Diary

‘The mob’s going to want a chicken to kill and they won’t care much who it is,’ wrote John Steinbeck. ‘Why don’t people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonably, for a mob.’ I’ve been thinking about those words in recent days as more ‘cancelled’ headlines fill the news. I was a co-founding member of the band Mumford and Sons, which I quit last year. I praised a book critical of far-left extremism in the United States and all hell broke loose, so I decided better to leave my band and save my bandmates the trouble. Better that than stay and self-censor.

A princess of Hanover wrote in her diary: ‘My 30th birthday. There must be some mistake.’ Substitute 30th for 80th and you have how I feel this week. But age is all relative, being dependent on your genes, immune system and how it was primed in childhood; on your location, your income and luck. I had long-lived grandparents on both sides; had measles, rubella, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough and scarlet fever before five; and in spite of semi-permanent tonsillitis was 20 before any antibiotic entered my body. I spent the years until 16 on the north-east coast of Yorkshire, through bitter snowbound winters, my lungs loaded with fresh sea air. Attitude and expectations are important too.

I only voted in one no-confidence motion. The leader was Iain Duncan Smith, and it was a bit awkward. I spent hours every week helping Iain with Prime Minister’s Questions, and felt sorry for him. At the same time, his leadership was a disaster. Indeed, Tony Blair was going easy on him in the chamber just to keep him alive. So what to do? On the morning of the vote, I conferred with two other new MPs in the PMQ team — David Cameron and Boris Johnson. We all agreed he had to go and swore a pact. So off I went to cast my ballot. A few hours later, the deputy chief whip asked me if I’d seen Boris. He was the only MP who hadn’t voted yet. I set off to look and saw him heading for the gates out of Westminster.

After my Unapologetic Diaries were published recently, I was apparently accused of offending several people. At a lavish Christmas lunch attended by celebrities, stars and a smattering of royals, I was mortified to find that my place card was next to one of my alleged victims. What should I do? Apologise? Grovel? What I had said in my diary was just repeating what a mutual friend had whispered to me about this individual. At drinks, I made Piers Morgan aware of the situation. He hooted victoriously, ‘Finally, I’m not the most reviled person in the room!’ then said he would save me further embarrassment by doing the unthinkable and swapping my placement round. With Piers next to me instead, the lunch was a little less tricky but uncomfortable nevertheless.

On Monday, I had a whinge-walk with Lizzie, my friend of 47 years. We met at breathing classes for our first babies and we gave birth on the same day in the now defunct Avenue Clinic in St John’s Wood. Our children grew up joined at the hip. Today my daughter Amy is a playwright in NW3 and Lizzie’s is a Buddhist monk in Nepal. Amy is with me at least twice a week, though her mother’s ability to make off-the-cuff remarks which generate front-page headlines makes her wish she was the one in a Nepalese monastery. I faced my daughter’s embarrassment and near cultural cancellation last week after I commented on the casting of Helen Mirren as Golda Meir. The papers rather gleefully framed it along the lines of ‘Lipman objects to Dame Helen playing Golda!’.

More than 200 non-US residents stood in the queue ahead of me. A grand total of four Homeland Security officers were on duty in the glass booths. I texted my ride to expect me in Arrivals in an hour, at best, and tried to compose the opener for my Spectator diary. I didn’t get far: after an early start in Cork, my long-haul flight from Heathrow to San Francisco and watching Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, my brain was scrambled eggs. Nearby, an elderly traveller fainted. The well-rehearsed response by the tired-looking staff suggested this is a daily, if not an hourly, occurrence. I read a few chapters of Donal Ryan’s novel All We Shall Know. Public book-reading is becoming a very niche activity.

I have not given up on my Build Back Boris campaign, which is the most pressing concern facing the UK. Once a beloved national monument like Nelson’s Column, this formerly majestic edifice has been chipped away by wokery in all its destructive forms, led by the country’s leading demolition expert, Carrie Symonds. It will cost millions and take years to rebuild him, but donors such as my friends William Shawcross and the historian Andrew Roberts have pledged their assistance and expertise. In the past few weeks, however, there has been serious subsidence, and a potentially catastrophic leaning to the south, like the Tower of Pisa.

I was born and raised in Sheffield, a proud steel-making city which drew much of its energy from a sense of under-appreciation. Manchester had the airport, York and Leeds the fast mainline to London. Film stars went to Birmingham for premières. But we were part of Yorkshire, the greatest of English counties, with more acres than words in the Bible. Yorkshire tea, Yorkshire pudding. Yorkshire grit. Now the grit has got caught in the works following the cricket scandal. It could be a long time before the Yorkshire brand recovers. One great Yorkshire institution is Bettys of Harrogate, which provides tea, cakes and respectability to the ladies of God’s Own County.

The last time I wrote for The Spectator’s diary slot, over the summer, theatres were tentatively beginning to turn their lights on again, following the historically long closures at the height of the pandemic. On Monday night the West End went dark once more, but thankfully only briefly. Theatres along Shaftesbury Avenue and beyond dimmed their lights at 7 p.m. to mark the legacy of Stephen Sondheim, who died last week. I came to Sondheim’s work quite late myself, and I’m sure a new audience will be found following the affection generated at his passing. Sondheim’s impact is felt as much on the theatre scene here as it is in America, but he didn’t write about British politics, of course — or did he?

