Diary

Even in this bizarre year of Covid (for everybody) and ‘cancellation’ (for me), the last week or two has stood out as strange. Things began on a Friday morning with a brief and cryptic email from Toby Young. ‘Can you call me, David?’ it read. ‘I have a criminal solicitor for you if you don’t already have one.’ I replied with bemusement: ‘A bit lost on this one. What might I need one for?’ Toby, clearly surprised at my surprise, filled me in. Two days earlier the Met had summoned Darren Grimes for an interview under caution; threatened him with arrest if he didn’t show up and informed him that he was suspected of offences for broadcasting his interview with me.

Here’s a tip. When the Foreign Office advises against going somewhere, hop on the next plane. The mandarins have advised against visiting Italy because of Covid-19. It’s as bizarre as everything else that our rulers have said about the virus. Confirmed cases in the UK are currently more than twice as high per 100,000 as in Italy. Anyone with our welfare at heart should be telling us to go to Italy at once. I left the next day. The Italians could be forgiven for serving us our own medicine and quarantining all arrivals from the UK. As it is, they test you at the airport, and quarantine is only required if you test positive. It is rational and very efficient. It takes only ten minutes and costs nothing. Generally, however, the Italian government has much to answer for.

The weird thing about Donald Trump’s handling of Covid-19, alongside all the other weird things, is that he has always been a near-pathological germaphobe. He likes fast food, we’ve been told, in part because it is barely touched by human hands; he prefers not to press the lowest button on an elevator; he asks Oval Office visitors to wash their hands in a nearby bathroom; he routinely has a bottle of Purell sanitiser available whenever he has to touch hoi polloi; he lost some real estate deals in the past because he wouldn’t shake hands. Last year, Politico called him ‘the most germ-conscious man to ever lead the free world’.

I first visited Orford in 1970, at peak Cold War when this stretch of the East Anglian coast was one of the most dangerous places to be, so that for three months of each winter living in Aldeburgh, I was perfectly positioned for maximum danger between Orford Ness with its secret atomic weapon testing, and Sizewell’s nuclear power station. I was too busy writing books to worry but Orford, bristling with military security and terrifying ‘Keep out’ notices, gave me nightmares. Now it is quiet save for some magnificent gales and rain battering the windows of this house overlooking the water. I am in mid-book as usual, and Orford Ness is an innocent nature reserve, with some access, though one area is still worryingly out of bounds.

I have been in Istanbul, partly to research a French-born collateral ancestor of mine, Aimée Dubucq, who, according to legend, was captured by Corsairs in 1778 and presented to the Sultan of Turkey as a gift. Known in captivity as Naksh, or ‘The Beautiful One’, she was 19 when she was taken by boat to Seraglio Point, where stands the Topkapi Palace, the most exquisite and imposing royal residence in the world. The chief black eunuch, Son Altesse Noir, inspected every new arrival to the Harem, and he would have escorted Aimée through its kiosks, pavilions and gardens of splashing fountains, past the sound of parakeets squawking and, less happily, the cries of miscreants in the dungeons. Not even Turkish scholars know what really happened in the Harem.

The only female writers of importance I have personally met are Margaret Atwood and Joan Didion, both of whom are rather short. That, I realise, is an advantage of sorts. You have less height to lose. Didion is 5ft 1in according to her Wiki entry, and Atwood, a tiny powerhouse, is listed optimistically as 5ft 4in, but that I think is like the Hollywood actors who I know are several inches shorter than listed heights, having stood breathlessly when Robert Redford walked passed me outside Bloomingdale’s in New York City. I mention this because after completing my third book, the first two written over 40 years ago when I was almost 5ft 8in, I am now 5ft 6in. I have lost an inch and a half since going into a three-year lockdown hunched at my desk.

I moved to this country from the USA 30 years ago and this year I’ve finally understood why: it was to spare myself the more self-defeating elements of America’s identity politics. Last week, the Oscars announced diversity guidelines, at least some of which films will have to fulfil to be considered for an Academy Award, such as that the film must ‘centre on women, LGBTQ people, a racial or ethnic group or the disabled’. Yet nowhere in these guidelines is there acknowledgement of one of the biggest predictors of quality of life in the US and, indeed, everywhere: social class.

This is a very British story. Because we Brits are often warlike but never militaristic, we often make a balls-up of the first phase of any campaign. The Peninsular War, the Crimean War, the Zulu War in 1879, the Boer War, the second world war; defeats and humiliations sap national morale, until we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down, and fight back all the way to victory. This process is often abetted by improvisation and eccentricity. That has been true of the battle against Covid. I once heard Peter Carrington say that he had been at school before science was invented. Although a generation younger, I know what he meant. In my ignorance, I made one assumption: that science was an exact science.

It’s never a good sign when you’re watching a scene of street terror in yet another gut-churning YouTube video and you find yourself thinking: ‘Hang on a minute, that’s around the corner from my apartment!’ But there’s a now infamous video from last week where a mob of enraged millennials with their fists pumped in the air surrounded a lone young woman sitting outside a Washington restaurant where I often eat. Like a scene from the Cultural Revolution, the crowd demanded she shout certain slogans and raise her clenched fist in solidarity — or be damned as a racist. Most of her fellow diners took the path of least resistance. She wouldn’t. The chants grew louder: ‘White silence is violence!’ They started screaming in her face.

