Diary

Saint Tropez is as bawdy as ever, so we spend most of our time tucked away in the hills. But even our monk-like existence sometimes requires some amusement and when we recently ventured out to one of the most exclusive yet bacchanalian nightclubs, I queued up in the ladies’ room, watching the young amazons fighting for mirror space in their towering heels and tiny skirts. We were all waiting, for what felt like an age, for one of the stall doors to open. Finally, after repeated banging on the painted plywood, two people staggered out, much the worse for wear. One was a man, who sauntered out wiping some white powder from underneath his nose with a sheepish smirk. The girls all shrieked as if they’d never seen a man before — so likely.

What is the opposite of a riot? It must be the serenity of the Isle of Bute. This island, close to Glasgow in the firth of Clyde, is not merely riot-free, it is almost spookily calm. When I visited it last week for the first time, I heard vague talk of a drug problem in Rothesay, its principal town, but that was the only hint of possible criminality. If all of Scotland were like Bute, Alex Salmond would have been justified in stating that Scotland had ‘a different society’ to that of England, one in which riots did not occur. So little seems to occur on Bute that the local newspaper, the Buteman, finds only matters of almost comic inconsequence to report. I saw two editions of the paper.

It’s 4 p.m. on a Thursday and I am talking with an MP on the House of Commons terrace. My mobile phone rings. It’s my colleague Keith Gladdis, the northern correspondent for the News of the World. I tell him I’ll call him back: I’m with a contact, working on a story — thousands of jobs have been lost because civil servants fixed a deal with a German company. There’s not much point, he tells me. ‘We’ve all been fired. They are closing the paper.’ I make my excuses and leave. Papers normally fold after running out of money or readers. The News of the World had plenty of both: still profitable, still the largest Sunday sale on the planet. But we were sunk by appalling activities carried out in secret.

I looked at it and was astonished. It was not that he disliked my ideas — he was entitled to disagree — but that he had attacked a book I had not written. He pretended that I believed the West had been right to support Saddam Hussein while he was gassing the Kurds when I had said the opposite. He made up stories about my parents, good people he had never met, to show me in a bad light. Every second paragraph contained a howler. Well, I thought, get a book wrong and the text will confound you. I typed out the passages that proved that he was at best an incompetent reviewer and filed my reply. ‘Get out of that,’ I muttered as I hit the send button. Ithought no more about it until I looked at my entry on Wikipedia.

David Brooks opes his Diary Eye strain. When preparing for my book tour I hadn't realised how much stress it would put on my eye muscles. But the sideways glance seems to be à la mode among newspaper photographers. They tell you to turn your face nearly sideways to the camera, then pull your eyes all the way over so you can peer directly into it. From the inside it feels like they are turning you into a shifty-eyed Richard Nixon, but it must look edgy to photo editors. In any case, after a few minutes your eye muscles hurt. I do whatever photographers tell me to do because if you can't look good you should at least look devious (in France, though, I once refused to pose naked in a bathtub full of milk).

With the Middle East in flames and Japan in meltdown, I decided to head for Brazil. As somebody who makes a living commenting on international politics, I was worried that my choice of destination might seem eccentric. But President Obama evidently sees the world the same way. While American cruise missiles rained down on Libya, he was giving a speech in Rio, as part of a five-day tour of Latin America. There is method behind this apparent madness. The President and his advisers think that, over the past decade, the US has wasted too much time, energy, money and blood on the Middle East. They are determined to focus on new global powers. Brazil, which will soon be the world’s fifth-largest economy, is clearly near the top of the list.

Alastair Campbell opens his Diary You may remember Ruth Turner, the Blair aide woken at dawn as ‘Yates of the Yard’ pursued allegations from the SNP about so-called cash for honours. How very different from YotY’s handling of phone-hacking. The News of the World hack Paul McMullan told me he was asked three times to visit the police to be interviewed under caution. Three times he refused. So the police ‘eliminated me from their inquiries’. Speaking to London Assembly members, YotY said the police could not be expected to chase every piece of gossip, rumour and innuendo  — er, what was ‘cash for honours’?

What is it that people do not understand about the concept of retirement for politicians? Those who think I should not have participated in Strictly Come Dancing seem to believe I am doing a job called ‘ex-politician’. I have no idea what it involves. I have left the House of Commons and have not been invited to join the House of Lords, which must surely leave me free to do anything I like as long as it is legal. Only popes and monarchs stay in post until they die. Actually, there are strong similarities between a dance competition and life in the Westminster village: smart manoeuvres, about-turns, fancy footwork, audience appeal and outlasting the competition. One is dull and the other is glamorous but in each it is the style which determines the outcome.

The other day my husband and I went to Winter’s Bone, the much praised (overpraised, we thought) film set in Missouri. Both of us have normal hearing but neither of us caught more than about half of the dialogue. Naturally, we didn’t fully grasp what was going on. It was a familiar experience. In many films now, as well as in much television drama, the sound is muffled and the actors seem to mumble and slur their words. No doubt this is in the interest of authenticity. But what about comprehensibility? Plots today, particularly of thrillers, are hard enough to follow; not being able to hear properly makes it almost impossible. This has been going on for ages.

One of the joys of working early mornings is not having to work after 9 a.m. But there are pitfalls. My colleague Jeremy Bowen, during a stint on morning television, went for a pleasant lunch in central London and emerged from the restaurant to see a 176 bus. This goes close to the unfashionable area of south London in which we both live. He boarded and sat at the top. The next thing he remembers is waking in Penge bus garage, in darkness, still wearing his makeup though no longer remembering why. He had to struggle to find a way out of the garage and home. Mindful of this, I always come straight back in a bus whose journey ends near my house. The result is that I find myself with time on my hands and the urge to Get Things Done.

