossy, ill-disciplined and ultimately weak. (There is no one in the country who thinks Kemi Badenoch will ever be PM, not even Kemi Badenoch.) And yet he wants her gone. Why? Because he knows that in order to win the next general election, Reform will probably have to form a coalition with the Tories. And the person Nigel apparently wants to lead them is James Cleverly, the bumptious, clubbable Brexiteer whom Farage is convinced can hold on to the south while he deals with the mob up north. While this may sound dreadfully fanciful, I could see it happening, in the same way I can see Labour forming a similar pantomime horse with the Lib Dems and the Greens, along with anyone else hanging around the polling stations come the summer of 2029. However, while Farage likes Cleverly, he doesn’t like him that much. The last time I interviewed him he said: ‘Politicians? Let’s face it, they’re all wankers, the lot of them.’ It’s funny, then, that his enthusiastic welcoming of Tory castoffs and traitors – Robert Jenrick, Nadhim Zahawi and Andrew Rosindell – is becoming his defining characteristic.
A few days after meeting Anas Sarwar, I was seated next to a charming senior civil servant at dinner. After 20 minutes of arguing about the performance of various cabinet members (he put up an implausible defence of his former boss Jonathan Reynolds, someone who I don’t think has ever worked in the private sector), he let slip a depressingly believable titbit. ‘The first day we met them after the election, one minister looked very earnestly at me and said, with a totally straight face: “So, what should we do now?” I told him that it didn’t really work like that, and that traditionally we tried to do what the incoming government told us to. Which is probably why we are where we are.’
I’ve finally succumbed to hearing aids. Mine are driven by AI, apparently, and make me feel like a robot. They’ve helped enormously with my tinnitus. The world no longer sounds as though it’s being enveloped by a massive brood of psychotic cicadas. Although, whenever my mobile rings, it rings in my ears and so I now walk around my office talking into thin air as though I were an air traffic controller. I should have got them three years ago, but as I had just become editor-in-chief of the Evening Standard, I didn’t fancy being the only aurally assisted person at our brightly lit morning conference, surrounded by 30 inquisitive hacks looking suspiciously behind my ears. Vanity, eh? Perhaps I should write a novel about male alienation and the hollow inner life of the contemporary man.
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