Diary

I can’t recommend enough the two-part film about General de Gaulle. The first is Résistance and the second is Liberté and you have to find them with a metal detector and a pair of field glasses because they only seem to show at around 2 p.m. at one of those armchair cinemas which insist you eat steak frites and drink Beaujolais while the advertisements pound away at your brain. Believe me, it is worth it. There are subtitles, epic episodes, battles both physical and mental, detailed direction and French and English performers who are very, very good. Simon Russell Beale is more Churchillian than Churchill. He makes you believe everything you’ve ever read about the man. Most importantly, he can properly smoke. In fact, most of the actors can.

A mild panic on Saturday lunchtime as I’m getting ready for the big British Museum ball. First, the dress code is ‘red’ and, though I’m due on stage in hours, all I’ve got is a black tie. Second, I haven’t watched last night’s episode of The Celebrity Traitors, and someone at the party is bound to tell me what happened. So I dash to a florist to get a red flower for a buttonhole; then I speed-watch on iPlayer. Thank goodness I did, because who do I meet at the ball? Maya Jama – Traitor-in-Chief. First she compliments me on the flower, even though it’s so lame compared to her outfit, and then she’s telling me the ins and outs of her murders. Never meet your heroes, they say. What nonsense.

Although I tend to keep my romantic nature under wraps, every year Helena, my wife, and I go on a ‘luxury mini break’ either to Birmingham or Manchester. By strange happenstance this always seems to coincide with the Tory party conference and the same was true this year, thus we headed off to Birmingham with a detour via Oxford. Normally I never wish to leave Somerset, especially without having had Sunday lunch, although this is less of a penance than normal as our cook has retired and we have not yet found a replacement, if anyone is interested… But this time I did so happily as we were taking our eldest son, Peter, to Oriel College. I feel I have given him every possible disadvantage in entering the hallowed halls of woke academia: my name, my politics and my own old school.

There is a moment at the beginning of Lord of the Flies where the shipwrecked children realise that the adults have all been lost and they can now descend into savagery. Much the same thing has happened sartorially in the House of Lords since the hereditary peers were expelled. The thin veil of civilisation has been ripped aside and now anything goes. Ties are optional, with Lord Davies of Brixton saying, in that snobbish way reserved to socialists, that nowadays they are only worn by ‘estate agents and funeral directors’. I was delighted to see Baroness (Joanne) Cash pointedly wearing a tie at the despatch box the next day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

‘Mr Morgan,’ said the faux-regal voice at the end of the line, ‘this is Earl Spencer. I’ve got you now, you bastard.’ Suffice it to say, this call didn’t happen last week after the alleged ‘historian’ was forced to publicly apologise for publishing a lie about me in his new book. (He accused me of being Mirror editor in 1993 when it published gym photos of Princess Diana in a notorious invasion of her privacy that cost £1 million in damages – but I didn’t join the Mirror until 1995.) However, the irony of what that call was about isn’t lost on me, 31 years later.

‘Journalling’ is now a good thing, which we know because it’s part of Bryan Johnson’s morning routine, sandwiched between eating algae and sauna-ing with a Bryan Johnson-trademarked ice pack on his crotch. It’s nice to check in with Johnson – the tech millionaire who wants to ‘defeat death’ – every few hours. This week I embarked on my biggest ever stand-up tour, a tour whose scale makes it seem like a culmination of everything to this point. Venues you dream of playing, ones which seem so distant in the mud and piss of the UK’s comedy circuit. Twelve hundred people tonight, 1,500 the night before. ‘Only 680 tonight is it?’ I shrug from the back seat of my tour manager’s Skoda, like a man used to four-figure wine rolling his eyes at a mere Château Lafite.

I will miss Dolly Parton; one who truly deserves the title of ‘icon’. I met her a few times but the most memorable was in 1984 when I attended the premiere of her movie Rhinestone. I went by myself, which is unusual for me, but I had just told my then husband that I wanted a divorce after years of misery and verbal abuse. During the red-carpet ‘trek’ and photo shoot, Dolly noticed I looked a bit tear-stained and asked me if I was OK. When I told her that, despite being so unhappily married, it was still hard to adjust to life by myself, Dolly patted me on the shoulder and quipped: ‘Don’t worry, honey, husbands are like buses. If you wait long enough another one will come along.’ Dear Dolly, so wise. And in my case, so right.

