Diary

Normally I model myself on one of the more retiring of the Desert Fathers, as much as a man living in England with six children can, so I rarely venture out. But this summer I could have given Galahad Threepwood a run for his money in the socialising stakes. Not that a Desert Father would have objected to my visit to Wimbledon to the papal nunciature, where the nuncio was celebrating the papacy of Leo XIV. It is reassuring to have a Pope who believes in the papal office and, with luck, the traditional liturgies will no longer be persecuted. The hatred for the Latin Mass is a peculiarity of a few ageing liberals. Fortunately, young Catholics, including my nephew David who is a seminarian, are flocking to the Old Rite. Wimbledon, as P.G. Wodehouse aficionados know, is Ukridge territory.

The late John Updike once wrote an amusing article about signing books. This wasn’t at some literary event with a few dozen fans queueing – no, it was vastly more daunting. An American book club had taken one of Updike’s novels for its Book of the Month and asked him to sign 25,000 copies – guaranteed sales, of course, hard to refuse. They sweetened the pill by flying him to a Caribbean island for a couple of weeks and putting him up in a beachside bungalow. There, a team of assistants brought him 100 books at a time and he would sign away, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. Updike was very droll about the discombobulating effects of signing your own name thousands upon thousands of times. It became an almost existential crisis.

On the hottest day of the year, St Pancras station would not have been my first choice for lunch, but it turned out to be, quite literally, the coolest of venues. I was meeting my brother (not Jeremy, as is often assumed, but Ben), over from Spain to attend the launch of a book I’ve written, How Not to Be a Political Wife. Even Ben was struggling with the heat, and when London is hotter than Madrid, you know something’s up. Anyway, he was heading to Stansted, I to Corby, so it seemed like the logical place. We found a table at Booking Office 1869, cool and dark beneath huge, vaulted ceilings. The food was surprisingly good: light, whipped smoked cod roe, cured Loch Duart salmon, miso-glazed aubergine, hot salty chips.

Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We’d met the previous week at the Auckland Writers’ Festival and would meet again, post-Brisbane, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. A book tour of Australia and New Zealand is a bit like being in a David Lodge novel – writers are more likely to travel halfway round the world if a few potentially sizeable crowds are waiting for them. A.C. Grayling, who I broke bread with in Auckland and saw again in Sydney, seemed to have scored the most palpable hit by being invited to be philosopher-in-residence at a festival in Margaret River, centre of Australia’s most prestigious wine region.

‘What happened to Piers Morgan?’ asked a Spectator writer last weekend. The answer, according to slavishly pro-Israel commentator Jonathan Sacerdoti, is that I’m now ‘darker’, ‘degraded’, ‘dismal’ and ‘debase(d)’ – because I’ve become more critical of how Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza. For a long time on my YouTube show Uncensored, I defended the country’s right to defend itself after 7 October attacks. But I now believe Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has crossed the ‘proportionality’ line with its recent food and aid blockade and relentless bombardment of civilians. Self-evidently, Israel is failing in its mission to eliminate Hamas and get the remaining hostages released.

On 30 April, the solicitors Mishcon de Reya asked me to join a panel commemorating the 25th anniversary of the High Court trial in which David Irving unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier. Deborah was there, alongside her lawyer, Anthony Julius. Irving’s anti-Semitism had a particular purpose. Postwar, the chief obstacle to restoring the ideas of Adolf Hitler was what happened to the Jews. If their genocide could be denied, fascism could be rehabilitated.

I have seen the future of food. And some of you won’t like it. On a research trip to the Netherlands last week, along with the fellow partners of my firm, Bramble, I took a speedboat tour of the port of Rotterdam. One of the most awesome sights was the so-called ‘Innocent Blender’ – a vast smoothie-making fortress, box-shaped and silver – glinting over the water. This is where the British-based, Coca-Cola-owned company makes its ‘tasty little drinks’. The factory location makes sense: most of Europe’s imported fruit comes via Rotterdam. Massive tankers – 600ft long and filled with 40,000 tons of chilled orange juice from Brazil – move through constantly. The Blender is completely electric, runs on renewable energy and uses robots to purée, bottle and package.

