Diary

When the Queen died, I was on my way to Kyiv. My mind focused on the war in Ukraine, I found myself uncharacteristically lost for words when I was asked to comment. I took refuge in the complexities of the journey, which involved a delayed flight from Rome to Lublin, a frantic drive to Chelm on the Polish-Ukrainian border, and then an overnight train through western Ukraine. It was a good excuse. The reality was I could think of nothing to say. I couldn’t have done an interview even if I’d been trapped in Broadcasting House. Kyiv was, as NBC’s roving war correspondent Richard Engel had forewarned me, more exuberant than you might expect a capital city at war to be.

I am completely and utterly devastated by the passing of our wonderful, inspirational Queen, as I’m sure are so many in our fair isles. It is the end of the brilliant Elizabethan era. I was so proud to have been part of her last Jubilee. After being driven along the circuitous pageant route around London, I finished up seated in the Royal Box, waving at Her Majesty in what would prove to be her last appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, where she sparkled in emerald green. This brought back memories of May 1945, when we were all celebrating the end of the second world war. My father drove his Riley Saloon as close to the gates of Buckingham Palace as was allowed, so that my mother, my sister Jackie and I could wave to the royal family while surrounded by cheering crowds.

Liz Truss doesn’t waste energy on unnecessary emotion. At the announcement of her victory at the QE2 Centre, she ditched the convention of hugging your partner and shaking hands with the runner-up. Instead she grabbed her notes from her husband Hugh O’Leary and marched past Rishi Sunak without a second glance. No time for sentimentality! Different from Johnson, surrounded by his siblings and ubiquitous father, or the uxorious Cameron and doting May. She knifed to the microphone with the same steely determination she showed all those decades ago when she told the Lib Dem conference to abolish the monarchy. The script has changed, the focus has not. Just before midnight on the first day of her regime, she rejected another convention: the showy buttering of POTUS.

You wait 11 years for a Tory leadership election and then three come along in quick succession. The first in which I had a vote was in 2005. In August of that year my candidate, David Cameron, was being told to fold his tents. The final choice was a foregone conclusion: it would be a battle between the big beasts, David Davis and Ken Clarke. The Cameroon cohort in parliament at that point was more notable for quality – Boris Johnson, George Osborne, Oliver Letwin, Nick Soames – than for quantity. They may have made a fine first eleven but it was a struggle to find a twelfth man (or woman). Cameron, however, was convinced he had to make his case; to tell the truth, do or die. He was determined the party had to modernise. Ditch its nostalgic bring-backery on grammar schools.

She’ll never do it. She’d have to be mad. Why take the risk? That’s what everyone said when I announced at the end of my BBC1 interview with Rishi Sunak that we were still hopeful that Liz Truss would also agree to a half-hour in-depth conversation in prime time. Well, guess what? She has agreed and will come into Broadcasting House just a week before most people expect her to move into No. 10. Too late to have any impact on the result, say the cynics. That ignores the fact that 10 to 15 per cent of the Tory selectorate will not, I’m told, vote until the last minute. More importantly, it ignores the tens of millions of people who have had no say in the choice of their next prime minister.

I love Suffolk, not just for its beauty but for the stories to be found all around me. Every day I swim with my two-year-old labrador in the river Alde with views of the strange pagodas built on Orford Ness, a long strip of shingle. Amazingly, components of the nuclear bomb were tested here during the second world war. Just up the coast is the wonderfully named Cobra Mist, a radar station active during the Cold War. If you’re lucky enough to go inside, you’ll find computers and surveillance equipment abandoned in the 1970s with lights still blinking and spools turning like something out of The Avengers. The US stealth bomber was apparently tested here. In 1980, UFOs were spotted above Orford on their way to Rendlesham forest. What a location for an author!

We left prepared. Bottles of water, protein snacks, phone chargers, portable Scrabble (even the teenagers can look at the internet for only so long). And we left early: our crossing was at 2 p.m., and by 9 a.m. we were already on the M25. Six-hour queues, we’d been warned. Armageddon on the M2. Somewhere around Maidstone, I got a text. P&O Ferries: ‘We regret our sailings are delayed by up to 45 minutes.’ Uh-oh. But as we descended into Dover, zero sign of trouble. We sailed through check-in. ‘So sorry there’s a bit of a delay,’ said the man in the booth. No worries, said we, pathetically grateful not to be stuck in a lorry park. On to French customs. Again, not a queue in sight.

The Season has ended and – apart from The Spectator’s summer bash of course – the two bang-up parties of July were discos in the Cotswolds. They do things differently there. At Jemima Goldsmith’s I danced so hard in high heels with a selection of her handsome young swains that I suspect the double hip replacement will be sooner rather than later. At Carrie and Boris’s Daylesford wedding do in a magical flower-filled field we all busted out our best moves. I was taught the slut-drop by Liz Hurley years ago in Nick Coleridge’s party barn in Worcestershire. She demonstrated how to collapse to the floor like a broken deckchair on the count of three. My problem at Daylesford was getting up again – not a challenge shared by my sister-in-law.

Two and a half years ago I joined the Tory party to vote for Boris, then unjoined as soon as I could. I’ve never been a Tory voter but I believed in Boris and never thought of him as a cliquey, old-school Conservative. Now I’d like to rejoin to keep Liz Truss out. She seems to want to be PM just for the sake of being PM – we’ve had enough of that. But I’m hoist on my own petard. The party has wised up to tactical joining and you need to be a member for six months to vote. One of the many reasons we have a chronic staffing shortage, it’s said, is that Generation Z only want to do jobs that will protect their mental health, i.e. ones that aren’t too much like hard work. I’m not sure that’s the answer.

