Diary

A few years back, Julian Maclaren-Ross was a forgotten writer. Today his wonderful books, such as Of Love and Hunger, are back in print, and on Monday, along with his biographer Paul Willetts, I took part in a centenary celebration of his life, with film of the man himself and of many of his contemporaries, most of them now dead: Alan Ross, Joan Wyndham, John Heath-Stubbs. J.M-R., a renowned Fitzrovian bore, was, as a friend of his put it, ‘better on the page than on the pavement’. True of so many writers one knows. ••• One perk of taking my one-woman show round the country, if you can call it a perk, is the glimpses I get of the north of England. Crikey, it really is grim up there.

It is never a good idea for a government to look stupid: least of all now. Yet that is what is happening over Lords reform. Nick Clegg wanted to wreck our currency. He failed. Then he wanted to wreck the voting system: another failure. He has now transferred his wrecking petulance to the House of Lords. He must not be indulged. Damage has already been done. Back in 1997, with heredity constantly reinvigorated by experience and expertise, the Lords worked well. A skilful revising chamber, it could force the Commons to think again, without challenging the supremacy of the elected house. The upper house could defy the government, but only when public opinion was firmly on its side. The hereditaries ensured that land and history had a voice, which lefties hated.

House of Lords reform is like a dose of the clap: it may feel good at the time, but the result is an unending pain in the proverbials. I can’t, er, speak from personal experience, but even the briefest glance at the government’s plans to elect the Lords makes the point. The new bill comes to the Commons next week, for what promises to be a stormy debate. It’s a disastrous hotchpotch which will create a free-floating class of electorally empowered senators on 15-year terms, with no constituencies and no possibility of re-election to discipline them. Even Lord Strathclyde, Leader in the Lords, has admitted that the new senators will have no accountability. Result: competing chambers, legislative gridlock, cronyism, and a free pass for the government of the day.

The details for my appearance at the Leveson Inquiry arrive. ‘If Mr Walters is content to walk through the public entrance to the RCJ, Bell Yard North One is closest to the Hearing Room. Could you provide names of anyone accompanying Mr Walters in order that we can reserve seats in the public gallery.’ It sounds like a passage from A Tale of Two Cities. David Davis calls with advice on how to conduct myself in the dock. He says he gave similar coaching to Alastair Campbell before his fateful encounter with the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee over the David Kelly affair, which is slightly unsettling, given my views on Campbell. ‘Be pinstriped professional,’ says Davis, ‘not Essex boy. •••  Friday: I’m on the 8.

A welcome call from son in California: as usual it takes five minutes at least to balance the mental time-of-day differences. In theory, I could call him at four o’clock my time and he’d be awake — just; but I’d have had seven hours to get used to being awake, he’s only just (reluctantly)started. Which is another reason I’m not keen to adopt Skype: it’s bad enough trying to sound alert when you’re half asleep, worse still if you had actually to look bright and focused. Son in question, Jake Lyall, is becoming an actor, day job writing software.

The best moment during my trip around America was at a charter school in San Lorenzo, California. Talking to a group of children, I asked one of them, Michael, a slightly sulky-looking Hispanic boy, where he would be if he was not at this school. ‘Juvie,’ he replied. The other children explained that he meant Juvenile Hall or Detention. In other words, if he had stayed at a normal state school he would have made an early start to a life of crime. Here at the charter school, he had not. How and why had the school made such a difference, I asked him. ‘We spend our whole life here!’ he grumbled — no time for crime. His mother had made him go. Evidently a wise and determined woman.

Whenever, in an idle moment, I dip into one of my own books, I am almost immediately consumed by an unstoppable fou rire. It is immodest of me to make this confession, but I find my own work irresistibly funny. It pleases me to know that other more illustrious authors whom I admire are also deeply amused by their own books. Kafka, Max Brod tells us, always exploded with laughter while reading aloud from his own desolate tales. Ronald Firbank cackled uncontrollably while writing his orchidaceous novels and D.H. Lawrence, not famous for his sense of humour, laughed often and not seldom inexplicably at his own writings. Even the saurian countenance of Samuel Beckett was creased with laughter as the author contemplated his own sardonic playlets.

This month has been the launching season for my new collection of poems, Nefertiti in the Flak Tower. Not many younger people, I have been discovering, know what a flak tower is, or was. Perhaps I should have called the book something else. One of the poems in the book is called ‘Whitman and the Moth’: it might have been wiser to call the book that. Early in the launching season I was asked to read the poem aloud on that excellent radio programme Front Row. The poem is a meditation on the old poet at the point of his death and I’m afraid I found the right voice for it exactly. ••• I have been exhausted for more than two years now, by illness. Leukaemia is practically the least of my ailments.

It is unusual in Canada to have had the same address for 60 years, and for an urban house to have ten acres around it (testimony to my father’s foresight), and these facts made it especially painful not to set eyes on my home for five years while I struggled in the American Gulag. It has been an affecting return, with many kindnesses and very few echoes of the appalling defamations that announced the beginning of my travails (and have ended in generous libel settlements in my favour). Given the correlation of forces between the US government and me, it is ending as well as it could, and the remaining relatively trivial legal skirmishing should also be favourable.

Bidden to the Barbican for the Bauhaus exhibition, I trekked from the eponymous underground station. I noted that there are many steps from the platform to the street, perhaps a little steeper than the norm, for I kept catching my crutches on them. Across the road, the narrow steps into the Barbican — a mean afterthought by a rotten architect — I know to be very steep even for a man fully fit in wind and limb. Beyond the serried tower blocks there are more steps, more generous to the lame in every dimension, and down — though they will be up on the way back and there are a hell of a lot of them. They are unswept and crumbling, their only redeeming feature a scattering of daisies in the cracks.