I never thought I would read a headline like ‘Kirstie Allsopp’s husband enables upskirting’. Regrettably, this type of nonsense has become a regular part of our life since Ben and his business partner Will decided to rescue an old pub on Latimer Road. There used to be a dozen pubs on this street, but they have nearly all gone. Ben and Will are romantics and are hugely attached to this part of west London, where they have worked together for 25 years. They thought that reviving the pub would be a fun project, but some locals are working night and day to ensure it never comes back to life, lodging dramatic objections to everything and anything.

On the road with a new book, I recently spoke at a literary luncheon hosted by the Cambridge Festival. What could be more civilised than food, wine and conversations about murder with a charming audience… but this is one of many festivals that lost its funding thanks to the organisers of Hay-on-Wye and Edinburgh pulling out of their sponsorship deal with Baillie Gifford, a unilateral decision that has endangered the entire landscape of literary festivals. Cambridge, Wigtown, Stratford and Henley all ended up losing their funding when Baillie Gifford, not surprisingly, decided to call it a day. And what exactly has been gained? The pressure group Fossil Free Books may be preening itself.

‘What!? But they won’t let you in!’ and ‘What!? But they’ll detain you at the border!’ and ‘What!? But they’re all nuts over there!’ were just some of the responses from friends and colleagues at my announcement that I was heading to the US for three and a half weeks’ work. But my visa was valid and accepted at passport control, I wasn’t thrown in jail, and the people whom I met and worked with were perfectly sane, perfect hosts and a perfect delight. First up was the Minnesota Orchestra, where I conducted two concerts of my own music and more well-known works by Rachmaninov and Rimsky-Korsakov. Also on the programme was an excerpt from Wagner’s Parsifal.

The coming week will see the last major commemoration of a second world war anniversary – 80 years since VE-Day – which a handful of surviving veterans will attend. It is unjust that VJ-Day in August will attract much less attention, but so did the Far East campaigns, much to the contemporary chagrin of the ‘Forgotten Army’ in Burma. One of Bill Slim’s soldiers was George MacDonald Fraser, whom I knew and adored, as did millions of fans of his Flashman books. In his fine memoir Quartered Safe Out Here, George described how one May day in 1945, as his company lined out to attack a Japanese-held village, a green young officer ran out in front of them and cried ecstatically: ‘Men! The war in Europe is over!

The weather in Bath has been preposterously good, with the Royal Crescent glowing in a soft, lemony light. I’m here for my How to Fail live podcast tour. I launched the podcast back in 2018, which, by podcasting standards, makes me practically geriatric. At the time, I felt like a failure (divorce, infertility, that kind of thing) and I wanted to know how others coped. So I started asking them. I could never have imagined that How to Fail would, ironically, become the most successful thing I have done. Nor could I have anticipated the growth in podcasting as an industry. An intimate audio medium has turned into a cultural behemoth, spawning books, tours and branded merchandise. Podcasters are now being encouraged to film everything.

Lent did not, I confess, start well. Cheltenham fell in its first week, and the Gold Cup is hardly the place for the rigours of Lenten discipline to begin. Some might say it is hardly the place for a clergyman at all. Peter Hitchens once commented on my clerical collar – stiff, crisp, linen – and said that if he saw a man wearing such a get-up at a racecourse he would assume he was an illegal bookmaker in disguise. Still, I recall that one of the most successful owner-breeders of all time was a clergyman. The vicar of Ashby de la Launde, the Revd J.W. King, won the Oaks, 1,000 Guineas and St Leger with his horse, Apology. There were, as the Bible tells us, giants in the earth in those days.

The cherry blossom was at its finest as I made my last early morning trip through Regent’s Park to Broadcasting House to present Radio 3’s Breakfast. When hire-bikes arrived in London, the planners were thoughtful enough to install a docking station outside my flat. I have used the heavy cycles for my commute ever since. Over the past 14 years I have become accustomed to the regular faces on my route: the man in an elegant dressing gown, surveying the morning scene while waiting for his dog to pee; the jogger who for some reason processes backwards along the pavement (whatever the supposed health benefits of his technique, I’ve always wondered how he avoids colliding with one of the elderly lampposts, some of which date back to the reign of George IV).