Hello, what’s this I see before me? A blank page; and a pen unencumbered by the heavy weight of BBC News impartiality. I still present University Challenge, it’s true; but having left the Today programme, perhaps I can now asseverate opinions that a fortnight ago would have got me sacked. This feels good! Here goes… Dominic Cummings was right. I’m referring, obviously, to a speech he gave to the IPPR in 2014. It’s on YouTube and, being something of a weirdo and misfit, I have watched it a dozen times at least.

Odysseus had to withstand the wrath of Poseidon, avoid the call of the Sirens and vanquish the terrifying Cyclops to get back to Ithaca. But he didn’t have to negotiate the 19.20 train out of Waterloo. It’s worth it though. I am returning home to walk another section of the magnificent Thomas Hardy Way, a trailway around Dorset covering some of the most beautiful landscapes that England has to offer. Hardy himself described the Blackmore Vale in the north of the county as that ‘fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown and the springs never dry’. Summer 2026 has rather tested that claim. We stay in a small cabin that a friend has built near a secluded wood, miles away from anywhere.

I’m not a member of the Establishment, even though I’m writing this in what might be described as its literary organ. I know my voice will be correctly interpreted as that of a maverick outsider riding shotgun into the lair of privilege. The early weeks of Andy Burnham’s First Lordship of the Treasury have been defined by clips using edible class indicators – baps, crisps, beer – to signal that, despite Cambridge and decades in Westminster, he is a contra-establishmentarian. But there’s nothing new in this (except TikTok). Walpole scoffed Norfolk apples in the House to garnish his backwoods-squire credentials; Lloyd George declared, ‘The day of the cottage-bred man dawns’, promoting his taste for bara brith.

In the musical Allegra, which has just finished its run, I ran around singing, dancing and jumping on tables for a couple of hours. I have a lot of elderly friends – by which I mean my age – who saw the show and they told me they felt exhausted just sitting there watching. ‘Oh,’ I’d say airily, ‘it’s just my job.’ I didn’t mention the mornings: the hollow, aching bones, the ferrety eyes, the corncrake voice and the need to stagger downstairs at 3 a.m. for calming milk and nutmeg. At one point, I tripped over halfway through ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ and carried on singing on my knees like a restricted-growth version of Al Jolson. My granddaughter, 14, thought it was a brilliant stunt worthy of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Greetings from Edinburgh, where the air is full of love and seagulls. Mostly seagulls. They soar, they sweep, they swoop above the Old Town, the New Town, the castle and the cathedral. They are everywhere. They strut down the Royal Mile, tourists and rickshaws scattering to make way for them. They descend from on high to attack your bag of chips as you sit at your lunch table in the Assembly Gardens. They are fearless and fabulous and huge. They are herring gulls mostly, with wingspans of up to 5ft (seriously) and lifespans of up to 20 or 30 years (oh yes). I love them, with their beady-eyed authority and mocking squawk that asserts with every piercing cry: ‘I have been around for 30 million years or more and belong here quite as much as you do.

Labour MPs first tried to ban me from the Commons press gallery two decades ago, after I ridiculed Speaker ‘Gorbals Mick’ Martin. Jim Sheridan MP said I was ‘abusing the facilities’. Only later did we discover big Jim was the one abusing the facilities, sticking a £1,000 white leather bed on expenses. Now Derbyshire South’s Samantha Niblett wants my parliamentary pass revoked because I reported that a woman at Andy Burnham’s social-care speech was wearing a snortingly short skirt. She sat in front of Eyelashes Andy and crossed those pins Kenny Everett-style. I wondered if that might be why our new PM kept losing his philosophical thread. Cue a social-media hoo-hah. My comment was viewed more than a million times on X. This passed me by because I do not read X.

