Spectator Life

Beulah Hill in Norwood is an overwhelmingly uninteresting stretch of South London road; the kind of anonymous thoroughfare that can induce mild depression on a day of drizzle and delayed buses.   Yet, as is often the way with these tedious parts of suburbia, visual perseverance can reap rewards. It was only last week, on my hundredth trudge down the hill towards home, that my fiancée spotted a blue sign above the doorbell to a typically fusty looking mansion block.   Stalking up the driveway to look closer, I read that this was the spot where, 60 years ago, the Jules Rimet trophy (aka the World Cup) was found in a hedge by a mixed border collie dog named Pickles.

Peter Mandelson — twice-resigned Cabinet minister, architect of New Labour and, until recently, His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States — went to the University of Oxford from Hendon County Grammar. Mandelson read PPE at St Catherine’s College from 1972 to 1976. Young Mandelson’s impressions of Oxford, as detailed in Donald Macintyre’s Mandelson: The Biography, are mixed at best: Hertford College ‘stank of cabbage’ while St Edmund Hall was ‘sort of thirteenth century’, the Union ‘hoorayish’ and ‘off putting’. With too many Peters in his year, Mandy was known, simply, as ‘Benj’.   Fast forward some 40 years and Mandelson was awarded an honorary fellowship by St Catherine’s College in 2018.

I almost spat out my toast (smothered with the As Ever, The Raspberry Spread Trio - ‘Made To Keep On Hand And Enjoy Often’ $42 - natch) in pure molten anticipation when I read that my role model in spreading jam to flour, sorry, speaking truth to power, will be hosting a women-only weekend ‘retreat’ in Sydney during her forthcoming Australia jaunt, with tickets ‘a steal' at £1,700. I already had my credit card in my hot little hand until I remembered that though I love to lunch tête-à-tête with one lady, being in the company of many women at once - with not one awful toxic man around - makes me feel like drawing crude approximations of penises on fragrant toilet doors after around half an hour.

The ermines have been mothballed; the coronets stowed away. The United Kingdom has, at last, thrown out the hereditary peers from Parliament. This levelling process, begun by Tony (not yet Lord) Blair, and stymied for decades, has come to an end. It’s as if the lion and the unicorn had been torn from the royal coat of arms, and ordered to find other work. No longer will we gawp at the peers processing at the opening of Parliament, arrayed alongside their glittering spouses, their titles and names a reminder of centuries of history. Our parliament - the most ancient in the world - has lost that lustre for ever, and will increasingly resemble the bland, managerial talking-shops of Europe.

The recent ‘school wars’ farrago was an act of madness – or, more accurately, Madness. ‘All the kids have gone away/Gone to fight with next door’s school/Every term that is the rule’. So the Camden ska band sang on ‘Baggy Trousers’, their 1980 classic about their school days. Schoolchildren organising to duff up their contemporaries is not new; social media has made it easier for pupils to connect, parents to panic.   For the uninitiated, a TikTok trend thought to have begun in Hackney last month has seen posts pop up across the country – from Nottingham to Watford – encouraging children to meet for clashes between different schools organised into ‘red’ and ‘blue’ teams.

What do you think of when you think of Jameela Jamil? (I realise that I may be talking to the wrong demographic here, but bear with me, and I promise I’ll broaden it out.) I think of hair – lots and lots of shiny, black, beautiful hair. Personally – and I thought this long before telogen effluvium, caused by the trauma of spinal surgery, made half of mine fall out and turn the rest grey – I don’t believe I’ve ever seen hair as lovely, not even on the great stars of Hollywood like Veronica Lake. If ever anyone had ‘pretty privilege’ (a term which I find censorious and covetous; attractive people should get prizes, just like brainy ones do) it’s Jamil.

I live on a road where parking is forbidden. This has not stopped any of us from needing cars. Instead, we crowd each evening into the small cul-de-sac opposite, where ten vehicles can park legally, and 15 can park optimistically. The sign is unambiguous: ‘Three hours. No return within two.’  Most days I manage to comply. Some days I even set an alarm. The cruelty is that nothing happens for ages. Weeks pass. Months. You begin to suspect you have cracked the system or even that the sign is entirely ornamental, the sort of bluff recognisable to anyone familiar with the steady arrival of ‘Final’ notices.  Then, without warning, that little yellow envelope appears on your windscreen. The wardens have descended like a pack of seagulls on an unattended tray of chips.

‘Listen to this drivel’ is not the combination of words a radio presenter longs to see in reference to their exertions, but it’s what The Spectator associate editor Damian Thompson had to say about me on X recently. I’d provoked Thompson’s ire by telling people what was coming up that morning in my Radio 3 programme, Essential Classics, in a one-minute video delivered with a somewhat unserious tone. Thompson did later apologise for being rude but declared: ‘It’s just awful to hear the new house style of Radio 3.’   Thompson joins other Spectator writers who have their collective underwear in a twist about the style of presentation on Radio 3.

