Diary

When I took the job as director of the BBC’s coverage of London 2012, my cousin asked if anything about the job kept me awake at night. The truth is nothing — so far. I can see that Britain’s television screens going black at the start of the 100 metres final would be bad, since there isn’t much recovery time in 9.6 seconds. Fortunately, however, we’re not wholly dependent on live events; and the pleasure of recent weeks has been seeing previews of what will make the whole year feel special. The best example is the ‘Sceptred Isle’ soliloquy by Patrick Stewart from our new television production of Richard II, which captures the national spirit better than any number of positioning papers on the ‘Cultural Olympiad’.

We are not made incrementally aware of things that happen incrementally. Though something may have been changing for a while, the realisation comes all at once in a swoop, usually when it’s far too late. I realised that I had become a ‘madam’ last weekend, in the butcher’s. We had a bit of a joke, the butcher and I, over the severed limbs, then as he handed me my bag, he said: ‘There you go, madam.’ Madam? Madam? Madam? What happened to babe? I’m sure I was babe last week. Since the butcher opened my ears, life has become a terrible cacophony of madams: ‘£3.50 please, madam,’ ‘sorry, madam,’ ‘thank you, madam.’ Whilst I was buying mince, my girlhood slipped away.

One of the best things about being a writer is that you get asked to interesting places. I’ve always turned everything down because I believed I should sit at my desk and write. About six months ago, I decided to see what would happen if I accepted everything for a while. Admittedly, I had a kick-start. My BBC film Page Eight, about the moral ructions in MI5 in the past ten years, was given the unusual honour, for a TV film, of closing the Toronto Film Festival. So I went to Toronto (refreshing), then to Edinburgh (uplifting), Warsaw (fascinating), Rome (matchless), Hamburg (serious), Jaipur (fabulous), Eastbourne (serene) and Gothenburg (-14°C).

Try as I might, I can’t pretend even to myself that the Cambridge Union debate against Katie Price was anything but a total victory for tits and telly, and an utter defeat for me. What was I thinking? But still. Last week I found myself at the Cambridge Union in a tight red dress, proposing the motion ‘This House believes the only Limit to Female Success is Female Ambition’ to an overflowing chamber. I thought I made some jolly good points. And Miss Price, in sparkly leggings and six-inch heels, was winningly unsure of herself, and actually delivered a four-minute speech in proposition rather than opposition of the motion. But none of this counted. Our side was crushed.  The headlines were gleeful. ‘The Price is Right!

I have a book out this week and, as always, it’s a torrid time, alternating between delight at good reviews (A.N. Wilson in this magazine) and despair at the massacres (the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton in the Guardian). It was just after one such dark assessment of my future that happier news arrived from an unexpected source. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, had just read the book (it had only been out two days) and tweeted his assessment to his 153,000 followers: ‘Just read Religion for Atheists. Great writing, thoughtful, disturbing. Highly recommend.’ At once, pandemonium broke out: Murdoch’s account is followed by pretty much every newspaper in the world.

To Moscow! To Moscow! Recently I was in Russia as a guest of the British Council. My friend Damian Barr hosts a regular literary salon in London, and the idea was to put one on here, with the poet and essayist Linor Goralik, the novelist Alexander Ilichevsky, the publisher Dan Franklin and me. Extraliterary considerations: long johns. I asked my Russian friend Natasha, who’s from the Perm region, how cold I could expect Moscow to be in December. She made a hum-haw noise. ‘Actually you can’t know. Sometimes it can be pretty warm. It may even get up to minus five.’ She wasn’t trying to be funny. The great refrain of Chekhov’s Three Sisters has the advantage of not needing a Cyrillic keyboard to reproduce: ‘B Mockby!

It is hard for me to monitor this from my prison cell in Florida as I wait for the spurious and failed prosecution of me to flounder to an end, but it seems to me that Britain has failed adequately to recognise that Margaret Thatcher was correct in almost everything she said about Eurofederalism. She was a prophet who was sent packing because of her prescience, amid all that bunk about being ‘uncaring’. There was too much attention paid to the spivvy parvenus who most ostentatiously gained from her policies, and not enough to the millions of the unashamed bourgeois who gratefully made her the first prime minister since Lord Liverpool to earn three consecutive full terms. Surely it is time her effigy was in Parliament Square, to make George Canning less lonely in his toga.