Why do novelists set their stories in cities or landscapes which seem to haunt them? Not the places of their childhood – an obvious choice – or places they’ve researched because those places are intellectually attractive. The places they can’t avoid in their own subconscious. I’m often asked this question because the places I write about are considered exotic. But to me, it’s the reverse. I write about a city long after I’ve lived there and left it, having never had any intention to write about it at all. Such was the case, for me, with Istanbul. I moved there in 2011 after 20 years in New York. It came about by chance. My mother died that year and I came back to Brighton to attend the service.

A couple of years ago we rented a villa in Ithaca. ‘Who wants to go see Odysseus’s palace?’ I said to everyone sitting by the pool. So I went alone. High on a hill overlooking the sea, among the pines, I found the remnants of a citadel. Last Friday evening I was transported back there by Christopher Nolan’s epic. Settling a few feet in front of the huge West End screen – the last seats available – my neighbour did what no one does in a cinema and introduced himself. He was a Labour minister, one of their brightest young stars, looking a little distracted. Watching a tale of betrayal and meandering missions: he was just preparing for the week ahead. If Britain had been fighting the Trojan war we’d be on our seventh Agamemnon by now.

Hugh Grant, self-confessed grump and Fourth Estate muzzler, was at a drinks party I went to the other day in his old stomping ground of Notting Hill. It happened to be the day after he went to Makerfield to lend Andy Burnham his support. Grant was doing his occasional ‘man of the people’ act (Latymer Upper; New College, Oxford), having attached himself barnacle-like to the next PM in the apparent belief that Burnham will one day tame the wicked Murdoch/Rothermere press. How naive is that? Anyway, I went up to him and said: ‘Oh, you turned up in my husband’s old constituency as well, and it was the absolute kiss of death.’ He looked mildly amused. ‘You lost then?’ ‘No, we won it outright. So, thank you.

I left the Sunday Times a year ago to create a CEO reputation advisory firm. Sir Philip Green, the former retail tycoon with whom I fought a running battle, apparently rang a mutual friend and said: ‘I hear he’s going into PR – he should try adding ICK to that.’ More constructive advice came from a property entrepreneur, who told me that my emotional and financial volatility was about to be ‘massively heightened’. That turned out to be very true. When the methadone of your final PAYE payslip cuts out, reality kicks in. But winning clients, and looking after them, is amazingly rewarding. And even when you have a bad day, it’s your bad day. Newcome Advisory celebrated its first birthday last week.

Jesus Christ Superstar is returning to the West End at the Palladium, the theatre owned by its composer. It probably wasn’t too difficult for the show to obtain the booking, but I’m glad to say that the work has continued to be performed all around the world in myriad versions, in many languages, even in venues Andrew does not own, since he and I wrote it in 1969-70. It was our first real success and, like many artistic endeavours, was initially rejected out of hand by almost everyone of any importance in the theatre world. Christianity is 2.5 per cent older now than it was when we finished writing it, and almost 5 per cent older than it was when I first became intrigued by the roles mere mortals played in the Jesus story, courtesy of Eagle, the revolutionary postwar comic for boys.

The usual blindfolds, handcuffs and gags were slapped on live news and discussion programmes last Thursday, including me and my lot on Good Morning Britain. Don’t mention the by-election. So not a peep, other than to say the polls had opened. Why are broadcasters still forbidden from talking about anything to do with the campaign until voting closes that night? Every other media outlet – podcasters, social sites, the morning papers – are free to speculate, predict, debate, campaign. But not telly or radio. Woe betide any mainstream broadcaster who breaks the rigid Ofcom code. Why is TV deemed to have some kind of exceptional influence over how people cast their vote on the day? Television isn’t the omniscient power it was back in its pomp.

In the build-up to the tenth anniversary of the EU referendum, we’ve heard lots of claims about Bregret. There are some Remain nostalgists who are convinced that, after a decade of listening to their wise counsel about how much better we’d be if we’d stayed in the glorious EU, those misled numpties who voted the wrong way must surely have changed their minds and be ready to slink back to Brussels. Recently, the Observer commissioned polling to prove the point. It’s true that rejoining attracted the largest single share, at 33 per cent. But the options for staying out of the EU, taken together, commanded a clear majority: 55 per cent. Mysteriously, the paper decided not to publish. Darn it, why does the public keep giving the wrong answer?