When I told a Westminster political editor that my novel NUNC! was about the prophet Simeon and the Nunc Dimittis, he said: ‘Who? The what?’ I reminded him that the Nunc was one of the great canticles along with the Magnificat, Te Deum, etc. More blank looks. It is startling how scriptural knowledge has faded. Thirty years ago an understanding of Church worship was one of the things that bound us. Today we are expected to know about celebrities. Here the blank looks are mine. One day last week MailOnline had headlines about Sydney Sweeney, Blake Lively, Gigi Hadid, J.B. Gill, Allie Teilz and Young Scooter, ‘known for collaborations with Future and Gucci Mane’. Not known by me, he isn’t. I haven’t a clue what genders they are, even.

Kyiv ‘It doesn’t surprise me that they’re abolishing the Ministry of Education,’ my old friend Dima told me. ‘Judging by what Steve Witkoff said on the Fox channel, neither history nor geography are taught in America.’ Team Trump’s energetic but purposefully misdirected attempts to push the negotiation processes forward have left Ukrainians in shock. Each day reveals new depths in the Oval Office’s inadequacy and we can only shrug when we hear things like ‘Putin is not a bad guy’ or ‘I feel that he wants peace’. President Volodymyr Zelensky said something similar after his election in 2019, when he promised to negotiate a peace deal with Vladimir Putin within 12 months or resign. Neither peace nor his resignation materialised.

Two months into President Donald Trump’s second term, the habitual liberal hysteria about his rollercoaster presidential style is reaching shrieking banshee levels again. But as always with my friend in Pennsylvania Avenue, I urge patience and a focus on what he does rather than what comes out of his inflammatory machine-gun mouth. I sense cold, calculating method to all the apparent madness, entirely in keeping with Trump’s election campaign pledges, and predict that – after the current bumpy ride – he will get the US economy purring again, America’s border under firm control and win the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Oh, and he’ll annoy a lot of the right people in the process.

I’ve been head down for the past few weeks, preparing for my one-man show. The title is catchy – Nigel Havers Talking B*ll*cks. I’m not sure this was a good idea because in every interview that I have done, I’ve been told that we can’t use this word on air. I seem to hear nothing but four-letter words on the TV these days, so I hadn’t realised that people would mind the bollocks. It seems to be more offensive than the entire four-letter cannon. I am obviously not down with the kids. I have never done anything like this before and have been worrying about three things: will anyone come; will anyone find it amusing; why am I doing it in the first place? I remember Dawn French wailing down the telephone, saying: ‘Why am I doing this?

To the Queen Anne splendour of the British ambassador’s residence in Washington for Peter Mandelson’s welcome party as our man in D.C. Downing Street did their utmost to stop lobby hacks from attending since they didn’t want us to report anything that might distract from Keir Starmer’s ring-kissing at the White House the next day. The PM’s make-or-break meeting with The Don clearly weighed on his mind. On the plane over, he looked almost ill at the prospect. Yet by the time he landed he was cracking jokes, air-kissing Tina Brown and bantering with FBI director Kash Patel – a Liverpool fan – about football. Oh, and as for Peter’s do, the Lutyens palace sparkled after its £120 million refit, but it was still perhaps a little understated for someone of his stature.

A couple of months ago, an invitation arrived. Would I like a room at the Savoy for the Baftas? I could attend the awards, guzzle champagne, walk the red carpet alongside Demi Moore and Ariana Grande and so on. Sadly, I replied, I was already booked up that weekend as a judge for a very different kind of competition: the World Marmalade Awards in Cumbria. This year marks the 20th anniversary of this event, held at a whopping Grade-I listed house just outside Penrith, surrounded by stone walls and sheep. Ahead of time, all judges were told to bring warm clothes, so I drove from London with a suitcase of jerseys. Upon arrival, I was shown to a room with a four-poster bed (given to the family by Queen Anne) but no heating. There didn’t seem to be central heating at all, in fact.