Diary

Going to the theatre is a joy. When you are a character on the stage, less so. Over the past couple of months, I have been depicted in two plays. Having worked for Murdoch for years, I clearly enjoy pain and so, at my own expense, I went to see both. First up was a one-man show called Monstering the Rocketman at the Arcola in Dalston, which detailed how the Sun (me!) had accused Elton John of being involved in rent boy sessions. Our source, it turned out, had sold us a pack of lies, made more painful by the fact that the news editor, the reporter and I spent 90 minutes cross-questioning this stoat to satisfy ourselves he was telling the truth. It’s easy to be misled.

A school in Greater Manchester has stripped 193 books from its library because they are ‘inappropriate’, liable to upset pupils and thus a safeguarding risk. Among the dangerously destabilising material: Michelle Obama’s memoir and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Who was entrusted with identifying these literary IEDs? An over-zealous head? A prurient librarian? A demented child psychologist? Nope. A humble AI bot. While writing my latest novel, The Hawk Is Dead, much of which is set in Buckingham Palace, I asked ChatGPT to produce a simple floor plan. Not a tough assignment – much less taxing than diagnosing nearly 200 books as existential threats to adolescent wellbeing. It got the Palace’s orientation wrong. For more than 200 years, the East Wing has faced the Mall.

Elizabeth II was never particularly enthusiastic about birthdays. They were a good excuse for a parade or an honours list, but not a patch on a major wedding anniversary, let alone a jubilee. Those were a celebration of true dedication, not of mere longevity. Even so, were she still with us, the late Queen would have acknowledged that her centenary on Tuesday is a big deal. It would also have created a delightful conundrum for the Buckingham Palace anniversaries office, the department that sends out 100th-birthday congratulations from the sovereign. At the start of her reign, she was sending 385 of those each year across all her realms (by telegram). By the end, it was over 16,000 (by card).

I can’t resist a courtroom drama. Prince Harry vs the press, for example: journalists I admire on one side, aggrieved celebrities on the other. Among the usual suspects I have a fondness for Elizabeth Hurley. When I was editor of Tatler, she gamely posed for the cover in a satin gown in a breezy field with a friendly goat in tow, with a coverline assuring our readers that people had better sex in the country. The logic escapes me, but the issue sold extremely well. Trials can drag on, though. I was once sent to cover a libel trial: Imran Khan had accused two cricketers of ball-tampering. Hours passed as they fought about gravel, and I played noughts and crosses with the commentator Henry Blofeld.

To mark the celebration of the Annunciation (‘Lady Day’, 25 March), a friend sends me an image of her favourite picture of the angel’s appearance to the Virgin Mary – a painting by the African-American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, who worked mostly in France in the first decades of the last century. Mary is a very young Middle Eastern peasant woman, shrinking into the rumpled sheets of a bed roughly screened off from a plain stone domestic interior, as a blinding pillar of light hovers in the foreground. As my friend said, it shows not the serenity of many images of the event, but an acute apprehensiveness. This may be good news but it is also, quite simply, terrifying. Nothing is going to be the same again. Sarah Mullally was installed as Archbishop of Canterbury on 25 March.

Following my appointment as shadow justice secretary, I was moved to a bigger office in parliament. Where once I enjoyed a tiny room directly above the chamber (perfect for rushing to votes), now I have a plush room much further away. It is directly above the irksome Steve Bray, who continues his noisy campaign against Brexit. Of course his anti-social behaviour should mean he is moved on by the police, but these days officers balance the public interest against Bray’s ‘rights’. I recently relied on some Anglo-Saxon vernacular to tell Bray what I thought of his protest, and realised afterwards in today’s upside-down world the police would probably finger my collar – not his. Opponents of Labour’s ‘Islamophobia’ definition warned it would stop us debating religious ideas.