At last, 18 years after leaving university, the call comes to appear on the University Challenge Christmas Special. A wonderful boost for my intellectual vanity. Not so good for the physical sort. Halfway through filming, at Granada Studios in Manchester, a man in props approached me in the make-up room. ‘I’m afraid you’re strobing,’ he said, pointing at my checked shirt, which produced a blurring effect on telly. ‘Do you mind wearing the studio shirt?’ The studio shirt was bright grey — if that’s not an oxymoron — with a highly varnished sheen. At lunchtime, I rushed off to Brooks Brothers and bought myself a non-strobing, non-shiny blue shirt, for £89. It didn’t do much for my appearance.

This is the time of year when we all need an epiphany or two. Mine came last week driving near Seville, where I’ve been filming. Far away, across the valley, I saw a vision. There was a tall figure, bathed in radiant light — light which both shimmered in two huge wings, yet also seemed to cascade upwards. The angel of the south? No, it turns out, not quite a Pauline moment. This was a solar tower onto which hundreds of mirrors beam sunlight, the rays turning water into steam and producing energy. It was very beautiful. It’s rare at my age that you see something you’ve never seen before and gives you a prickle of optimism. Up to Bridlington to talk to David Hockney about his huge new RA show coming up in January.

Recently, telling myself I must cure my allergy to the banal language employed by the Church of England these days, I went to a service in a local Norman church. The visiting preacher was a grey-haired woman. Her soporiferous sermon induced instant lethargy until she gave a sudden shriek. ‘…and God went WOW!’ she shouted, and repeated this dubious claim twice. Incomprehension skittered among the congregation of six elderly ladies. I suppose the preacher believed that, if she used contemporary colloquial language, the picture she was trying to conjure of a recognisable God would be easier for us to imagine than if she used the language of the King James Bible. Her mistake was not to have checked out the general age of her listeners. They knew ‘Wow!

Last Easter I left the special school for children with behaviour problems, where I had been head for six years, for a job advising on behaviour at the Department for Education. Recently, I went back to my school and bumped into a boy called Jack in the corridor. He looked at me for a few seconds as if trying to remember who I was and then said, ‘You were a useless head teacher,’ and walked off. A few of the children ran up and hugged me, but many of them barely acknowledged my presence. Our pupils have often been brought up in families where men come and go and each new one is a potential threat, so it can take them years to learn to trust adults. I had become another transient man who had come into their lives and then abandoned them.

Nine years ago we moved to Herefordshire from Gloucestershire, where lovely Jilly Cooper was a neighbour. There is less bedhopping here in the Marches, fewer rakes such as Jilly’s character Rupert Campbell-Blacks. Recently, however, we learned that a married friend here was having an affair, bonking away in the marital home like a bonobo monkey. What should we do? Sometime matinee idol Hugh Grant would tell us to mind our own business. Broadsheet columnist Joan Smith on Monday assured the Leveson Inquiry that 21st-century Britain is laid back about marital collapse. Speak for yourself, Joan. I take the view that marriage is a public estate, declarations of love being exchanged in front of the community. It is factually incorrect to say that marriage is completely private.

Athens The manner in which George Papandreou was ousted has shocked Greeks. ‘It’s a foreign invasion, a takeover, only without tanks’, says Calchas, an angry young man whom I find marching around Syntagma Square in front of the Greek parliament, with 100 or so others, all clutching rolled-up red flags. Other marchers mutter about ‘neo-colonialism’. They have a point. The ultimatum issued to Papandreou by Brussels bigwigs was extraordinary. After he made the fatal error of suggesting that the EU austerity package ought to be put to a referendum, Papandreou was told that he should step aside and allow the emergence of a ‘unity’ government whose purpose would be to implement EU measures.

