Diary

It’s amusing to see serious journalists and authors struggling to use Twitter under instruction from their newspapers and publishers. They realise they lose dignity by condensing their great thoughts into a mere 140 characters: it is inevitable, whoever you are. Imagine Jesus had been obliged by his Father to tweet. It just wouldn’t have been the same: ‘Might be a bit short of loaves and fishes on the mt today. Take a miracle to feed everyone!’ or ‘Great supper with the lads tonight — worried that tomoro might not go so well. #nastyfeeling’ This year the referendum on Scottish independence takes place at last. Oh, please, may the Scots vote yes! Pretty please! Come on Salmond! Everyone says what a brilliant politician you are.

A year or so ago I was asked to sit on a committee that advises the government on how to commemorate the first world war. It consists of about 30 dauntingly well-qualified people (former heads of the army and of Nato, historians, ex-defence secretaries), so there seems little for me to contribute at meetings. But it is interesting to be on the government side of something and see how it deals with public expectation and the press. In the summer there was a report in a British paper that the Germans had sent over their commemoration team and asked if, instead of dwelling on the conflict, the British could make 2014-18 a chance to talk up the European Union. I emailed the Department of Culture to ask if this could be right.

One of the most dispiriting experiences currently available is any commercial break during a televised football match. In a Champions League game, within seconds of the half-time whistle you are pitched into a garish carnival of crap which glaringly and proudly condenses Everything Wrong With Modern Britain into three bombastic minutes, beginning with the laughably pompous Champions League choral theme and then going downhill from there. Adverts follow for gambling, drinking, and borrowing money, along with violent computer games and cars. A multi-millionaire actor will exhort recession-hit viewers to bet on the next goal, via a handy app. Glossy couples and sexy croupiers make online cash-fleecing look like a James Bond casino.

The long-discussed meeting between a group of climate scientists and Fellows of the Royal Society on the one side, and me and some colleagues from my think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation on the other, has now at last taken place. It was held behind closed doors in a committee room at the House of Lords, the secrecy — no press present — at the insistence of the Royal Society Fellows, an insistence I find puzzling given the clear public interest in the issue of climate change in general and climate change policy in particular. The origins go back almost a year, to a lecture by the president of the Royal Society, the biologist Sir Paul Nurse. In it he chose to launch a gratuitous personal attack on me, making a number of palpably false allegations.

I’ve worked for the BBC for years and have been listening to the Today programme all my adult life, but joining it as a presenter feels like exploring a new frontier. Being on top of your brief is one thing; the mechanics of a three-hour live radio programme quite another. Take the junctions leading up to the ‘pips’ at the start of each hour. From television, I’ve been accustomed to directors counting presenters down to these junctions while they ad-lib on air — the idea being to stop talking as the voice in your ear says ‘zero’. But radio presenters are pretty much on their own, watching the clock and navigating to a precise target of five seconds to the hour. To my presenter colleagues, all this comes naturally.

For a minute I just stood there with my back against the wall, staring at the credit card receipt. Then I slid down into a crouching position on the kitchen floor. ‘So this is it,’ I thought to myself. ‘This is really going to be how I find out.’ I’d found the receipt in the front pocket of one of my husband’s suitcases on Tuesday morning. It was for dinner for two at the Four Seasons Hotel in Santa Barbara — a place he’d told me he’d never been. He’d had the Merlot and the rib-eye; she’d had the cucumber martini and a Caesar salad. I’m guessing that she waived the dressing. I’m already working out the logistics by the time my husband gets home from work.

Hard on the heels of the 90th birthday of Nicholas Parsons (10 October) comes the 65th birthday of the Prince of Wales (14 November). Neither is due for retirement any day soon. Indeed, I suspect retirement would be the death of the long-serving host of Radio 4’s Just A Minute. The Duchess of Cornwall listens to his programme, I know. Perhaps her husband does too. Either way, Parsons is a perfect role model for Prince Charles. Nicholas is young at heart, unfailingly charming and wholly committed to the strange lot that fate has accorded him. He has been hosting Just A Minute for 46 years and not missed a single recording. He will be at it until he drops. For his birthday I gave Nicholas a copy of my book The Seven Secrets of Happiness.

Researching a new book on Shakespeare’s sonnets, I stumbled upon an astonishing piece of hitherto unnoticed evidence in a 16th-century book by a sex-maniac clergyman from Cambridge. I shall not bore you with the details; suffice it to say that William Covell (the author and S-MC in question) revealed in words not especially ambiguous by Elizabethan standards that ‘Shakespeare’ was a nom de plume used by the courtier poet Edward de Vere. Now a lot of people have been saying this for a very long time — so stale buns to that, you may think — except that no one has yet noticed that the matter was revealed in a book as long ago as 1595, so that makes it an important discovery.

The last time I wrote for The Spectator I was sitting in a prison cell. I sent the then editor a poem called ‘The Ballad of Belmarsh Gaol’. Instead of printing it in the poetry column, Frank Johnson put it on the magazine’s cover. It received what is euphemistically called ‘a mixed reception’ — so mixed that I have never again tried my hand at verse. In those dark days 14 years ago I was wrestling with my self-inflicted agonies of defeat, disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy and jail. As I contemplated my non-future, its only certainty was that I would never again be in demand as a public speaker or as a political commentator in the media. But life is full of surprises.