‘Deranged conspiracy’. That’s the Sussexes’ verdict of Betrayal, my second blast at Harry and Meghan, after the serialisation was in the papers at the weekend. Naturally, I’m grateful. The book now ranks No. 1 on Amazon. My biography of Robert Maxwell also benefited from his endless writs. Similarly, Richard Branson sued twice to prevent publication. He lost and was denied the licence to run the National Lottery. The tycoon Tiny Rowland was more subtle and effective. ‘Bower’s book,’ he announced, ‘is boring. He’s missed all the good bits.’ That hurt. My new book exposes the vainglorious Duke and Duchess’s downwards spiral over the past five years towards an inglorious endgame. Dwindling fame and fortune is forcing them to revalidate their royal status.

Six people meet for a picnic on Richmond Green. They eat Popeyes chicken nuggets, Sainsbury’s sausage rolls, M&S sandwiches, Cadbury Mini Rolls and Walkers crisps. They drink a bottle of Pinot Grigio and several cans of Sol lager. How do I know? I’m no detective but they’ve made it easy for me. After they’ve finished, they’ve simply got up and left the bottles, wrappers, packages and paper plates on the grass, laid out like a meal on the Marie Celeste. There’s always been litter – Bill Bryson described it as ‘a long continuum of anti-social behaviour’ – but this is something different. It feels more like social anarchy, a total blankness. I can’t get my head around it.

Four weeks after I decided to upend my life by standing as the Reform UK candidate at the Gorton and Denton by-election, I was in the small living room of a constituent listening to Nigel Farage give a lecture on phaleristics – the study and collection of war medals. The poor chap whose home we were visiting had barely processed who was at his door before Nigel spotted a collection of medals over his shoulder and charged into his living room to give him chapter and verse. ‘This one’s from 1914! The British Expeditionary Force! Incredibly rare!’ I couldn’t help but notice that, despite his wild enthusiasm at the prospect of us winning one of Labour’s safest seats, he was even more thrilled by the medals. Then again, his ability to connect with ordinary people is unmatched.

Never one for introspection, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has still managed to provoke some searching questions about the institution he once served. For example, what constitutes a family if it is royal? Since Victorian times, parliament’s rulebook, Erskine May, has forbidden ‘reflections’ on ‘the conduct of the Sovereign, the heir to the throne, or other members of the royal family’ in debates. Following Lib Dem pressure, that rule has been rewritten by Mr Speaker, who has stated: ‘Because this now relates to a person who is not a member of the royal family, the situation is completely different.’ But in what way? Clarity is needed.

We always try to spend Valentine’s Day weekend in Paris. My wife has held on to a tiny apartment in the Latin quarter since a young age and it is the perfect pied-à-terre from which to venture into the best parts of the city, from St Germain to the Marais. First stop on the journey is the Eurostar lounge. I like to check on the availability of The Spectator on the shelves. When we acquired the magazine a little over a year ago there was no sign of it despite well-stocked supplies of Guardian Weekly and the New Statesman. Not good. That has now been sorted, and I was pleased to see a generous supply of the world’s oldest magazine.

Back in the mists, early 1980s I suppose, I was asked to decorate a penthouse apartment in London for a tycoon who collected large-scale contemporary American art. Decor done, art hung, the porter asked if he could show it to the prospective buyer of the same-layout penthouse next door, a member of the Gaddafi family attending university in London. ‘Sure,’ we said, and a young man in black robes arrived a bit later. He did a quick recce, approved, and said he wanted to have exactly the same decoration, including the art, and ready to move into in ten days. My team pulled together a pretty good replica while Tom Bell and I spent a weekend making the art. Fake Stellas glowed with colour, fake Rothkos brooded. We slashed fake Fontanas, cartooned fake Lichtensteins, popped fake Warhols.

‘The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom,’ espoused German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Having spent the past fortnight in the grip of both, after fracturing my femur so disastrously it necessitated a total hip replacement, I can confirm he’s correct. And given I did it tripping in a hotel restaurant, I would add ‘shame’ to the list. The pain was excruciating; the shame even worse. (History will record that the Free Solo daredevil Alex Honnold successfully climbed the 508-metre Taipei 101 tower, without safety ropes, in the same week I failed to navigate a six-inch step.) But the boredom’s been stupefying.

