Diary

Finding an outfit for a wedding is a doddle compared with finding one for an investiture and I wonder how sensible it was to buy my hat first. I love hats. My mother was a dressmaker and designer and she also made hats and wore them with style and aplomb, in the days when women never went hatless, even just to go shopping. When I was a child she embarrassed me beyond endurance when turning up at school events in one of her rakish creations. I remember the Christmas play and a small black felt number worn jauntily on one side of her head. It had protruding bright turquoise feathers and a turquoise satin slash. Worse was the one that turned up at sports day. That had cherries dangling from it and a sort of ribbon pineapple atop.

As I returned to the House of Commons, it was clear I had swapped one jungle for another. For the last few weeks I have been in Australia filming I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! and the Conservative leadership were less than impressed. In desperation to prevent me from taking part, No. 10 drew a grenade from their armoury in the form of a whip suspension. It had no impact on my decision to join the show, but did help make me one of the best-known politicians in Britain. I wonder if that is really what they were trying to achieve? When I was first approached by the show’s producers, I politely declined. I couldn’t see any benefit in travelling halfway around the world to eat camel toe for the public’s amusement.

I once bred a racehorse, half-owned by my mother, born at my mother-in-law’s farm in Suffolk and named ‘Green Moon’ by my daughter. He won a race or two but never found his form, so we sold him to an Australian for not much. A few days ago, I was woken by a 5a.m. phone call from an ecstatic friend who told me that Green Moon had just won the Melbourne Cup — one of the best races in the world — bagging an immense prize cheque for his new owner. I’m not sure whether I will ever be able to forgive him, or myself. Late one evening, I find myself star-stuck in the company of Jeremy Clarkson. I’m not excited by cars — I’ve owned the same seven-seater diesel Toyota Previa for six years — but Top Gear is unmissable.

I have just returned from sunny Los Angeles, visiting Simon Cowell, the subject of my most recent biography. He told me about a visit by Cheryl Cole to his amazing house in Beverly Hills to patch up their arguments. ‘My book is number 1,’ boasted Cheryl. ‘Mine was number 1 for six weeks,’ countered Cowell, enjoying a rare moment of self-congratulation amid a sharp drop of The X Factor USA’s ratings on Fox TV. Everyone, it seems, is having a crisis. I am grateful to John Birt for offering me my first job in TV (at Granada). But I blame his legacy for the current crisis, the latest in a long line since I joined BBC current affairs in 1970.

People constantly ask travel writers: where are you going next? They hope to hear about a camel-party in Mongolia. But last week I had to answer blandly: Italy. I travelled with my wife to a friend’s wedding on Lake Orta among the Italian lakes, where the bride arrived by boat at the garlanded jetty of the town hall. There she and her fiancé vowed, according to the quaint-sounding Italian law, to establish their family residence (this sent a shimmer of laughter through the guests — the couple had been cohabiting for years) and educate their offspring. Afterwards I hoped to show my wife the Italian gardens I had loved 40 years ago, but to drive through Lombardy and the Veneto now is to traverse an industrial wilderness.

Air Canada has outwitted the superstorm and I am about to return to Canada after my nine-day stay in London following an absence of seven years, and nine years since I actually lived there. I was launching the British edition of my book, A Matter of Principle, which describes the legal onslaught against me in the United States that consumed most of those years. As these matters have been amply aired in the London media this past week, I avoid them here. As Truman Capote famously said to a British (male) television interviewer, ‘Why don’t you read the book, darling?

In the October sunshine I have been watching the academic year’s new debtors unloading their electronic possessions from the cars of mothers with hair in 50 shades of grey. After nearly 40 years of teaching in Oxford, I am enraged that the undergraduates have been rebranded. They are now ‘consumers’ and from their first day they are being saddled with debt at a high commercial rate of interest, piling onto the capital sum they also owe. Not one of us has had the chance to vote on this mean-spirited reform. Unlike the vice chancellors and David Willetts, I live daily with the debtors at ground level. When consulted, more than half of them say they will emigrate rather than repay.

Straight off the overnight plane from a work trip to Miami I head for Paddy Power in Camberwell. I think I know what the result of the American election is going to be. Luckily for me (or perhaps for them) they are still closed so I wheel my suitcase home and the moment passes. My plan had been to lay a tenner on Romney winning and Biden remaining vice president.

