Diary

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?

Although the past few footballing weeks have been dominated by the convulsive conclusion to Arsenal’s season – and the upcoming few will be dominated by the World Cup – I wonder if some of you might spare a thought for my own traumas north of the border. As a Celtic supporter, I’ve had one of the worst seasons imaginable. After years of victory in the relatively impoverished (and severely mocked) Scottish Premier League, my team has had one of their most disastrous stretches, knocked out embarrassingly early from all European competitions and then continually shamed and outperformed by a resurgent Hearts, who haven’t won the Scottish League since 1960.

I have been opening a play. It is called Allegra and is about a woman who is relentlessly happy. This is not typecasting. ‘Why do we actors have so much self-esteem and so little self-respect?’ demanded Edmund Kean in the eponymous play Kean,which I last saw in 1990. Funny, I never forgot that line. I’d been bobbing along merrily in rehearsals, learning, improving, rejecting and rejoicing. Now, suddenly, it was a technical rehearsal in a real theatre, the Brighton Royal, and there was a microphone taped under my wig, battery packs belted to my underwear – real orchestrations, quick-change shoes. My ancient make-up sticks must be laid out and lip and tongue exercises from my Lamda days, 60-odd years ago, must be performed.

Arsenal’s triumph in finally winning the Premier League again after 22 long, often eyeball-wrenchingly tortuous years has gone down like a Keir Starmer motivational ‘I’m not leaving!’ speech, which is ironic given the Prime Minister is an avid Gooner like me. It’s hard to understand why a club that boasts a fanbase including us, Jeremy Corbyn, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, the late Osama bin Laden and Prince Harry (whose matchday allegiance has followed a similar path to his royal duties, in that he never turns up) attracts such opprobrium that we were recently named the ‘most-hated supporters’ in the league. But as with Millwall in their hooligan heyday, if no one likes us, we don’t care.

If I were prime minister for a day (which is looking like an increasingly realistic prospect for all of us), one of my first acts would be to ban events being held on Monday nights. The first day of the week is always a jarring change of pace from the lazy joys of the weekend. I prefer my Monday evening to be a restful transition point into the rest of the week, like gradually dunking a Digestive into a mug of tea in order to get the right ratio of crunch to sogginess. You don’t want to hurl the whole biscuit in there at once. Alas, the British Book Awards held its ceremony on a Monday and, for the first time ever, decided to nominate me for a prize.

Since Victorian times, sandwich-board men proclaiming doom have been part of our urban street life, particularly in London. I’ve felt like a sandwich-board man lately, having warned endlessly in my weekly Telegraph column that Britain is heading for fiscal meltdown. In June 2024, just before Labour took office, I signalled that a government led by Keir Starmer ‘could soon face borrowing difficulties’. Six months later, I cautioned ‘we face a return to 1976 unless Labour changes course’ – recalling that 50 years ago, Britain was forced to declare itself insolvent and go to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. It brings me no pleasure that many of the outcomes I warned of, to such derision, now dominate the news.

And so to the White House for a ringside seat at the Trump circus. Another assassination attempt on the President wasn’t going to stop the royal machine. After calls between Buckingham Palace, the West Wing and the secret service while the UK press pack nervously checked their phones mid-flight to Washington, praying for the British Airways wifi to hold, the King and Queen kept calm and carried on with their state visit. It was never in doubt. Despite the White House correspondents’ dinner shooting, there was too much fear behind Whitehall and Palace walls of disappointing the Donald to pull the plug. May I commend BA for its wifi and in-flight entertainment, which features The Royals, a lively podcast on the House of Windsor.