Harry was so scared when we entered him in the Best Veteran category in the Friends of Tooting Common Dog Show that he tried to jump out of the ring, and when he found he couldn’t break free he clung on to me for dear life. Harry was so scared when we entered him in the Best Veteran category in the Friends of Tooting Common Dog Show that he tried to jump out of the ring, and when he found he couldn’t break free he clung on to me for dear life. He didn’t win, in spite of his extraordinary sweetness and beauty. Harry is an eight-year-old English springer spaniel from Battersea Dogs Home and we got him last December. The trouble with Harry is that he is not quite right in the head. In fact, he is bipolar, and goes through his cycle every 24 hours.

Carla Powell opens her diary Few state visits can have stirred up more advance controversy than Pope Benedict’s, though I do recall Private Eye’s cover ahead of the visit of the Japanese Emperor in the 1960s: ‘Nasty Nip in the air’. There was the child abuse scandal, the juvenile antics of the Foreign Office planners, the stories that the Catholic hierarchy were trying to keep Irish gypsies away, and Cardinal Kasper’s late own goal in labelling Britain a third world country on the eve of the visit. At least the Vatican still knows how to arrange a diplomatic illness, which they did to avoid the embarrassment of bringing Cardinal Kasper to London. I suspect he will be playing for the Vatican reserves for some time to come.

I have of late, for the most cheerful of reasons*, been getting up early to work. All well and good — deadlines have been met — but now I can’t break the worm-catching habit. Long before dawn the eyelids flutter open and the brain begins its spinning machine whirl. I force myself to stay in bed until five o’clock, the point at which I consider a late night to be baptised as an early morning — or in other words, the earliest acceptable moment to switch on radio and kettle. As the World Service gives way to the Shipping Forecast I sit down at my desk, wondering whether I would be better employed as a postman or dairymaid, or perhaps as a teasmaid at the Today programme.

I am organising a memorial service at All Souls Church next to Broadcasting House for my oldest and greatest friend: Allan Robb, the BBC journalist and broadcaster, who died last month. He was 49 and, from the day we met as five-year-olds on our first morning at the Edinburgh Academy, we were like brothers. Allan worked for Radio 1’s Newsbeat and then Radio 5 Live for a number of years. You would have liked him. Like many of my colleagues, he didn’t fit the right-wing stereotype of a BBC journalist: he was not a bien-pensant leftie. Every morning he would march into the newsroom brandishing his Telegraph and railing against the decline of Western civilisation. On air, though, you would never have known his political preferences. Allan was sparkling company.

When I finally croak, this is what it’s gonna say on my headstone: ‘Ozzy Osbourne: born 1948; died whenever. PS: He bit the head off a bat.’ It’s been almost 30 years since I mistook that bat for a rubber toy — it’s not like I wanted to get rabies shots for the next two months — but it’s still the first question out of people’s mouths when I’m promoting a new album. But that’s what comes with being the Prince of Darkness, I suppose, so I’m not complaining — especially not when my new record, Scream, has gone into the Top Ten of the album charts in seven different countries this week. Not bad for a 61-year-old with five grandkids, eh?

‘New is not generally a word to use in politics. It is exhausted before it even begins: it generally means that the user of it has no ideas of any depth, and runs out of steam early on.’ I came across this observation in Norman Stone’s wonderfully unorthodox ‘personal history of the cold war’, The Atlantic and its Enemies, published last month. Not that it is in itself a very ‘new’ insight — more a case of ‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’ (Alexander Pope). I have certainly oft thought — and so I’m sure has nearly everyone else — that our new politicians’ relentless use of the ‘new’ word at every opportunity is one of the more worrying things about them.

Barack Obama seems to have been eating his way around the Gulf of Mexico, munching through a plate of crawfish tails, crab claws and ribs at Tacky Jack’s in Alabama, posing with a super-sized ice cream in Mississippi. The message is, of course, that the Gulf coast is open for business. The wider message is that he ‘gets it’. The Washington media don’t get him. The qualities the President prizes, coolness and detachment, they see as un-American disengagement. In truth it is a little odd sometimes, for someone who got the job partly because of his empathy and ability to identify with the audience. At his final speech at a naval academy in Florida the men in khaki repeatedly holler in powerful unison when he mentions the words ‘marine’.

Monday Gids in a stinky mood. He’s still traumatised after having to travel economy class to Korea. Rang from the airport to say, ‘I don’t turn right on planes.’ But Poppy said you could tell from his voice that he knew the game was up. We all turn right on planes now. It’s a bit depressing, to be honest. Only a month since we got in and everyone’s exhausted. Also realised today, it’s four years since I started work at Compassionate Conservative Headquarters. Can you believe it? Could never have predicted it would turn out like this. I mean, it’s v nice being In Power. But after all the years we battled Mr Redwood and his crazy talk about cuts it is weird that it’s come down to precisely that in the end.

Monday What a way to spend the bank holiday weekend, up to my eyes in sleaze on the Lib Dem vetting unit. Dave rang from Chequers on speakerphone to read us the riot act while playing tennis. Balls ponging v angrily. So far we’ve found a couple of affairs, some flipping, a cash-for-planning row and a second home claim for a sunken Jacuzzi bath with ‘erotic massager jets’. Also a lot of junketing. These Libs certainly like their overseas democracy monitoring. The Maldives seems to be having its ‘first free and fair election’ about three times a year according to their Register of Interests. What’s really odd is that they are up to everything they were accusing us of doing. Didn’t Mr Clegg think to check before he called us horrid names?