Diary

Having dampened local republican ardour during their recent tour of New Zealand and Australia, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visit thinking-about-breaking-away Scotland next week. They’ll tour Glenturret Distillery near Crieff, Perthshire, next Thursday, to ‘bottle their own Glenturret whisky’, if you please. Sounds like a pro-union royal initiative, but what will First Minister Alex Salmond have to say? He claims he’d like the Queen to continue as Scotland’s head of state, although some of his supporters disagree.

My wife and I spent the winter in Worcestershire. This allowed me to tell everyone back home in the States: ‘We are wintering in Worcestershire.’ This may be a sentence that has never actually been uttered in human history, even by people who spend all their winters in Worcestershire. It turned out to be a wonderful time, despite us arriving in, according to the papers, ‘the wettest winter since 1755’. For what seemed like weeks, every time I turned on the television while cooking, there was Mr Cameron beneath a brolly (as I think you call them) shouting into a microphone, ‘Money is no object!’ There was a lot to watch on the BBC while I made stir-fry and attempted rabbit stew.

I feel an intense antipathy for Vladimir Putin. No one on the international scene has aroused in me such dislike since Stalin died. Though not a mass killer on the Stalin scale, he has the same indifference to human life. There is a Stalinist streak of gangsterism too: his ‘loyalists’ wear masks as well as carry guns. Putin also resembles Hitler in his use of belligerent minorities to spread his power. Am I becoming paranoid about Putin? I hope not. But I am painfully aware that he would not matter if there was a strong man in Washington. As it is, President Obama is a feeble and cowardly man who makes even Jimmy Carter seem bold by comparison. He is running down America’s strategic capabilities while giving anaemic moral lectures.

I am back in the UK for work. Great time to turn up — after the grim, grey grind of the British winter. Here in Manchester, people stroll in shirtsleeves or T-shirts, though it’s still only 15 degrees. They are, in truth, dazzlingly white. Their semi-nudity strikes me as a tad premature, but then I’ve only just left my Indian summery vineyard in New Zealand via Bondi Beach. I’m here at the behest of BBC2, for a second season of The Peaky Blinders. If you didn’t see the first season, you should. And if you don’t ... I know where you live. And having played Chief Inspector Campbell, I know how to remove your fingernails. Be warned. Campbell is the psycho cop from hell (well, Belfast), and is more fun to play than any part I remember.

Ahh! Spring has sprung at last! Or has it? Leaving a warm and sunlit London last month we expected balmy weather in Los Angeles but the skies were grey and murky and, like Lena Horne sang in ‘The Lady is a Tramp’: I hate California, it’s cold and it’s damp. It’s necessary to dress in three layers in the City of Angels. It can be seriously frosty in the early morning, when the movers and shakers don their sweats and pant down the boulevards of Sunset and Beverly. By mid-afternoon, however, it’s boiling and everyone strips to sleeveless. Not that Los Angelinos are big in the sartorial stakes.

A week away in Crete: I’ve come for the archaeology and culture — little patches of Minos, ancient Greece, Byzantium and the Venetian Republic are scattered around this most southern sentinel of Europe. It hasn’t gone quite as I’d hoped; when it comes to monuments, the Greek rule seems to be ‘close early, close often’. But I’ve much enjoyed the food, a just-swimmable sea, and the benign, gracious hospitality of the locals. At first sight, like much of the eastern Mediterranean, Crete appears to be a matriarchy. Stern women in black still dominate village squares; they travel on tiny, exhausted donkeys as they always have done, whacking them with walking sticks; and they seem to run all the shops, tavernas and businesses.

I had a slight shock last week, while listening to Desert Island Discs. The admirable nurse Dame Claire Bertschinger had chosen a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ as one of her eight discs. The poem, beautifully read by Michael Caine, was nearing its climax when it came to an abrupt stop. If you do this and that and the other, what...? Nothing. The final stanza, with its punch-line (‘Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it/And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!’) had been lopped off. I quite see that the poem may be too long to read in its entirety, but it would have been easy to skip the penultimate stanza. Whoever removed the last lines must be illiterate.

I have just shaved off my beard in preparation for a new series of Lewis because I want to look my best for my on-screen love, Donald Whately. Donald? Isn’t his name Kevin? I’ll explain. A few years ago I was fishing off the end of a jetty in Florida. A large American gentleman approached me. ‘I’m sorry to bother you son, but my wife asked me to ask you if you are an actor from the British TV?’ I am, I said. ‘Dang. I just knew it,’ he replied, patting me vigorously on the back. His wife stood behind him, nodding and smiling kindly. ‘Well, we just had to say how much we love Inspector Marsh and that Donald Whately, boy what an actor he is.’ His face beamed in earnest appreciation. Thank you very much, I said.

