Diary

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.

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’?