When I was a teenage Tory activist in the mid-1990s, I hoped one day I’d be part of a leadership election campaign team. The energy and the intrigue looked so exciting. Eventually, I did end up right in the thick of it – but as a political spouse. These races have changed a lot since then. Michael Portillo’s plan to run against John Major was rumbled when his allies were found to have installed dozens of phone lines in a campaign headquarters: that was how you did it back in the 1990s. Now, it’s all done in WhatsApp groups. Kemi and I joke about what we would have made of each other then. I’m glad we didn’t meet: I’m not sure we have would have appreciated each other’s qualities at that time.

It feels like the end, but we’ve been here before. The past months of Boris Johnson’s teetering administration have felt like the final act of a Shakespearean tragedy and yet the curtain just won’t fall. This week saw one of those rare electric nights of drama when a prime minister looks set to be toppled. At least, they used to be rare. In the first 25 years of my life I had only three prime ministers. The past chaotic decade looks to be about to produce its fourth. The axe hovered in the air for Johnson, but was prevented from falling – at least at the time of writing – by Nadhim Zahawi, the MP for Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, denying us the climax. The question many have is – why?

In 1977, when I set up the South Bank Show for ITV, I wanted Paul McCartney to be on the first programme. His unique talent apart, I thought he would be the key to unlocking one of my chief aims in the new programme, which was to disrupt the accepted order of play in which classical music, ballet and opera were at the top of the pyramid while down at the bottom was pop music. McCartney took some netting, but he came on and we met at Abbey Road Studios at about midnight and the programme was launched. Not without criticism: the Daily Telegraph critic wrote that as far as arts programmes were concerned, it drew the line at Lennon/McCartney. Those were the days. Clive James saw what the programme was trying to do and backed it and that was vital.

To Windsor for Garter Day, the first since 2019. With a strong voice and smiles for us all, the Queen presided over the investiture of three new Knights – Tony Blair, Baroness Amos and, as a Royal Lady of the Order, the Duchess of Cornwall – in the small Throne Room. After luncheon with the royal family in the Waterloo Chamber, we processed to St George’s Chapel for a service during which the new Knights were formally installed. It is a splendid pageant appreciated by the large crowd of onlookers who look with amazement at our outfits. We wear morning dress, garter star, a dark-blue velvet mantle, a rather heavy gold collar and a black velvet hat with a plume of white ostrich feathers. The British do like dressing up.

I wish I could persuade certain cabinet ministers to put their money where their mouths are. Several times last month on Good Morning Britain I exhorted Tory frontbenchers, including Liz Truss, to place cash bets with me. If they’d agreed, I’d be richer than Rishi by now. Well, obviously that’s an exaggeration, but I could have at least afforded to hire a private jet to fly me and Judy to our summer hols in France. Oh, all right then, a single-prop Cessna. Bet one was that there would be a swift U-turn on refusing to place a windfall tax on oil companies. I would have staked my house on it. But no takers, despite absolute denials that it was going to happen. Bet two was that there’d be a vote of confidence on Boris before midsummer.

When I was asked by an old friend to write this diary, I did my usual thing of: ‘Yeah I’d love to do this and of course I can get it to you by your deadline…’ Then the deadline flew past. Now I feel like I am back at school desperately writing an essay, hoping to get it in on time. At least the subject is easier to write about than the Shakespeare we studied for English A-level. This year the country, the Commonwealth, our family and so many people are celebrating a magnificent woman. Her Majesty the Queen is an incomparable monarch who has reached a record-breaking milestone. She also happens to be my grannie, and I am a very proud granddaughter. When I was thinking about memories of the 2012 Jubilee, I rang a few of my friends and family to jog my mind.

I met a Canadian couple for lunch in Edinburgh. They were from Vancouver – he a judge, she an opera singer – and had won me at a charity auction. I do this several times a year. It’s a painless way of helping good causes. Of course it’s a very one-sided blind date: they know more about me than I do about them, at least to start with. But the conversation always flows easily and I’ve met some fascinating characters. After the lunch, a drink at Inspector Rebus’s favourite watering hole, the Oxford Bar, was part of the deal. It too has character to spare. Speaking of which, I also sometimes offer charities the prize of becoming a character in a forthcoming book.

It is a glorious spring evening in Lviv and what could be better than a ballet gala at one of Europe’s grandest opera houses? The performance starts with an unusual announcement. In the event of an air raid siren, all spectators must go to the bomb shelter. The red-velvet seats are less than a third full – not for fear of going to a ballet in a war in which Russians have bombed a theatre, but because they can sell only 300 tickets since that is the bunker’s capacity. There is an emotional rendering of the national anthem for which the audience stand, hand on heart, and it is hard not to shed a tear, then the lights dim and the curtains open.

I wonder at times how some of my fellow hacks in America get out of bed in the morning. The leak of a draft of a Supreme Court decision on abortion rights last week prompted what can only be called a collective nervous breakdown. ‘My teeth have been chattering uncontrollably for an hour,’ New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister vented. ‘Bodies/minds are so weird. Like, not euphemistically – actually chattering. Audibly. And full shaking body. Though otherwise wholly, rationally, well and truly expecting it.’ Well, I wouldn’t say wholly rational, Rebecca, but you do you. The terrifying ruling would send the abortion issue back from a single court to democratic debate and discussion – where it is in every other western country.