Staying in Britain for the summer has been, in many ways, entirely glorious. We have zigzagged from Shropshire through Derbyshire to the Northumberland coast, from Fife and Perthshire to Herefordshire and Devon. On the way, beautiful little towns and sweeping coastlines, not empty but not crammed either; excellent local food and plenty to keep us interested, from echoing cathedrals to buzzing bookshops. But it has also allowed me to see first hand just how desolate so many high streets are: not only the shops closed because of plague, but those shuttered, clearly from a long time back. Boarded up doors, bleached posters… If it wasn’t so wet, the tumbleweed would be blowing.

It’s three days since rumours swirled around France that President Macron was going to impose a ‘tit-for-tat’ quarantine on UK visitors. While waiting for the axe to fall, several friends who had booked flights to visit us in Saint-Tropez were unsure whether to come or not. Julian Clary, who had already accepted the fact that he was going to have to quarantine upon his return home to London, told me: ‘I don’t mind having to stay at home — what I mind is not being able to visit my mother.’ ‘Well, I haven’t seen my eldest two children or my grandchildren for nearly six months,’ I retorted.

I have known Ghislaine Maxwell for more than 40 years, since she was a student at Balliol. I always liked her, everyone did, and I find it hard to reconcile the Ghislaine I knew with the heinous crimes of which she now stands accused. I visited her several times at Headington Hall, her family house on the edge of Oxford, when her father Robert Maxwell was at the height of his power. It was a peculiar house, rented from the council, like an enormous municipal town hall. The entrance hall and corridors were lined with at least a hundred framed cartoons by Jak and Mac of the great narcissist newspaper owner. The spare bedrooms had buzzing minibar fridges like in a hotel.

It is a particular pleasure to be returning to the columns of The Spectator, more than half a century after I became editor. The paper has been part of my life for a very long time. When I was at school, more than 70 years ago, we were all told to read Harold Nicolson’s column every week, to learn the art of essay-writing. I like to think that it was still a good paper in my time, but it is a much better one now. Fraser Nelson and his team are doing an excellent job. Our lives remain dominated by the plague, aka Covid-19. The government’s handling of it — admittedly a difficult task — has not been brilliant, but no worse than the performance of its scientific and medical advisory group (no acronym has ever been less apt than Sage).

Four years ago, I bought a ranch in Wyoming. Not that I was tired of New York, but I’m fascinated by the epic scale of this country, and I wanted to try something different. And different it is. The state of Wyoming is physically larger than the UK, but has much less than a hundredth of the UK’s population. I have to drive ten miles before I see a paved road. I stop there to pick up my mail, from a locked box on the shoulder. From there I have a choice of two supermarkets, one 40 miles north, the other 60 miles south. But distances are relative here. I told my friend C.J. Box, the great Wyoming writer, that I was moving, and where. ‘We’ll be neighbours,’ he said. ‘Really?’ I replied. I thought I must have misread the map.

I’ve been a regular runner for 40 years, pounding my way across Hampstead Heath to Kenwood House and back. This year, thanks to a combination of heart surgery and coronavirus, I’ve become a walker, and my perspective has changed. Walking is a genial activity, requiring you to open yourself up to the world around you. Running is the opposite, a private battle with personal pain. You can see it etched on runners’ faces. They don’t smile until it’s over. I don’t think I shall take it up again. The pain of running once conditioned my life. Now I’m a walker it’s a great relief to experience, and convey, pleasure. One of the strangely endearing things about Zoom is its visual quality.

A rare illness has broken out in Westminster. Last week a case of what was known before Brexit as ‘consensus’ was spreading. After two years of dithering, ministers published the ‘Magnitsky’ legislation, named for a lawyer tortured and killed after uncovering corruption by Russian officials. Finally, the UK can impose sanctions and close the door to human-rights abusers and their dirty money. Top of the list are those who targeted Sergei Magnitsky, who prop up a regime that oppresses LGBT people, Muslims and other minorities and that used chemical weapons on the streets of the UK. This is long overdue. It is equally welcome to hear that Saudi officials complicit in murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi will face sanctions.

‘Musician’ is how I described myself to the nice Latvian lady interviewing me the other week for an ONS survey connected with the coronavirus, but that didn’t tell the government much. In economic terms, our profession embraces everyone from Sir Paul McCartney to the struggling garage band that may or may not be allowed back into your newly reopened pub. In terms of what we do, we divide into three overlapping categories — writers, administrators and performers, and our experience of pandemic and lockdown has been sharply different. I’m mainly a writer, and I guiltily admit that I have welcomed my first chance for years to work with minimal interruption on what I probably do best.

Do you remember where you were when the BBC showed a rerun of Bowie’s Glastonbury set? When we ask each other that in future, the answer is always going to be: ‘At home, recovering from a day of Zoom calls.’ It’s 100 days since lockdown and as we slowly emerge it’s hard to keep a sense of proportion about the events in between. I remember pricking my finger for a trial antibody test; I remember my delight at discovering that an old-time cockney butcher still exists on a nearby council estate; I remember the absolute stillness of the air as a sparrowhawk circled over south London. Best to fix these memories in writing now, because the cryogenic social frost is well and truly melting. I’m on a public webinar with Katja Kipping and Jagmeet Singh.