I am extremely lucky and have a charmed life. But this is a hard-luck story. And like much journalistic endeavour, it’s drawn from a wellspring of bitterness and resentment. Recently I was invited to Mustique. It’s a bland paradise. The beaches are raked each morning, as is the sand underneath the trees just behind the beaches. There is a never-ending rota of parties in beautiful villas hosted by smiling people with globally successful businesses. Teletubbies for billionaires. If, infantilised by your surroundings, you happen to leave your clothes somewhere on the island, before you’ve noticed they will be returned to you, laundered and pressed by the servants of The Mustique Company.

No great April Fool’s Day spoof this year. The best ever was in Panorama on 1 April 1957. I was mildly connected with it — I was on the Panorama production team that devised it, though I did not think of it or produce it. It was a film of the spaghetti harvest in Italy. The team cooked pounds and pounds of spaghetti and draped it over the branches of trees in an Italian orchard, then filmed peasant girls with ladders collecting it in armfuls. Among the many people taken in by it (there was very little real spaghetti around in the 1950s, it was all in tins) was the director-general of the BBC, Sir Ian Jacob.

This week marked seven years since I agreed to quit my civil service career to become a political adviser to Gordon Brown, and three years since I was forced to quit that new role in shame. Following my resignation, I put my last vestige of professional pride into denying the chasing media pack the chance to put a camera in my face. My home was surrounded, so I spent seven nights staying with different friends in London, on occasion having to escape over fences or inside car boots when the pack found me. I learned two main lessons from this experience, besides not sending scandalous emails: first, switch your mobile phone off when not on the move — I was tracked down whenever I didn’t — and second, introduce yourself to any neighbours even if only staying one night.

Last summer when I was staying with my friend India Knight in Cornwall she said I absolutely must join Twitter. Besides being a Sunday Times columnist, she is a Twitter queen, No. 73 in the Top Twit 100, with 57,000 followers. Better still, she has a ‘peer index rating’ — whatever that is — of 58, which is higher than Alan Rusbridger’s, tee hee. I read some of India’s tweets and wasn’t convinced but then she said: ‘Look, Lynn, editors take it seriously. They think if you have 57,000 followers you have 57,000 fans; they see it as proof of popularity.’ ‘But I haven’t got 57,000 followers,’ I whimpered. ‘I haven’t got any.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I will fix it.

Vienna. I’m here on the first leg of a short three-city tour for my new novel — Eine Grosse Zeit in German. The weather is sensational, warm and sunny, and even though we’re still firmly in March and there isn’t a leaf on a tree, Vienna’s cafés have their tables out on the sidewalk wherever possible. I’m staying in the incomparable Hotel Sacher — which probably serves the best breakfast on the planet and they cook your scrambled eggs in front of you while you wait. After a couple of interviews I have something of a gap in my schedule and decide to walk to my next appointment with a TV programme which is being filmed in the Sigmund Freud Museum, formerly Freud’s apartment and consulting rooms at no. 19, Bergasse.

Asked to write a diary for The Spectator, my first reaction was: ‘Why me?’ To sit down at my laptop and write — rather than read a script — feels a bit strange. I am still getting used to people wanting to know about me. A mere nine weeks ago I was anonymous, now I can’t move for those bloody paps. er, well, not quite, although I sometimes get a bit stared at, and a surprising lot of men express how much they enjoyed Call the Midwife. I even got a free biscuit from the man in the buffet car on the train to Hereford. My dream, however, is to play wildly different characters, so here’s hoping. (Fast forward to Series 15: a haggard-looking Jenny cleaning her glass enema tube. Yeuch....

I’m a cowardly traveller. I’m not afraid of trains, planes, cars — just of change, and of elsewhere. Months ago I agreed to go with my colleagues from Bath Spa University to a conference of creative writing programmes in Chicago. As the time approaches, I resent that past self who said yes: foolishly enthusiastic, deluded about my own character. The prospect of travel makes the days leading up to it feel insubstantial, as if they are only a preparation. I have no interest in Chicago, where I’ve never been. There’s a metaphysical puzzle about time which has gripped me since I was a child — faced, say, with a school morning of maths and double Latin. Why does this moment I’m in have to be now? Why can’t it be then, when the trip is over?

Some time in the olden days, an Irishman called St Piran took the trouble to float over the ocean on a millstone and land in Cornwall, with the purpose of introducing the natives to tin-mining and Christianity. Today, the mines are closed and the inhabitants under the age of 75 are indifferent to the saint’s religious legacy. But it is St Piran’s Day in Penzance. (Or Pensans, as the nationalists call it. One remembers Kingsley Amis’s Old Devils, emerging from Swansea station to see a rank labelled Tacsi, ‘for those who could not understand the word “taxi” ’.) The St Piran’s Day procession is led by Jan Ruhrmund, who used to be a librarian at the Morrab Library and is now the Lib Dem mayor.

When we switched on the BBC’s 6 o’clock news on 18 February, we had no idea that it was the day of Whitney Houston’s funeral, and even less that the coverage of this sad event would blot out all other news. So we expected the item to come to an end. But it never did. I was spending the weekend with, among others, two teenagers and we were all transfixed by the relentless mawkishness of the proceedings. After about an hour, we switched off and had supper. When we came back, the tributes were still rolling on. But now a large subtitle had appeared at the bottom of the screen. It read: ‘You wait a lifetime for a presence like her’s [sic]’. We decided it was time to ring the BBC’s complaints line. Naturally it took an age to get through.

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’.