It was a given that the critics would indulge in emotional onanism when they covered the Tracey Emin retrospective at the Tate Modern – apt enough when you consider the sexual content of so much of it. But what surprised me was that it wasn’t just women. For the art is almost entirely about Being Tracey: her abortions, her sexual abuse as a teenager by horrible men, her diaries, her cancer with pictures of the bloody stoma, her famous unmade bed, with its used condoms, granny slippers and teddy (it sold in 2014 for £2.5 million) and her death mask, which was done in life … obviously. That, you might have thought, would put off the men.

Reports that Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie have been banned from the Royal Ascot carriage procession raise an important question: what is the optimum fighting weight of the Royal Family?  For years now, we’ve been hearing about King Charles’s plans for a ‘slimmed down’ monarchy. Prince William, too, has declared that ‘change is on my agenda’ — which presumably means fewer floppy hats and chests stuck with improbable numbers of medals on the balcony at Buck House.   In the current torrid climate, few would demur that removing titles, cash and crash pads at Kensington Palace for the freeloading grifter elements of this extended family is a bad thing.

Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the death of Serge Gainsbourg at 62 from a heart attack. The only real surprise is that he ever made it to such an age. Gainsbourg, whose unlovely but strangely beguiling countenance can best be likened to a garden gnome left outside in the rain for too long, was a performer and composer who epitomised French popular music of the 1960s and 1970s in all its bizarre contradictions. Compared to such wholesome British figures as Cliff Richard and Tom Jones, Gainsbourg was a seedy, almost sinister figure whose demeanour gave off an odour of stale aftershave, Gitanes and day-old red wine.  That he was also a songwriter of genius who has influenced countless other musicians – everyone from Jarvis Cocker and Radiohead to R.E.

A broken-down washing machine is generally regarded as definitely a Bad Thing. There is the expense and hassle of repairing or replacing the machine, the prospect of a flooded kitchen, and the sudden realisation that your underwear stock is … less abundant than you hoped.   But when our washing machine expired recently, I was secretly thrilled because it gave me an excuse to go to one of the few places on the planet that always makes me happy: the launderette.  I feel soothed from the moment I walk into one of these womb-like environments. I love the warmth, the smell of detergent and the air of cleanliness.

When the cops came calling to arrest Peter Mandelson this week, he was already lawyered up. And he’s secured the services of the best – and most expensive – lawyers in town. Mandelson is now staring down the barrel of a legal bill running into the hundreds of thousands of pounds – very possibly the millions, given the mammoth number of documents in the Epstein Files his lawyers will have to trawl through. Add in the forensic examination of government emails swapped in the build-up to Mandelson’s catastrophic appointment as British Ambassador to Washington – and the lawyers’ tills will be cheerfully ringing away.

I have recently returned from a fleeting visit to the City of Light. As usual, Paris itself was a delight. It is an architectural and historic marvel that nevertheless manages to offer the best food and wine in the world at all kinds of prices, and somehow also has a respectable number of quirky and interesting independent shops and boutiques amidst the more anticipated international names. In other words, any trip to the French capital should be an alloyed pleasure. So why, when I arrived back at St Pancras, did I all but sink to my knees in gratitude that I was once back in rainy old Blighty, and that the land of the Belle Époque was a distant memory?

‘If there is one thing I dislike,’ said P.G. Wodehouse, ‘it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.’ His grievance was conversational, mine is nominative: I pity those with made-up names. There was a time when names came from a modest catalogue: the Bible, aunts and uncles of fond memory, a wider culture that worshipped the royals. Maturity involves a conservative deference to tradition. One learns to presume that norms have more value than drawbacks: dress in an ordinary style, have the manners people expect – and bear a name that connects you to others. Beware any job that requires new clothes, said Thoreau. He meant coats and trousers but it applies to birth certificates, too.

It is almost inconceivable that we used to live in a world where people would ‘go for a drive’. Not to get to a destination, but simply for the pleasure of driving. Sunday afternoons were the time of choice for this activity and would see car owners take to the road simply because it was good fun to be behind the wheel. The idea that driving was anything other than functional now seems absurd.   That world has vanished, partly due to the sheer volume of cars. In 1971 (the year my dad learned to drive), there were roughly 15 million cars on UK roads. Today, on those same roads, there are 34 million.

Pick the prince who recently said this: ‘I take a long time trying to understand my emotions and why I feel like I do, and I feel like that’s a really important process to do every now and again, to check in with yourself and work out why you’re feeling like you do.’  Prince Harry, right? The baffled bailer across the water with too much time on his hands, who in the past, while doped up, has confessed to having conversations with both a trash can and a toilet. O, that the alumni of the Algonquin could have been around to join in!  No, it was Prince William. I must admit that I felt a vague foreboding when I heard his comments on BBC Radio 1’s Life Hacks on Wednesday – the Mental Elf strikes again!

It was the sort of elaborate birthday surprise that Andrew — practical joker and fond of a fart gag — might have arranged to prank a friend. Six unmarked police cars roaring up to the farmhouse where he had been living on the Sandringham estate at the unseemly hour of 8 a.m yesterday. Only these rozzers were real and the ‘ex-UK prince’, as one international news network described him, was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office before being released under caution around 12 hours later. ‘I’m just glad the Queen didn’t see this day,’ wrote one commentator on X. ‘It would have broken her heart.’ Yet the root of Andrew’s downfall lies with the late Queen Elizabeth II — an unlikely early advocate of gentle parenting.