Columns

On the way back home down Mile End Road, I stopped for a cup of tea in a nice-looking café. It was vast, once I’d stepped inside, extending out into a sort of gazebo – but empty. On display under glass, a good four metres of immaculate cakes: red velvet cake, baklava cheesecake, dipped doughnuts, Dubai chocolate cronuts. ‘Fast now, Iftar after,’ said a sign on the counter. It was the fourth week of Ramadan in Stepney Green, Tower Hamlets; the sun was low in the sky and the whole place seemed to be waiting for the fast to end. As I sat there with my tea, a woman of about my age entered and began to chat to the tidy young man at the counter. She was sick of life in London, she said, sick of this country. ‘You can’t even get a healthy lunch in Tesco.’ What, no carrots?

Some years ago I was approached by someone from a platform called ‘Cameo’. Not all Spectator readers will have heard of this platform, and I hadn’t either. As a result I listened to their pitch with the same amount of scepticism I might reserve for an email addressed to me as ‘Dear Beloved’, revealing that a distant relative had left me a share in a Nigerian diamond mine, and that if only I sent a quick cash deposit the diamonds would start flowing in my direction. I was informed that Cameo was a platform where I could make ‘easy money’. Being part-Scottish, I do not believe that there is any such thing. In fact I find the whole idea of easy money a contradiction in terms.

Sometimes the obvious is so obvious that people forget to state it. So let me observe one small footnote among recent obvious things. Earlier this month, Donald Trump killed the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and most of the senior leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary government in Iran. There are many things to be said against the Ayatollah and his friends. Since 1979 they have repressed the population of Iran and hurtled one of the great civilisations backwards by a millennium. From the start of the revolution they have murdered their domestic opponents by the thousands. They have shot students in the head when they came out on to the streets in protest. They have massacred, raped and tortured prisoners. They have exported terror around the world.

Twenty minutes into what seemed a routine softball literary interview for Bloomberg TV in London last month, the conversation took a prickly turn. My interviewer had tripped across some remark in one of my podcast appearances that set her off. So much for talking about my new novel. For the following 20 minutes, leaning over the table and poking at the air between us, she proceeded to hector me about why I seemed to discuss Muslims in general terms rather than as individuals. I objected that she was being disingenuous. Journalists regularly address issues involving groups of people in general terms. (For an opinion piece, I’m to interview all two billion Muslims individually and cite each in turn?

Sometimes things work out much better than one could have imagined, as if God, looking down, had decided that for whatever reason, a favour should be dispensed in my direction, a blessing. Perhaps occasioned by my diligence and faith, perhaps not. It is impossible to explain these benedictions. Sufficient to say that on Sunday night, at the Baftas in the Royal Festival Hall, the angels looked kindly upon me. I go to this bun-fest every year, dressed appropriately in a dinner jacket and a cummerbund, patent-leather dress shoes and a bow tie. I ought to point out that I do not receive an invitation to this glittering event: no, I gain entrance through what is commonly known as ‘gatecrashing’.

This is a two-parter, albeit linked. If you’re interested in the duplicitousness of British journalists, then keep reading. If you’re only interested in self-destructive British tax policy, skip to the middle. Burnt repeatedly by hacks who pretend to be enraptured by my latest novel while snooping through my cupboards, I long ago learned the hard way not to let British journalists into my home. Thus for years I only conducted interviews in the safely impersonal lobby of a West End hotel. But lessons learned are too often lessons lost. That may be an overly kind formulation of: I am an idiot. In my new hang in Portugal, I reverted to gormless naivety last month and let a British journalist into my house.