Diary

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.

Cannabis smoke lingering along the sidewalks of Washington D.C. was the most palpable fruit of liberty since my last visit to the US capital. I’m in town to give a talk at Britain’s dazzling Lutyens Residence about the evergreen ‘special relationship’ ahead of the US’s 250th anniversary next July. Acting ambassador James Roscoe has stepped up with aplomb to fill Peter Mandelson’s big shoes, aided by his renaissance wife, the musician, author and broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill. America’s anniversary will fall on the watch of its 47th President.

A few years ago, I watched an Irish-made drama on Netflix called Rebellion. Given that it was about the 1916 Easter Rising, I expected it to be somewhat anti-British but was pleasantly surprised. I knew the basics of what happened, but the series made me question why I knew so little about Irish history and politics more generally. I could name each taoiseach (prime minister) going back to Jack Lynch but, apart from Eamon de Valera, none before him. So I began to read voraciously about our nearest neighbour. Having edited books about British prime ministers and American presidents, I decided that one of the (now) 16 men who have held the office of taoiseach since 1922 might make an interesting project.

Nearly a year after my final Radio 4 shift, my new interview podcast has launched, and the weeks are more varied than anything I’ve previously experienced. The main focus is of course the guest and the content of the next episode. But we’re often at different stages of two or even three interviews at the same time, and production questions take us in multiple directions. How recent is the headshot the illustrator is using for artwork? What’s the best headline for each version: audio, video, text, social? What about practical arrangements or special requests for the next recording?

The beautiful British actress Samantha Eggar has died in LA. I hope that will be the last in a spate of deaths among friends and celebrities in the past three months. First it was Terence Stamp, the handsome actor who starred with Samantha in The Collector, which made them both into stars. Then the legendary Robert Redford, whose many fabulous performances in exceptional movies make today’s film output look positively anaemic. The Way We Were, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and Indecent Proposal are just a few of the brilliantly entertaining films he starred in. I met him only once, on a flight from New York to LA. He was charming, standing up from his first-class seat to exchange pleasantries.

In July, astronomers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System discovered an interstellar object racing through the solar system at a velocity never before seen in a purported comet. Only the third interstellar object ever observed, and now named 3I/ATLAS, it has become the subject of inevitably extravagant internet theories. This possibly ten-billion-year-old visitor has now ‘disappeared’ behind the sun, though not before the European Space Agency photographed it from Mars as it passed by. It looks like a luminous cylinder. Optical illusion, says Nasa. Interstellar objects enter our unconscious just as phases of the moon do. Who knows if they also, like the moon, exert mysterious influences on terrestrial minds?

Given the way the world is right now, I am avoiding it in the main. For the sake of my mental wellbeing, I require less bad news and more fun company. Just as George V collected postage stamps and Rod Stewart collects toy trains, I have been collecting theatrical dames since the beginning of the 1970s when I first worked with Dame Peggy Ashcroft. It’s an odd hobby, but it has proved hugely rewarding. From Dame Flora Robson (who gave me a very useful book on window boxes when I bought my first flat) to Dame Joan Plowright (who bequeathed me her husband Laurence Olivier’s favourite sun hat, which I’ve worn with pride all summer), I have bagged more than 50 of them over the years. I recently had lunch with one of my favourites: Dame Eileen Atkins, 91.

There was a time when the serious business of concert-giving closed down for the summer. Artists were expected to take time off – to rest, to fish, to learn repertoire. But now many of the most important musical events happen during the resting, fishing months, not least the BBC Proms. This year I was determined that vacation should mean just that, as I swapped the stage for the stalls, from Janacek’s Katya Kabanova at Glyndebourne to Top Hat at Chichester to Good Night, Oscar at the Barbican. It was an idyllic break, but it’s back to work. My new season began in New York, a second home since 1981 when I was a student at the Juilliard School, where I now have one student.

I recently attended the Young Dancer of the Year competition at the Royal Opera House, organised by the formidable Jacquie Brunjes. Sixteen young girls and boys aged 14 to 16 who had won a place in the final, all strutted their stuff in the hope of becoming the eventual winner. I watched each performance with a keen amateur eye, and selected my three to be awarded prizes, and not one of them made it to the final. Dame Arlene Phillips selected Cooper Filby, and I asked her afterwards if he had a chance of making it on to the professional stage. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘The standard of young dancers in Britain today has never been higher and Cooper can look forward to a promising career.’ I returned home and switched on the television to see Vladimir Putin on the early evening news.

The week of my cricket team’s annual tour of Cornwall. I formed Heartaches CC in 1973 and 765 games later it is still going strong. Not that I am a key component of the side these days, if I ever was, despite my seven wickets against Mullion in 1991. When I suffered my fourth injury in three of the past four seasons (and one of them occurred when I was minding my own business umpiring) I saw the writing on the scoreboard. I just hope I’m not injured as a spectator this year. For some reason 2025 has been an extraordinarily hectic year, musicals wise. Annoyingly hectic in fact. I know I should be grateful for continued interest in past work but, in my 81st year, I should have spent more days at Lord’s or the Oval than in theatres.

It’s that time of year when the local librairie-papeterie in your French holiday village is full of signs for la rentrée and English newspapers carry ads for gel pens and shoes with Velcro fastenings. I used to love this season as a schoolboy – discovering if I’d made the under-13 football training squad. For the past 40 years, though, September has been for me a different season: the time of the publishers’ launch party. These used to be lavish affairs, held in a hotel or gallery with themed drinks and food, the whole thing fizzing with romantic possibilities. In 2001 we had a memorable do for my American novel On Green Dolphin Street with a jazz quartet, cheeseburgers and bottomless dry Martinis. (What happened afterwards in Vauxhall Bridge Road has stayed in VBR.