‘He’s the reason I’m working in opera,’ one of the stage managers told me in the middle of the 12-minute standing ovation for Plácido Domingo, ‘he’s the most generous artist there is.’ As she spoke, Plácido was pushed yet again to the front of the stage to acknowledge the applause on his own. His reluctance was genuine. He picked up some of the flowers raining down on him and threw them back, to the orchestra, to the audience. Backstage, he greeted everyone, literally everyone, but not in a rush — with real interest. A programme from his very first performance at Covent Garden — as Cavaradossi in Tosca in December 1971 — was signed: ‘Forty years on...’ ‘Have I talked to everyone?

How nice to find myself at the front of The Spectator rather than the back, where I make occasional appearances, albeit under a pseudonym, next to the crossword. I love these quirky, waste-of-time competitions, which at £25 for 150 words must make the contributors pro rata among the highest paid in the magazine. It’s a shame, though, that the same four or five people seem to win all the time. What else do they do with their lives apart from construct haikus about literary figures or short stories without using the letter ‘e’? Who are Basil Ransome-Davis, Noel Petty and Bill Greenwell? I have a feeling I was reading their entries in Punch when I was about eight years old.

Last week I travelled to New York for an audition. And before you ask, I haven’t heard yet. On the flight I sat next to a retired Hollywood producer from Santa Barbara. She would have been travelling upper class but today, owing to some kind of tier point issue, she had been downgraded to premium economy. Like your entire country, I joked. She talked about the end of the American empire and the inexorable rise of the east. Welcome, I said. Let me embrace you and gather you into the club lounge of second-rate nations. Allow me to ease your sense of shame. Have a drink. We can sit here and bitch about the inferior service and the terrible food. ••• At Ground Zero I walked the narrow streets still haunted by that shocking insult, that shroud of dust clouds.

I arrived at the Occupy Wall Street protests on Monday morning, their one month anniversary, at 7 a.m. raring to go. That’s when the subway stations of Lower Manhattan are spewing out their banking spawn, when the streets are full of capitalist pillagers swarming off to suck what blood is left in the western economies. I was looking forward to a confrontation, some fist-shaking, at least some graphic shouting and argy-bargy. But at Zuccotti Park, I found everyone huddled beneath blue tarpaulin, fast asleep. Four weeks in, the radicals are exhausted. Surrounding the park, half the size of a football pitch and dotted with honey locust trees, stood groups of policemen, television vans and food carts all waiting for the protestors to get up.

I wake up early at my house in Hidden Hills, California, and go downstairs to make myself some toast and a pot of my special atomic coffee (you double brew the beans, add a double shot of espresso, and stay awake for days). And there on the table as I walked into the kitchen was a bottle of champagne that my wife Sharon had left open from the night before. Now, a few years ago, this would have been a disaster for me: I would have polished off that champagne for breakfast, disappeared for a month, then tried to come home by driving my Ferrari through the front door. But I didn’t. I just put a cork in the bottle, and put the bottle back in the fridge. The only thought that popped into my head was, ‘I hope it ain’t gone flat, because that would be a terrible waste.

This is not the best time to move from East to West. The thought occurs to me as I sit in a British bank, at its Westminster branch no less, waiting to open my first UK account. The procedure takes two hours, stretched across two appointments over two days. In the same period of time, a bank in Singapore — my home for the past 20 years — would not only have set up an account, but offered the customer five credit cards and a housing loan. When international investors like Jim Rogers say Asia is the future because things just move faster there, there’s some truth in it. ••• I’ve come to London for postgraduate study. It was not the easiest decision to make, hauling myself, mid-career, from Asia to Europe.

Having spent the best part of a year writing my memoirs, I spent most of the summer trying to put them out of my mind. On a brief holiday in the Isle of Lewis, catching lobsters and catching up with friends, I stopped thinking about it. You can consider it part of a rehabilitation package for recovering ministers. I learned to use an iPad. I even appropriated my wife’s Kindle, and read my first e-book: The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. At a table in the glorious Auberge guesthouse in Carnish, on the coast of the Outer Hebrides, it wasn’t hard to put away politics and economics.