Diary

I lay low during the ‘season’ as I can’t think what to say to people any more. I went to only two summer parties, a personal worst for me: Lady Annabel Goldsmith’s annual gold-plater in Richmond, and Jenni Russell and Stephen Lambert’s Notting Hill do, where I found myself introducing David Cameron to Seumas Milne. ‘You were at Eton and you went to Winchester,’ I said, as if the pair were shy teenagers at the Feathers Ball before the snogging, ‘so you two should get on like a house on fire!’ Seumas tried to recruit me in 2017 but I never came across. ‘Which party should I enter as a sleeper cell next?’ I joked (after I quit the Lib Dems they surged and as soon as I joined Change UK they tanked).

It is rare that losing a day at Lord’s for a Test match is welcome. I had expected to be watching England play Ireland with my wife and two of my children on the Thursday before last. Instead, much to my delight, Boris Johnson asked me to become Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council, so I had my first cabinet meeting, my first outing at the Despatch Box and first Privy Council meeting. Anselm, my fourth child, went to the cricket in my place so was equally pleased. The joy in joining the government is, naturally, in part personal but mainly because we will now leave the European Union on 31 October. Something that would not have happened with any other possible prime minister.

So the party of family values has chosen as leader a man of whom to say he has the morals of an alley cat would be to libel the feline species. Thus the Tories, with two women PMs to their credit, have achieved another historic first: scuppering the belief — argued by the Daily Mail in my 26 years as editor — that politicians with scandalous private lives cannot hold high office. I make no comment on this, or about the 31-year-old minx who is the current Boris Johnson bedwarmer, but ask you instead to spare a thought for Petronella’s abortion, Helen’s love child, Marina’s humiliation and her four children’s agony.

By this time next week the Johnson era will surely have begun. ‘We can, we will, we must now escape the giant hamster wheel of doom,’ our new Dear Leader will have declared in Downing Street. Or something like it. He will be rewarded with headlines such as ‘BoJo gives us back our mojo’. We will all have been urged to believe in Britain again. Then the questions will begin. With the same deadlocked parliament, the same deeply divided party and country and the same intransigence, what will the new prime minister be able to achieve that Theresa May hasn’t? I’ve been examining the past three years of failed Brexit negotiations for a BBC One documentary called Britain’s Brexit Crisis. What’s clear is that Britain never had a plan for Brexit.

I am beginning to feel like a sort of fairground curiosity: one of those pickled things in jars that Victorians stared at. It is Boris’s fault. Because I once had a close friendship — all right, all right, a tendresse — with Mr Johnson, I am pointed at, photographed, and harried in the aisles of shops. Soon members of the public will be tearing off bits of my clothes — something Russian peasants used to do with anyone who had met the Tsar, as if this would bestow some of Batiushka’s divine status. Tabloid journalists doorstep me, believing I have the answers. I am a female Zoltan Kapathy; not so much an imposterologist as a Borisologist. My present policy is to pretend that I am insane.

It has been a spring of party madness in London and New York. I was lucky enough to have several birthday parties thrown for me in both cities, including Evgeny Lebedev’s glamorous soirée at which Nigel Farage announced that he was no longer being served at any pub in Brussels, which may explain why he’s cut down on the drinking. There was also the ultra-glam Met Ball in New York: Dame Anna Wintour mingling with a half-naked Lady Gaga; divine Bette Midler in top-to-toe black sequins and a top hat, dancing with the talented Julianne Moore (wearing green sequins) and Cher in ripped jeans and an anorak. Not to be too bitchy (oh, go on!), but I thought Katy Perry dressed as a hamburger was a touch de trop, even for the party’s theme of ‘camp’.

I spent the early part of last week in London, filming what are known in the television trade as PTCs (‘pieces to camera’). These will form the connecting tissue for a three-part documentary series loosely based on my most recent book, The Square and the Tower. Ten years ago, I did a lot of this kind of thing. A series of books, beginning with Empire, started life as television scripts, in an effort on my part to bring history to a wider audience. (The effort was quite successful but earned me the disdain of a certain kind of academic prig.) In those days, PTCs were delivered on location, and the more exotic the better — I have an especially stomach-turning memory of dangling from a helicopter over the Victoria Falls.

I am besieged by media folk asking when I shall make good on a four-year-old threat to flee to Buenos Aires should Boris Johnson become prime minister. How can I get on to a flight, I ask, when so many other voters are already wait-listed? In truth, however, we are being served successive courses in a national banquet of self-harm, too grisly to merit jokes. Nobody should blame Johnson for wanting to be prime minister: many unsuitable people do. But there will be infinite historical curiosity about how the Tory parliamentary party could scramble to deliver Britain into the custody of a man whom few of its members would entrust with their wallet, handbag or spouse, save to secure a cabinet seat.

Multiple copies of a Labour leaflet for the European elections are being shared on messaging apps by horrified activists. Not only does the draft leaflet omit mention of a second referendum, it seems to suggest Labour’s MEP candidates will ‘do a Brexit deal with Europe’ while actually being members of the European Parliament. The leaflet causes a furore among the candidates, is disavowed by Labour HQ as a ‘draft’, and the whole caravan of Brexit chaos lurches forward to its next absurdity. Game of Thrones means Monday mornings are the new Sunday nights in our household. The battle of Winterfell is as thrilling as it is absurd. If you have seen ballistae on the battlefield, and know they can hit dragons, why deploy trebuchets?