This week sees the 30th anniversary of the death (or ‘untimely death’, as death is now invariably known) of Glenn Gould. The fame of most classical musicians tends to wither when they die, but Gould’s seems to grow and grow: his grave is the most visited in Canada, he has appeared on The Simpsons, and not long ago in its apparently straight-faced list of The 100 Most Important Canadians in History, Maclean’s magazine ranked him the No. 1 artist in the world. Such posthumous blossoming makes him rather closer to a rock star, which is, in all but the most literal sense, what he was. In fact, he makes most of today’s rock stars look doggedly conventional.

In Scandinavia, gene therapists have invented a virus that may treat the cancer that killed multi-billionaire Steve Jobs — but are going to have to throw it out, because of lack of cash. I am in Uppsala, Sweden, sitting among pipettes and centrifuges, helping the professor in charge to set up a rescue fund for this kindly microbe. My friend and co-writer, the biographer Dido Davies, has been diagnosed with pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer or ‘Steve Jobs Disease’, and Professor Essand’s virus makes neuroendocrine tumours melt away — at least, in lab mice. It is not clear if this will happen in humans; the only way to find out is to run clinical trials. But there is not enough money in Prof Essand’s lab to do this.

I’m just back from Chicago, Washington and New York where I’ve been making a film on Obama’s four years, and still shaking off the jetlag. It’s been a hot early autumn there, after a scorching summer; but nobody on the campaign trail seems to be talking about climate change. Or indeed about anything except the economy. Nor do many people seem to be listening. There’s an eerie absence of electioneering bumper-stickers, posters or even much coverage on the TV breakfast shows. You get tiny flashes of political coverage between the weather and traffic. This is a fight taking place in upmarket nooks and angry crannies — certain websites, op-ed pages and cable shows.

My postbag is mostly things like: ‘I once played tennis against you in the Provence in 1981. My daughter is now bicycling through Spain to raise money and I wondered… .’ So picture my surprise to get one that instead began like this:  ‘In your novel Engleby, the hero mentions a gig by Procol Harum he attended at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park, in 1972.’ The next line that was the killer: ‘I was playing keyboards in the band that night… .’ And so began an intriguing pen pal friendship.

In Edinburgh to speak about my new novel Zoo Time at the book festival. I love it up here, watching the rain lashing the austere grey terraces, dodging the street clowns who don’t really belong in so serious a place, visiting the Victorian dead in the marvellously voluble Dean Cemetery (it’s the stones that do the speaking, not the dead), and enjoying the view of Fettes from the window of my hotel. Built in the grand Scots baronial style to educate orphans and the poor, Fettes looks more like a lunatic asylum than a school. If I had a telescope I believe I’d be able to spot Mrs Rochester roaming through those spires, spitting and setting fire to herself. Tony Blair, who coincidentally referred to Gordon Brown as the mad wife in the attic, was a pupil of Fettes.

When in 2009 I published a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster it provoked contrasting responses from two members of the royal family. Prince Charles, protesting that he was ‘bemused’ by my views on climate change, struck me off his Christmas card list, where I had been for 25 years since we became environmental allies back in the 1980s. I was, however, startled and delighted to have a long, thoughtful and sympathetic letter about the book from Prince Philip, whom I had met only once, and which, inter alia, led me to be far from surprised when he last year made headlines for having dismissed wind turbines as ‘absolutely useless’. Back in the 1960s, now to my shame, I once wrote a far from kindly profile of Prince Philip in Private Eye.

And so the Olympics are done. I am still reeling from the information — I simply cannot unremember it — that two million people applied for tickets to the final of the men’s 100m, 80,000 of them succeeding. The race was over in less time than it has taken you to read this little nugget. I thought it insanity rampant, but then I know nothing of sport — despite having been at the Atlanta Olympics way back in 1996, in order to write some fairly flippant pieces for the Times. British Airways had managed to lose all my luggage, though it was restored to me one hour before my flight home — where the following day I learned that the Press Centre, where I had been spending most of my time, had just been blown to smithereens by a terrorist bomb.

What explains the extraordinary success of Fifty Shades of Grey? This question has been much skirted around but, as far as I know, no one has come up with what seems to me the obvious answer: a large proportion of women are to some degree closet masochists. Of course it’s an embarrassing thing to admit, but we are longing, in our sexual imaginations if not in real life, to be dominated and subjugated by a masterful male. This tendency also explains the enduring popularity of Mills & Boon romances, bodice-rippers and the novels of Georgette Heyer, many of which have been in print for almost a century. Fifty Shades is merely a more (much more) explicit continuation in the same genre.