Diary

Whenever feminists have complained in my presence about neglect of female high-achievers, other than rock singers and courtesans, I always like to mention brilliant Margaret Thatcher. It always makes them furious. They can’t bear to think of her as one of the most successful women of the 20th century. I had afternoon tea with her and Denis once in their chintzy flat at No. 10, where she expressed a great interest in Rupert Murdoch, whom she rather admired. My father-in-law, Stephen Spender, was also a Maggie fan and once, after he had delivered a speech about Henry Moore at Westminster Abbey, she repeated the whole speech back to him at the party afterwards word for word. Tragically her prodigious memory failed her in the end.

I learned on Wednesday that a row is exploding over freedom of the press ... in Australia. Surely some mistake. Australia is refreshingly open and its newspapers are free to say, often rudely, whatever they like. In fact, they are among the world’s the most tightly regulated, standing 26th and 29th respectively in the Reporters Without Borders censorship index — way behind Jamaica, Costa Rica and Namibia. Where, I wonder, will Britain stand after the events of this week? Much has changed in Oz since I spent my first day there as a Ten Pound Pom, looking comical in a grey suit on Bondi beach in midsummer, almost half a century ago. I left a stagnant Britain, beset by industrial strife and a Tory government whose only plan was to manage our decline.

The week starts with a bang — literally — when my 1986 Land-Rover explodes, mid-gear change: CLANK and the exhaust pipe burps blue smoke. The old girl rolls to a halt. All we lack is the tinkle of a dislodged hubcap. I feel like Peter Cook’s Maj Digby Dawlish in the 1969 film Monte Carlo or Bust after coming a cropper. Daughter Honor, ten, will be late for school so I palm her off on a passing car. Its driver seems friendly. I suppose Social Services would want me to have had her CRB-checked. The AA tows me to our mechanic in Ledbury. Lewis has a poke under the bonnet. His oily head emerges, teeth twinkling in his gums. ‘She’s well an’ truly knackerrrrred,’ grins Lewis. It made his day, though not mine.

My friend and colleague Roy Brown has just sent me the draft of a statement he will submit to the UN Human Rights Council this spring, on behalf of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. This is a group to which we both belong, which campaigns on freedom of thought and expression, women’s and children’s rights, education and much besides. Roy’s draft concerns discrimination against people who do not have a religious faith. It is extraordinary how many countries discriminate by law against nonbelievers, in violation of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which protects freedom of conscience.

Waiting for a match to begin at the gloriously situated Recreation Ground — home of Bath Rugby — I take a moment from shouting ‘Come on you Bath’ at the top of my voice, to consider wider issues. Rugby Union, for instance: the game is a civilising influence like literacy or clean drinking water. When it is played and appreciated, so is toughness of body and spirit, generosity and camaraderie. Some ugliness has accompanied its transition into the world of professional sport — that was unavoidable I suppose — but in the city of Bath the game is still played with a smile. It is also a better game than it was: cleaner, sharper, more exciting to watch.

In a recent exchange of emails, my Member of Parliament, Mr Andy Slaughter, told me he intended to vote in favour of same-sex marriage. No doubt by now he has done so. He said he believed it to be an extension of human rights. I replied that, just as there can be reductio ad absurdum, so there can perhaps be extensio ad absurdum, but I am not sure that my Latin is correct. Anyway, MPs do not to have to reply to replies. Indeed, I feel slightly sorry for Andy Slaughter, bombarded not just by letters and emails protesting against same-sex marriage, but some of the million postcards distributed through Catholic parishes in the Diocese of Westminster. The postcard points out that same-sex marriage was not in the Conservative manifesto and that it will degrade marriage and the family.

It’s a rum go, working in sport professionally. Your business is everybody else’s fun; their frivolity is your seriousness. Still, at least I was able to watch the Australian Open Final in Norfolk this year. Two years ago I watched the semi-final in a landside bar at Terminal Three. When Andy Murray won, I invented a new sport that combined sprinting with weightlifting, crossed the terminal without dropping any baggage, checked in, made the plane, just, and flew to Melbourne for the final. Murray didn’t win a set. Sportswriting can be a daft business. This year Novak Djokovic beat Murray in the Aussie Open final again, and it was a triumph of athleticism. Not touch, not artistry, not, heaven forefend, subtlety. It was all about running hard and hitting deep.

Kofi Annan has just been in town for an evening organised by The Spectator. The 800 seats at the Cadogan Hall could have been sold twice over; the former UN Secretary General has a huge following. Having known and admired him since Bosnia in 1993, I was very pleased to be his interlocutor. He has just published a fine memoir, Interventions. This deals with involvements such as the UN’s fight against HIV/AIDS — in which he gives President George W. Bush high marks — as well as the UN’s sometimes controversial military interventions as peacekeepers. He is candid about his own and the UN’s failures, particularly in Bosnia and Rwanda. But he still retains faith in the organisation.

Washington DC: My elegant and sociable mother-in-law received an email this week warning that, should she wander on to her balcony to smoke on Monday, somebody might shoot her. The Secret Service is eager that nothing should go awry when our president is inaugurated for his second term. The inaugural parade route stretches a dozen city blocks along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol, where the president gets sworn in, to the White House. The route is lined with office buildings and museums. There are few apartments with a view of the street, and my mother-in-law lives in one of them. When my father-in-law was alive, they’d throw a big party on inauguration day for friends, journalistic colleagues and a few politicians.

I am re-reading D.H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia. The opening line runs: ‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move…’ He expands on the dilemma (I paraphrase): you are afflicted by wanderlust, you want to move, you don’t have any money, you’ve only recently moved but for some reason you want to move again. It is, for example, England in deep midwinter and it has been raining solidly for six weeks. Deracination is an occupational advantage of being a writer, which is otherwise a pretty absurd profession. Writers can live anywhere, or everywhere, or, at times, nowhere… For a while I lived in an airless flat in Alphabet City, New York, when it was still a seedy neighbourhood, and the only people with mobile phones were drug dealers and pimps.

Well, what a year it has been. Another one full of financial doom and gloom. I’ve never known such a prolonged period of anxiety and pessimism in my lifetime. With our breakfast news we imbibe daily the latest glum forecasts. George Osborne talks of a ‘healing’ of the UK economy but at the same time he warned of years of economic pain ahead. Where is the ‘can-do’ attitude that I’ve seen recently on several trips to America? Though the election exposed the US as a very divided society, there is still a definite spirit of entrepreneurialism over there. There is still an ‘American dream’ that even the poorest and most humble can succeed. The worst pieces of news in 2012 were to do with youth unemployment and ‘social mobility’.