The week leading up to publication is a strange time for any author. You subject yourself to doing everything from BBC Radio Hebrides to reviewing the Sunday papers on TV, as long as they’ll give your latest book a plug. Mind you, most of them want to talk about anything except the new book. The Alan Titchmarsh Show wants to know whether I trained to be an auctioneer; the Daily Mail are more interested in how Mary (my wife) conquered cancer; The Telegraph are determined to learn more about a murderer I knew, who’s just got his MA, while the Times are keen to find out how often I attend debates in the House of Lords. It was ever thus. You may consider Castiglione: Lost Genius at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace at 6 p.m.

Last October, in these very pages, I wrote with what is now annoying prescience, ‘Like almost everyone else in the insane world of musical theatre, I don’t know how to create a hit.’ I am now facing up to the grim fact that my latest effort, From Here to Eternity, is folding after a six-month run at the Shaftesbury Theatre. The publicity has vastly exceeded the interest in the show when it opened last September. Never have the words of Bob Dylan seemed so relevant to me: ‘There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.’ The enthusiasm of the media to report gleefully on Eternity biting the dust has been boosted enormously by the simultaneous, weirdly coincidental, demise of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest effort, Stephen Ward.

 São Paolo It was back in 2001 that my good friend Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs coined the acronym ‘Bric’, short for Brazil, Russia, India, China. These were the emerging markets that were going to surpass the developed economies. And so they have. Well, nearly. I, too, am partial to a good acronym and it has always seemed to me very unfortunate that there isn’t a matching one for the four biggest established economies. According to the International Monetary Fund, these are currently the United States, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom (based on last year’s GDP figures). I therefore propose ‘Juugs’. The rise of the Brics and the fall of the Juugs has a good ring to it.

My surgery has been calling in all those over 75 for a special session with their doctor — a sort of old-age MOT. I came out of mine pretty well, I thought: I could remember the name of the Prime Minister, blood pressure excellent, spark plugs need cleaning, windscreen wipers ineffective, bodywork showing signs of wear. But not too bad for 80. Gerontologist Tom Kirkwood, in his book Time of Our Lives, gives a clinical but excellent and entirely comprehensible account of what we should expect, and what can and cannot be done about it. His study of a group in their mid-eighties found that not one had zero age-related disease, and most had four or five. We take our pick: hips, knees, macular degeneration and so forth.

There’s no reason why you should have heard of me. No reason why you would have watched a Channel 4 television series called Benefits Street — with a title like that, I’d have changed channel if it came on my telly. But they didn’t tell us the title when they wanted to spend 18 months filming on our street. For reasons I can’t pretend to understand, five million people tuned in. It’s supposed to be the biggest hit Channel 4 have had since The Snowman. A fairly normal bunch of people — myself, Fungi, Black Dee, Becky and Mark — have become reality TV stars. It’s like Big Brother, except no one is evicted. Or paid.

When visiting Britain and Australia last November, I discovered that the mayor of Toronto, Robert Ford, is now the world’s best-known Canadian. He has acknowledged the occasional use of cocaine and, overall, the response to his foibles has been welcome. The world has been astounded to learn that not all English-speaking Canadians are whey-faced, monosyllabic Americans-on-Prozac. They might also learn that the contiguous metropolitan area of Toronto — now home to about seven million — has a very high standard of living and a low crime rate and is one of the world’s more impressive modern cities. The mayor is an ample and florid man who describes himself as ‘350 pounds of fun’, but he departed from Canadian tradition with his candour.

You have to hand it to Supermac. Fifty years after the event, he is still running rings round them. The esteemed Vernon Bogdanor (The Spectator, 18 January) tells us that Iain Macleod was wrong in claiming that Sir Alec had been foisted on the Conservative party by a magic circle of Old Etonians. On the contrary, the soundings had ‘revealed a strong consensus for Home. So Macmillan was not slipping in a personal recommendation when he advised the Queen to send for him — he was doing precisely what he was supposed to do.’ This is a deliciously selective account.

I now live in the hippest part of London, Shoreditch. It must be Tony Blair’s idea of heaven, a multicultural mix of hugely rich and up-and-coming young things of every nationality, huge high-rise blocks of £5 million duplexes, old Victorian buildings ripped apart to make way for young men with beards working on searing new technology, hordes of young beautiful women striding around looking very much in charge. But amazingly something has escaped developers. The pubs, of which there are many. There is a wonderful example on the corner of my alley, the Eagle, a finer example of a Victorian pub than you’ll ever see. It was once the locale of music hall artist Marie Lloyd, famous for singing ‘She sits among the cabbages and peas’.

David Cameron gives Old Etonians a bad name. Critics deplore his Old Etonian-ness,  his Lord Snooty Factor.  Childish, but it’s an uncomplicated prejudice which can be freely expressed in our otherwise rigidly policed public discourse.  Is there an OE who might rescue the school’s reputation? There is:  Rory Stewart, 40, Tory MP for Penrith.  Known in some quarters as ‘Florence of Belgravia’ because of his expertise in Arabic affairs, he is famous for walking 6,000 miles through Afghanistan in two years and for writing two bestselling books about working there and Iraq. And, says the Guardian – of all papers – he is ‘hugely appealing: self-deprecating, funny, open, curious and kind’.