A great night to be in Pittsburgh. The local baseball team, the Pirates, were attempting to reach their first play-offs in 21 years. Meanwhile in Washington DC, a Republican party rejected at the polls last year was seeking to increase its popularity by bringing the government to a halt. On the Strip, a bustling street along the banks of the Allegheny River, it seemed everyone was wearing a shirt declaring his or her allegiance to the Pirates. In the pizza joint where we’d gone before I played my first Pittsburgh gig in nearly two decades, the TV above the bar reported on the stalemate in Washington. But it didn’t feel much like a shutdown. No one in the place seemed to care that the Republicans might be in a hole, nor willing to suggest that they stop digging.

So mysterious, the Conservative party. In every poll, our five most admired institutions are the NHS, the BBC, the Royal Mail, the armed forces and the monarchy. The Conservative party wants to destroy four of them. Conservative? The only traditional aspects of British life to be preserved are private education, executive over-pay, the rights of both the security services and the press to wiretap innocent citizens, and the delegation of foreign policy to Washington. Some Tories even want to send high-speed trains zipping through their own rural constituencies. Ministers muttering into their beards about how everything must be changed and changed utterly more closely resemble the Trotskyites of my youth than Conservatives. Shouldn’t the party change its name?

They say nothing beats the feeling of seeing your book in print. But for me, the proudest moment was presenting the first copy to my Mum. She’s been ill recently and I read her most of the chapters in draft while she was convalescing, albeit leaving out the nasty bits. I sat with her that evening, reading her more of the book and feeling quite pleased with it. But the nervous feeling kicked in the next day when I saw the first extracts in the Daily Mail, and heard some of the reactions from the media and Labour folk. It strikes me as bizarre that people would reach conclusions and issue condemnations after reading 2 per cent of the book, but it didn’t stop them piling in.

The looming centenary of the outbreak of the first world war offers an opportunity to break away from the Blackadder/Oh! What a Lovely War vision, which dominates popular perceptions. Nobody sane suggests a celebration. But, in place of the government’s professed ‘non-judgmental’ approach to commemoration, ministers could assert that although the war was assuredly ghastly, it was not futile. Whatever the shortcomings of the Treaty of Versailles, a peace imposed by a victorious Germany would have been much worse. David Cameron often mentions with pride Britain’s role in resisting Hitler. In 2014, it would be good to hear him acknowledge that Britain, and those who died in her name, were also right to resist the Kaiser’s generals.

‘Wider still and wider, may thy bounds be set,’ the ecstatic throng sang at the Last Night of the Proms. They were partying like it was 1902, even though it seemed like the moral territory occupied by hope (not to mention glory) was growing narrower. Perhaps it has been ever thus, but it seems apparent that there are two versions of Britain on offer right now: Britannia Promlandia and Tate Britain, as in Catherine Tate: the commonwealth of ‘Am I Bovvered?’ Promlandia’s celebrations were cued up this time by David Cameron’s St Petersburg impersonation of Hugh Grant, schoolboyishly ticking off all things Bright and British — footie, Shakespeare and, er, One Direction. It is a feelgood Albion, perpetually basking in Olympic summer.

Days ago, I’d have bet that even the most bitterly partisan Congress in generations would jib at humiliating their commander-in-chief. More than two thirds of the population, according to the polls, demanded he go to Congress before firing Cruise missiles against the Syrian regime. Well, he did, didn’t he, but appeasing the people hasn’t cut much ice with Senators of both parties to judge from the hearings this week which have provoked Secretary Kerry to wag a schoolmasterly finger. In the hour their country calls on them to make a stand against the ‘moral obscenity’ of gassing 1,429 Syrians, 426 children among them, the querulous tribunes of the people seem to have learned their lines from Rick in Casablanca: ‘I stick my neck out for nobody.

There isn’t a Scottish politician in living memory who hasn’t been on the Caledonian Sleeper. I always imagined Donald Dewar folding himself up in his berth, he was so tall. He was notoriously sniffy about the company he kept in the bar and once recounted the horror he felt when — stuck in snow — he was forced to fraternise with practically the rest of the Labour front bench for 22 hours somewhere south of Carlisle. Journalists tend to be more comradely. The other night, I took the sleeper in tow with an old family friend, the BBC reporter Allan Little. Over Glenfiddich and cheese we exchanged scurrilous gossip and book recommendations before, just north of Watford, he made his long way back to the Edinburgh end of the train.

If you haven’t scuffled you haven’t lived, and our local scuffle is the best of the best. A scuffle is a sort of off-road bumper cars in 4x4s, and it’s one of the highlights of the summer. Our car, The Scuffle Pig, was on her third outing this year. We thought she’d been dealt a fatal blow in 2011, when a foolish friend encouraged a fellow scuffler to get her out of a dip by ramming her. The back windscreen was smashed, and I had to leap out and strip my then 12-year-old stepson down to his underpants in front of numerous spectators in order to get rid of the glass. He was remarkably good about it, though. Happily the Pig rode again, sporting four new off-road tyres which cost more than she did.