Amsterdam   These are dangerous times in the Netherlands. Anti-lockdown mobs have torched cars, thrown rocks and attacked the police. In Rotterdam, police used live fire, in scenes more reminiscent of New York or LA than the birthplace of Erasmus. The protests are ostensibly in response to government plans to restrict the use of indoor spaces only to people with a Covid pass, showing they have been vaccinated or they have recovered from the virus. The (unvaccinated) Dutch — very much a minority — don’t take kindly to being turned into second-class citizens. Frank Paauw, Amsterdam’s tall, silver-haired police chief, suspects darker forces are at work. I met him during a TV interview, his gun conspicuous by its presence.

This week, I’m having puppies! First litter! The Johnsons were not doggy as we always moved around too much (my late mother claims it was 32 times in 17 years), but once you have a dog, life seems boring without. I have a theory that children give couples something to talk about and, when they go, only a dog can fill the conversational void. The mother (or ‘dam’) is Ziggy, who entered our lives one week before lockdown after I had a sudden strong urge to get a dog. On 13 March last year I drove to a farm in Somerset and fell for a puff of white fur with three black dots for a face for which I shelled out a four-figure sum. I’m afraid she is a cockapoo, like every other dog in London, but that’s not her fault.

Two weeks ago, I resigned my post as philosophy professor at Sussex University. For three years, I’ve faced bullying and harassment for my views on sex and gender. More recently, this intensified into a full-blown campaign. Posters and graffiti went up denouncing me. Masked students held protests, set off flares and gave interviews saying they felt unsafe with me around. The problems all started when I began making such controversial statements as: ‘there are only two sexes’ and ‘it’s wrong to put male rapists in women’s prisons’. I even went as far as worrying out loud about the consequences of children being given body-altering drugs based on potentially temporary inner feelings. It has been all too much for certain colleagues.

COP26 is not your typical power summit, because world leaders, NGOs and hacks are all in the same scrum. Outside their gilded fortresses politicians reveal different habits. John Kerry has the most purposeful stride, eyes rigid to the front, refusing to acknowledge the melee. Macron gives an impromptu press conference at the drop of a hat: he always has an articulate opinion to share, though his macho minders manhandle anyone who gets a little too close. Trudeau is predictably generous with his flirtatious smile. And Modi is the most huggy, which I hadn’t anticipated. He hugs everyone. Except me. I was particularly struck by his warm embrace of Luxembourg’s PM, Bettel.

The wonderful thing about woke narratives is that you only have to wait a while until they collapse. The core of Donald Trump’s appeal in 2016, we were told by the media, was that white supremacists and various gammons saw a chance to reverse racial progress. The results of 2020 showed that, in fact, black and Latino support for Trump had increased over those four years, while Biden won by increasing his white male vote. The ‘racial reckoning’ in the wake of George Floyd’s murder was proof, we were told, that we needed to ‘defund the police’.

I’m on a book tour which involves 65 speeches in 60 days in Britain, Washington, Philadelphia, Virginia, Mexico, California and New York. I suspect the second part will be tougher than the first, as Americans understandably hold a less charitable view of King George III. I’m a lot kinder about their Founding Fathers than the woke crowd in the States, though. The National Archives in Washington is threatening to put up a sign next to the Declaration of Independence stating that some of its views are ‘outdated, biased, and offensive’. Of course they are referring to its clause about Native Americans, but I’m going to try to persuade Americans that it’s also true of 26 out of the 28 clauses lambasting the poor old king.

The rhythm of the big party conference leader interviews is a strange one. First come days of slow, repetitive, detailed preparation, much of which we know will be junked on the day. My brilliant team play Keir Starmer or Boris Johnson, being as cheerily obstructive, long-winded and deflecting as possible, until all of us could repeat the key facts and graphs and quotes in our sleep. Next, a frantic early Sunday morning (up well before five) to fillet the latest news, discarding what had been favourite questions and lines of attack, and boil everything down to a manageable size. By now my heart rate is rising and I’m eating more pastry then anyone really needs. Finally I am in the chair, wired up and facing the guest.

I am just back from my final salmon fishing trip of the year. I have never had a worse season and have hardly cast a line. This autumn’s almost unprecedented sunshine has been terrible for fishing; the river Tweed had been reduced to a dribble, through which even Alex Salmond could easily lead an invasion force from Scotland to England while wearing a three-piece suit. I returned to find a letter from Salmon & Trout Conservation lying on the mat. It is bizarre that the only friends these fish have are those who want to stick a hook in them. The chief executive sounded at his wits’ end as he appealed for funds.

As the cross-Channel ferry noses into Ouistreham, I have a perfect view westward along the D-Day beaches. The excitement of arrival is heightened by the fact that this is the first time I have travelled to the Continent since Covid struck. Not since the age of 17 have I been absent from what the English call ‘Europe’ for so long — although of course, living in England, I have been in Europe all the time. My first objective on this trip is to see the new British Normandy Memorial at Ver-sur-Mer, the very place where my father landed with the first wave of the 6th Green Howards shortly after H-hour, 7.25 a.m., on D-Day in 1944. Located atop a high coastal bluff, the memorial commands a spectacular view of the Normandy beaches.

During one of the interminable lockdowns I mentioned that I didn’t care if I never went to another launch party again. Not only did I say it, I think I wrote it. Well, that will learn me, as my mum used to say. The launch for Julie Bindel’s book Feminism for Women was held in Conway Hall and it was anything but the usual turps and vol-au-vent affair. Bindel is a polarising figure and a fabulous friend. What’s really polarising about her, I think, is that she doesn’t pose on Instagram in ‘Smash the patriarchy’ T-shirts — she actively does feminism. It was an enormous relief to hear her say that the things that make men feel better — pole dancing, surrogacy, sex work — are not feminism.