I have been dithering for years about when to stop judging The Great British Bake Off. When I joined nine years ago, I thought, since I was in my mid-seventies, that I’d be lucky to manage two years. At that age, my mother was deaf as a post and away with the fairies, believing her son was her father and that her cat was the one she’d had 40 years before. But my marbles stayed more or less in place and there seemed no good reason to give up a job I loved. Finally, though, the desire to work less and play more got to me. Bake Off and its offshoots such as The Great American Baking Show and even the Christmas specials are all filmed in the summer, which has meant I could never have a summer holiday. So, I finally jumped.

The invitation came from Ewan Venters, a Scot who currently steers the Paul Smith brand, and the venue was Angela Hartnett’s Cafe Murano in Marylebone. Would I like to come to a ‘small, intimate’ dinner (which usually means a small multitude) to meet Anas Sarwar, the leader of the Labour party in Scotland, who obviously has his sights on Bute House come May? The aim was to understand more about the issues which affect the Union and the evening was reasonably subject to the Chatham House rule, although the meal was basically just to reassure us all that Sarwar thinks our unbeloved Prime Minister is a blithering idiot. Sarwar knows that if the Scottish election becomes a referendum on Sir Keir, he loses.

With the close of 2025 I crowned a tumultuous year in which I got married, moved house and saw Evelyn, my belligerent character, leave Coronation Street after six years, heading to virtual university at 79 to study law with special emphasis on dogs. The Street may have gone very gay and very murderous lately, but I hope canine-obsessed Evelyn left her mark on its cobbles. I loved my sojourn there, so she’ll be back and she’ll be ugly. My last vainglorious appearance of 2025 was in the Boxing Day episode of ITV’s The Masked Singer, where the panel failed to guess the identity of the seething, exhausted old goose, wobbling and warbling blindly around the stage. I was voted out in favour of Dermot O’Leary dressed as a sprig of mistletoe with Mick Jagger-sized red lips on his hips.

The chief function of the prime minister is to take the blame, and Sir Keir Starmer can no more escape this rule than his predecessors did. Having met him occasionally when he was my local MP, before he moved from Kentish Town to Downing Street, I feel a twinge of sympathy with him. He took trouble with unimportant people, could not have been more genial when I bumped into him at the Pineapple, his local pub, and on one occasion even asked if I could explain the attraction of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. I feared this task would be beyond my powers of exposition, and perhaps also his powers of comprehension, so changed the subject. But in those days Sir Keir had a sincerity which disarmed criticism. This is no longer the case.

I set up In Our Time 27 years ago. I had been shunted from Start the Week to what was cheerfully known as the ‘death slot’, 9 a.m. on Thursdays, because BBC management decided I could no longer present that programme after becoming a member of the House of Lords. I know I’ve said it before elsewhere, but its success from those inauspicious beginnings was very fulfilling for me. I decided to retire from IoT in September. I will miss it as it gave me a tremendous education, but I know it will be in very good hands – Misha Glenny is a first-class broadcaster and writer. While passing on the baton, I would like to say how much the audience reaction always meant to me. There were many young people who reacted to the programme and the podcast.

I was in Singapore last week, a city that hums with energy. It feels efficient, cosmopolitan and yet personal – if you know where to look. My schedule was packed, but in the best way. First stop: Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chair and CEO, in conversation about the state of the world. Jamie was vintage Jamie – articulate, forthright, refreshingly unscripted. In a world drowning in platitudes, his candour was invigorating. He spoke about resilience and leadership that doesn’t flinch when the winds change. Focus on the mindset, not just the markets, he said. Then came the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. I sat on a panel about global debt sustainability, a topic that sounds dry until you realise it touches everything: growth, inequality, geopolitics.